This
artery in the national motorway system has long been co-opted by local
conurbation traffic as the best way of getting around the conurbation.
If you are driving from the larger eastern side of Birmingham it has too
frequently seemed more practical to get to Wolverhampton or the Black Country
(or from there to Birmingham) by using the motorways rather than using local
roads which can become congested at any number of points as they approach any of
the local centres en route.
The
local-conurbation traffic spilling onto these motorways especially at peak
traffic hours has congested England’s motorway system, to such an extent that
it generated the misguided demands for by-passes, such as the BNRR and the
Western-Orbital(s), in a misguided attempt to preserve a necessary national role
for the M6.
The only sustainable way of helping the M6
to regain its national strategic function is to reverse the build up of
local traffic on the motorways through making the local roads more
available to the essentially local traffic.
It is not credible to suggest, or to rely on, traffic reduction measures alone
to achieve this. Nor is it credible to rely just on charging entrance onto the
M6 from the conurbation or regional junctions. However both of these policies
are essential.
What has never been addressed in the Multi-Modal Studies or the draft RPG is how alternative routes through the conurbation can be fostered.
Look
at how the ‘Other high volume corridors with potential for enhanced
public transport’ illustrated on the Transport and Accessibility Diagram
(following P.130 of the draft RPG) only cover Birmingham and some of Solihull and
all stop at the Birmingham/Black Country boundary. Notice further how
these corridors all centre on Birmingham city centre and include no circular
routes.
When
considering the role of buses in reducing social exclusion, the Social Exclusion
Unit interim report states: ‘Key approaches include: establishing a frequent
network of routes into and across towns, supported by bus priority measures and
demand responsive feeder routes into main bus corridors and interchanges.’ RPG needs to include reference to the importance of routes across
towns [not just radially to and from the centre] and demand responsive services.
In the case of a conurbation such as ours,
such routes need a conurbation-wide span.
The
‘Outer Circle’ bus route in Birmingham has become one of the most used urban
public transport routes in Europe. However, that route is actually the outer
circle of 1923-1926 when much of it ran along country lanes. At that time much
of the population of the Black Country would rarely need to travel to
Birmingham, and then probably only to the city centre.
Plenty of other bus routes are also still the product of earlier
transport authorities. So while Birmingham has ‘outer’ and ‘inner’
circle bus routes, and the road corridors that go with them, the conurbation has
not developed any kind of circular or other routes to ease movement across the
conurbation. (Indeed it could be argued that the Birmingham circular routes,
where they cut across between Birmingham and West Bromwich
hamper the flow of traffic between them.)
These
problems have endured primarily because the short life of our metropolitan
county (1973-1986) coincided with the era when resources devoted to public
transport were being dramatically cut. During
that era the Black Country still had one of the lowest movement requirements
anywhere in urban Britain, because that area had traditionally seen local people
work close to where they lived. The regeneration of the area will probably
require greater diversity of skills in and around the Black Country and so will
probably in the short to medium term involve much more movement around that part
of the region.
So the success of the West Birmingham and
South Black Country Regeneration Zone and the conurbation as a whole, probably
now requires more radical movement corridor development.
It is reasonable to expect that there will be more brownfield sites coming
available for businesses in the Black Country than in much of the rest of the
conurbation. The transport planners need to primarily facilitate the interchange
and movement of labour between Birmingham and the Black Country and through the
development of such public transport corridors, let them then develop into
general corridors of movement that would allow the movement of goods.
The public transport that currently serves
to link eastern Birmingham with the Black Country too often relies on travelling
through Birmingham city centre. The
policy diagram indicates that this is intended to continue. This is hardly
attractive to commuters, and nobody would argue that these are appropriate
movements for goods except at the point where they are both
overwhelmingly movements by heavy rail and
the national Birmingham rail bottlenecks have been addressed. The Metro
proposals just compound this problem -
and at great expense.
More circular movement corridors are what
the conurbation needs rather than the western by-passes proposed in the draft
RPG. Those corridors within the
conurbation would better link areas of need with the areas of opportunity.
By-passes beyond the edge of the conurbation (as illustrated in the policy
diagram) would pre-empt resources from these needs within the conurbation.
Should sufficient resources be put into developing movement corridors within the
conurbation, less local traffic will spill
onto the M6 and allow - it is reasonable to assume - through traffic to reclaim
that motorway for its national strategic function.
So
it is in this context that we say that the
Districts need to be given more firm guidance about addressing the movement
needs of the conurbation when formulating their UDPs and LTPs.
That guidance must be based on facilitating movement around the
conurbation rather than the flawed assumptions illustrated in the policy diagram
which will only fuel the demand for bypasses.
We
had considered putting forward some examples of problems in the local road
network and the public transport corridors. However, we have never had the time
and resources to do this in the systematic way required. Any suggestions made
here risk being merely anecdotal and unsystematic, but the Panel
could do worse than consider the Hagley Road as an example of a road that
links Birmingham to the Black Country. The junction between this road and the Wolverhampton Road is hardly designed to
encourage traffic to use this corridor between Birmingham and Wolverhampton in
preference to the motorway.
Freight
in the Black Country.
The
policy diagram indicates there is to be an Important Freight Terminal in
the Black Country. However this is at some distance from the proposed bypasses.
At the very least this would require considerable modification of the Black
Country road network to allow heavy lorries to access the terminal from one or
other of the bypasses. This would demand considerable regeneration resources.
We
support the proposal for a rail freight terminal in the Black Country. But it
would serve more purposes to devote resources to joining this terminal to
movement corridors within the conurbation, than to be seeking to develop road
links between any western bypasses and the desired freight terminal. Our
approach would facilitate both movement of goods but also more movement of
conurbation-local people and labour to more effectively foster the
conurbation-local economy. It is only on this basis that Urban Renaissance will
be possible at the heart of our region.