Millburn Road, Inverness - The Background

infrastructure
case-study
Published

September 2, 2026

To open this project I’m going to have a look at some infrastructure that is close to home - the segregated bike lane on Millburn Road in Inverness.

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, cities across Scotland installed lots of temporary bike lanes as people’s travel habits changes in response to the virus. One such lane was built along a stretch of Millburn Road1 protecting cyclists on a particularly busy route into the city. The road went from looking like this in 2017:

To this in 2025:

So you can see it’s gone from a fairly inhospitable place to cycle, to one that’s fairly attractive. Then in a surprising move earlier this year Highland Council removed a section at the westernmost junction.

A comparison image of the bike lane before and after the 2026 shortening
Figure 1: The Millburn Rd bike lane, before and after the 2026 shortening. Photo: Highland Cycle Campaign

Over the next few weeks I’m going to explore some of the data around this junction to investigate how useful it’s been to the city. I want to see what we can learn from the infrastructure to help better inform any plans for what comes next.

Footnotes

  1. It was shortened after a couple of years, more detail on that in a later post.↩︎