Public transport in the City is slow, unreliable and expensive, I know I live here and have had to make the same cross city journey in my car and on public transport. Kings Norton to Sutton Coldfield takes 40 minutes in a car (straight though and under), you would be lucky to complete the journey by bus in less than 2 hours, it is about 16 miles so miles per gallon of petrol would be less than 1/2 a gallon which costs half the price of the bus fare; (never mind the time saved). The train is allmost as fast but the cost is much higher than using the bus and the local stations are few and far between which means any time saved is transferred to the walk time to and from the stations. That is why there are so many cars going through the city. My experience is also the easiest north south route, the whole journey issue gets multiplied out of proportion if you travel east to west say Heartlands Hospital area to Woodgate Valley. Having placed a ULZ around the centre of the city has only made matters worse; it has forced moter transport on to narrower roads further out which are now heavilly congested and not designed for such volumes of traffic.
All the while the city council is obsessed with vanity projects which cost far too much and ALWAYS delay traffic even more, instead of getting problems solved that are decades old.
In my opinion, a holistic strategy for traffic movement is needed. As the example of Liverpool shows where Lime Street was remodelled for more pedestrian and cycling traffic, you need to invest in better and more efficient public transport if you wanna close a major through road in a big city. Otherwise, you're just moving car traffic to other roads and creating traffic jams somewhere else. Regarding repurposing tunnels to combined bus and cycleways, I'm skeptical as I would not feel safe as a cyclist sharing a lane with a double-decker bus. Cycle paths should always be segregated from motor traffic.
I would say just keep working toward turning it into a normal street. Undo the grade separation (except for the tunnels), introduce many more crossings, take away some of the lanes. Some of the tunnel lanes can be replaced with bus lanes like you showed, certainly opportunities to easily acquire right of way for buses that won't get stuck in traffic doesn't happen very often.
People always seem to assume that if you reduce car traffic through city centres you'll end up with fewer people going there, but I've never actually seen that to be the case. If anything, the opposite seems to be generally true, because they become more pleasant places to actually be in without all of the noise and hassle, and how many people who travel through from one place to another actually stop in the middle?
I don't think I've ever really seen business leave city centres to go to suburbs for traffic reasons. City centres are still generally easiest to access for the majority of people because of the density of people living nearby or within and how many of them can use public transport (which is very often radial) to get there. When they do make that decision it's usually for political or tax reasons – the biggest one that comes to mind is how Amazon moved out of Seattle and into Bellevue, but they have tons of money, a pretty above-average resistance to paying tax, and were battling a city and a city council especially that doesn't particularly like them.
Utter madness policy in charging 8 quid to drive within the outer ring road, cutting off also access to the main A38 arterial crossing, decimating city centre business and definitely increasing congestion around the periphery. All to save 0.1 lives per year from pollution reduction (recent University study on Brum roadside pollution within the road charging zone) at the expense of how many accident victims elsewhere from decaying road markings and extra traffic? And EXTRA pollution and pollution from more miles driven trying to navigate roads cut off with barriers and dead ends all over the city. And how many cyclists do you see where lanes have been converted to hideous blue cycle paths?
BIrmingham and Glasgow, the two British cities that in my opinion were hit the hardest by 1950-60s planning. The cities were essentially destroyed to make them car friendly. I don't really know how you can fix this problem to be honest. Maybe a metro+tram and dutch cycle lanes everywhere, but to get that you have to take funding and space away from motorists, which is political suicide.
Remember that in Amsterdam they have massive, seemingly excessively-sized highways surrounding the city. But this is because a lot of traffic that used the through-city routes to get elsewhere would never disappear. So in the short term Birmingham should resurface the inner ring road with quieter tarmac to cut down on noise and tire pollution, and in the long term work on the larger roads and motorways that bypass it. After that more public transportation & walking improvements can be made to the inner ring.
I remember going to watch the Queen open it. Remember the view of a desolate Snow Hill station. The only time it has ever helped, traffic flow, is overnight or Sunday mornings. The main use now are for the A38;from south and A38/A41 /A34 north. Everything else is well served by the Middle Ring Road. By using the Middle Ring road for the mentioned routes will be a minor inconvenience. My view is – downgrade it and divert traffic onto the Middle Ring Road.
either completely bury the cars underground (build extra tunnels over sections where there are currently conflict points) and make it a toll road or turn the whole thing into an epic cycle network
It sounds like you have boosted the traffic background noise, but I know you haven't =) Who the heck would want to be in Birmingham City centre?
Could the whole ringway be closed to cars and given over to Trams? I'd convert both the inner and outer rings into Trams/Metro Rail and apply modal filters so traffic through the city centre is no longer possible except for buses/bikes/ambulances/deliveries. Although metro rail may require a few more tunnels (or better elevated rail). There is already a motorway ring around the outside of Birmingham that cars can use to get to other parts of the city. Birmingham has a few legancy rail lines into the city centre, but these probably have infrequent trains with stops far apart. Melbourne in Australia recently built an elevated rail above a live rail track (as the track had too many crossings with roads). I'd use this to build elevated rail above the existing tracks so that the existing tracks can become a local metro rail service with more stations and the elevated tracks can become a stop only every 4 stations express service. The city would still need to put in new lines into virgin areas which would be tough. But imagine a Birmingham with two inner circle lines and trams and express and metro raidial lines, it would be a completely different place to live in.
I think like everywhere, it does not matter why we think. The city will never move against lazy car owners. It's a problem everywhere. Even the Big Dig in Boston only happened because the main artery was collapsing. Sad but true. It's a curse.
Needs a DECENT tram system like Manchester, and park & ride. The queues going into or out of Birmingham on any given day are horrendous. Too many people working in a high density space with minimal decent ways of getting in to the city centre except for by car. Also – try going to a gig and getting a train out of Mirmingham after 23:00 at night. You are compelled to use a car, or spend £150 on an expensive hotel for 7 hours sleep. All needs sorting out, and Bimingham, for all the great redevelopment it's done, could learn a lot about transport from Manchester.
Just bite the bullet and close it. Turn it into an urban park. References for this include the great successful transformations of Amsterdam, Paris and Barcelon to mention just a few. Cars should go around the city, not through it.
If most of the traffic is thru-traffic, a proper outer city bypass should be able to do the trick Keep the inner ring road. Its purpose should be to absorb downtown traffic and make the city center traffic free, thus more pleasant to be in
I live in south Birmingham and use the a38 tunnels everyday to get to work in Tamworth. The problem is , the Birmingham ring road (middle ring road) is shit. It was not designed to be the only loop around Birmingham, and now that it is, Traffic is a nightmare. Any decent solutions cost money, but I would do 2 things. 1: Improve the middle ring road, grade separate the whole thing, if it’s done to a high standard, it’ll keep traffic out of the city centre. 2: submerge into a tunnel the whole section between pagoda island and Lancaster circus, removing most of the weaving and making it for through traffic only.
All removing it will do is cause more chaos on the middle ring road and bring more traffic onto a already heavily congested m42, m5 and m6
It's such a high-quality road, and the main thoroughfare through the city, I lean towards keeping it. Removing it will cost a lot of money, will force traffic onto minor roads and streets, and will create spaces which will mostly remain of the liminal variety, underused and a bit sad looking. If you look at the ex-ringway areas between Moor Street and Aston, most of it is still not exactly friendly space that people want to spend time in.
The planners in the 60s and 70s either didn't know about induced demand or they didn't care about it. Design big roads into a city and they will attract traffic which will then congest itself. The issue is that the number of registered vehicles has risen every year. There's some good suggestions on here. Repurpose it, reduce the capacity, give space to trams and cycling/active travel infrastructure.
How about working out roughly how it would cost to bring the road up modern urban standards then spending every penny on the all inner-city areas that surround it instead
Wow, that is trip down memory lane. I remember being taken around that at rush hour on about my 3rd or 4th driving lesson. As the instructor said: "drive this, and you'll drive anything." I've not lived in Brum for a long time. And a key point (as I remember) is that this is basically the extension of the Aston Distressway, and as such almost straight off the M6. My first thought was "could we repurpose the tunnels for the trams?" I'm guessing two problems: where does the A38 (M) traffic go? And are the tunnels big enough (I doubt it)? So, you need to consider this from the M6 downwards to the city centre.
The solution to the Birmingham Inner Ring Road is to close the entire thing, convert the entire route from a ring road into a Birmingham Circle Line railway operated by Transport for Birmingham on behalf of the local government, radically improve the movement of local people around Birmingham, by having a metro system for them, and create a ULEZ that pushes dirty cars further out from the centre of Birmingham to lower the number of people in Birmingham who suffer from pollution related illnesses.
Birmingham is going to need a metro system, at some point, and with all the kybooshing that got done to facilitate this dodgy road project, it would be good to reserve all the land for metro usage, so that other metro lines could bolt onto the system and go further out.
One of the great things about these roads being stupidly wide, is that the non-tunnelled sections of roads could be dropped into a cutting, so that bridges crossing the metro line would be flat, and pedestrians and cyclists would find it a lot easier to cross the roads. The remaining space could be turned into green cycleways and parks. You would rapidly improve those areas of Birmingham changing the land from a source of polution to a set of attractive spaces.
Some of the remaining space could be used for bus lanes and tram lanes.
It might be tempting for someone to suggest running trams, instead of trains, but trams have a much lower capacity and all the cities in the UK need and deserve to have their own metro systems. At a push tram-trains could be used, so that you can still have a proper metro system around the heart of Birmingham.
Great video. It’s amazing how much of a negative impact this sort of road infrastructure has on the economic and social health of our cities. And it’s amazing how little recognition there is of this as a problem. If this was in Europe, it would have been torn out 40 years ago and Birmingham would likely have a large S/U Bahn network. It’s pitiful how so far behind the UK is at infrastructure investment – and because we don’t normally invest, or very inconsistently do, it makes it even the more difficult and expensive to do so when we decide to.
If the middle ring-road worked better, then the north-south traffic could be pushed that way. The tunnel at Five Ways, now used by the metro, should have been built 45degrees round, so that traffic going round the ring-road went straight under & didnt go via the roundabout.
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Public transport in the City is slow, unreliable and expensive, I know I live here and have had to make the same cross city journey in my car and on public transport. Kings Norton to Sutton Coldfield takes 40 minutes in a car (straight though and under), you would be lucky to complete the journey by bus in less than 2 hours, it is about 16 miles so miles per gallon of petrol would be less than 1/2 a gallon which costs half the price of the bus fare; (never mind the time saved). The train is allmost as fast but the cost is much higher than using the bus and the local stations are few and far between which means any time saved is transferred to the walk time to and from the stations. That is why there are so many cars going through the city. My experience is also the easiest north south route, the whole journey issue gets multiplied out of proportion if you travel east to west say Heartlands Hospital area to Woodgate Valley. Having placed a ULZ around the centre of the city has only made matters worse; it has forced moter transport on to narrower roads further out which are now heavilly congested and not designed for such volumes of traffic.
All the while the city council is obsessed with vanity projects which cost far too much and ALWAYS delay traffic even more, instead of getting problems solved that are decades old.
In my opinion, a holistic strategy for traffic movement is needed. As the example of Liverpool shows where Lime Street was remodelled for more pedestrian and cycling traffic, you need to invest in better and more efficient public transport if you wanna close a major through road in a big city. Otherwise, you're just moving car traffic to other roads and creating traffic jams somewhere else. Regarding repurposing tunnels to combined bus and cycleways, I'm skeptical as I would not feel safe as a cyclist sharing a lane with a double-decker bus. Cycle paths should always be segregated from motor traffic.
I would say just keep working toward turning it into a normal street. Undo the grade separation (except for the tunnels), introduce many more crossings, take away some of the lanes. Some of the tunnel lanes can be replaced with bus lanes like you showed, certainly opportunities to easily acquire right of way for buses that won't get stuck in traffic doesn't happen very often.
People always seem to assume that if you reduce car traffic through city centres you'll end up with fewer people going there, but I've never actually seen that to be the case. If anything, the opposite seems to be generally true, because they become more pleasant places to actually be in without all of the noise and hassle, and how many people who travel through from one place to another actually stop in the middle?
I don't think I've ever really seen business leave city centres to go to suburbs for traffic reasons. City centres are still generally easiest to access for the majority of people because of the density of people living nearby or within and how many of them can use public transport (which is very often radial) to get there. When they do make that decision it's usually for political or tax reasons – the biggest one that comes to mind is how Amazon moved out of Seattle and into Bellevue, but they have tons of money, a pretty above-average resistance to paying tax, and were battling a city and a city council especially that doesn't particularly like them.
Utter madness policy in charging 8 quid to drive within the outer ring road, cutting off also access to the main A38 arterial crossing, decimating city centre business and definitely increasing congestion around the periphery. All to save 0.1 lives per year from pollution reduction (recent University study on Brum roadside pollution within the road charging zone) at the expense of how many accident victims elsewhere from decaying road markings and extra traffic? And EXTRA pollution and pollution from more miles driven trying to navigate roads cut off with barriers and dead ends all over the city. And how many cyclists do you see where lanes have been converted to hideous blue cycle paths?
BIrmingham and Glasgow, the two British cities that in my opinion were hit the hardest by 1950-60s planning. The cities were essentially destroyed to make them car friendly.
I don't really know how you can fix this problem to be honest. Maybe a metro+tram and dutch cycle lanes everywhere, but to get that you have to take funding and space away from motorists, which is political suicide.
Surely the tunnels take a lot of traffic away from the city centre so it can be a nicer environment for walking and cycling?
Tunnels could be made into linear underground ponds for ducks.
Remember that in Amsterdam they have massive, seemingly excessively-sized highways surrounding the city. But this is because a lot of traffic that used the through-city routes to get elsewhere would never disappear. So in the short term Birmingham should resurface the inner ring road with quieter tarmac to cut down on noise and tire pollution, and in the long term work on the larger roads and motorways that bypass it. After that more public transportation & walking improvements can be made to the inner ring.
I remember going to watch the Queen open it. Remember the view of a desolate Snow Hill station. The only time it has ever helped, traffic flow, is overnight or Sunday mornings. The main use now are for the A38;from south and A38/A41 /A34 north. Everything else is well served by the Middle Ring Road. By using the Middle Ring road for the mentioned routes will be a minor inconvenience. My view is – downgrade it and divert traffic onto the Middle Ring Road.
Turn it into a bus only ring road and flatten it to allow pedestrians to cross it. Then at some stage replace the busses with trams.
either completely bury the cars underground (build extra tunnels over sections where there are currently conflict points) and make it a toll road or turn the whole thing into an epic cycle network
It sounds like you have boosted the traffic background noise, but I know you haven't =) Who the heck would want to be in Birmingham City centre?
Could the whole ringway be closed to cars and given over to Trams? I'd convert both the inner and outer rings into Trams/Metro Rail and apply modal filters so traffic through the city centre is no longer possible except for buses/bikes/ambulances/deliveries. Although metro rail may require a few more tunnels (or better elevated rail). There is already a motorway ring around the outside of Birmingham that cars can use to get to other parts of the city. Birmingham has a few legancy rail lines into the city centre, but these probably have infrequent trains with stops far apart. Melbourne in Australia recently built an elevated rail above a live rail track (as the track had too many crossings with roads). I'd use this to build elevated rail above the existing tracks so that the existing tracks can become a local metro rail service with more stations and the elevated tracks can become a stop only every 4 stations express service. The city would still need to put in new lines into virgin areas which would be tough. But imagine a Birmingham with two inner circle lines and trams and express and metro raidial lines, it would be a completely different place to live in.
I think like everywhere, it does not matter why we think. The city will never move against lazy car owners. It's a problem everywhere. Even the Big Dig in Boston only happened because the main artery was collapsing. Sad but true. It's a curse.
Needs a DECENT tram system like Manchester, and park & ride. The queues going into or out of Birmingham on any given day are horrendous. Too many people working in a high density space with minimal decent ways of getting in to the city centre except for by car. Also – try going to a gig and getting a train out of Mirmingham after 23:00 at night. You are compelled to use a car, or spend £150 on an expensive hotel for 7 hours sleep. All needs sorting out, and Bimingham, for all the great redevelopment it's done, could learn a lot about transport from Manchester.
Just bite the bullet and close it. Turn it into an urban park. References for this include the great successful transformations of Amsterdam, Paris and Barcelon to mention just a few. Cars should go around the city, not through it.
If most of the traffic is thru-traffic, a proper outer city bypass should be able to do the trick
Keep the inner ring road. Its purpose should be to absorb downtown traffic and make the city center traffic free, thus more pleasant to be in
I live in south Birmingham and use the a38 tunnels everyday to get to work in Tamworth. The problem is , the Birmingham ring road (middle ring road) is shit. It was not designed to be the only loop around Birmingham, and now that it is, Traffic is a nightmare. Any decent solutions cost money, but I would do 2 things. 1: Improve the middle ring road, grade separate the whole thing, if it’s done to a high standard, it’ll keep traffic out of the city centre. 2: submerge into a tunnel the whole section between pagoda island and Lancaster circus, removing most of the weaving and making it for through traffic only.
All removing it will do is cause more chaos on the middle ring road and bring more traffic onto a already heavily congested m42, m5 and m6
Nice video
It's such a high-quality road, and the main thoroughfare through the city, I lean towards keeping it. Removing it will cost a lot of money, will force traffic onto minor roads and streets, and will create spaces which will mostly remain of the liminal variety, underused and a bit sad looking. If you look at the ex-ringway areas between Moor Street and Aston, most of it is still not exactly friendly space that people want to spend time in.
The planners in the 60s and 70s either didn't know about induced demand or they didn't care about it. Design big roads into a city and they will attract traffic which will then congest itself. The issue is that the number of registered vehicles has risen every year. There's some good suggestions on here. Repurpose it, reduce the capacity, give space to trams and cycling/active travel infrastructure.
How about working out roughly how it would cost to bring the road up modern urban standards then spending every penny on the all inner-city areas that surround it instead
Wow, that is trip down memory lane. I remember being taken around that at rush hour on about my 3rd or 4th driving lesson. As the instructor said: "drive this, and you'll drive anything." I've not lived in Brum for a long time. And a key point (as I remember) is that this is basically the extension of the Aston Distressway, and as such almost straight off the M6. My first thought was "could we repurpose the tunnels for the trams?" I'm guessing two problems: where does the A38 (M) traffic go? And are the tunnels big enough (I doubt it)? So, you need to consider this from the M6 downwards to the city centre.
You can’t do anything significant to the Queensway without making changes to the Middleway ring road.
Mandate one lane is bus only. The rest can be cars only. About time the city gave public transport users priority.
They’ll have to fight the people who will complain ‘it just sits empty all the time, it should be opened up to relieve traffic’.
The solution to the Birmingham Inner Ring Road is to close the entire thing, convert the entire route from a ring road into a Birmingham Circle Line railway operated by Transport for Birmingham on behalf of the local government, radically improve the movement of local people around Birmingham, by having a metro system for them, and create a ULEZ that pushes dirty cars further out from the centre of Birmingham to lower the number of people in Birmingham who suffer from pollution related illnesses.
Birmingham is going to need a metro system, at some point, and with all the kybooshing that got done to facilitate this dodgy road project, it would be good to reserve all the land for metro usage, so that other metro lines could bolt onto the system and go further out.
One of the great things about these roads being stupidly wide, is that the non-tunnelled sections of roads could be dropped into a cutting, so that bridges crossing the metro line would be flat, and pedestrians and cyclists would find it a lot easier to cross the roads. The remaining space could be turned into green cycleways and parks. You would rapidly improve those areas of Birmingham changing the land from a source of polution to a set of attractive spaces.
Some of the remaining space could be used for bus lanes and tram lanes.
It might be tempting for someone to suggest running trams, instead of trains, but trams have a much lower capacity and all the cities in the UK need and deserve to have their own metro systems. At a push tram-trains could be used, so that you can still have a proper metro system around the heart of Birmingham.
Great video. It’s amazing how much of a negative impact this sort of road infrastructure has on the economic and social health of our cities. And it’s amazing how little recognition there is of this as a problem. If this was in Europe, it would have been torn out 40 years ago and Birmingham would likely have a large S/U Bahn network. It’s pitiful how so far behind the UK is at infrastructure investment
– and because we don’t normally invest, or very inconsistently do, it makes it even the more difficult and expensive to do so when we decide to.
Nothing it is a road. leave it in place.
If the middle ring-road worked better, then the north-south traffic could be pushed that way.
The tunnel at Five Ways, now used by the metro, should have been built 45degrees round, so that traffic going round the ring-road went straight under & didnt go via the roundabout.