Birmingham Transport Plan, remove parking spaces

[Oliver Hardy]

heebeegeetee said:

Colonel Cupcake said:

A cars reason to exist is to go from A to B,

The problem is, they only do that for less than 5% of the car's life. The rest of the time they're unused.

That means dumping them on the sides of roads, screwing up traffic flow, hampering travellers such as cyclists from proceeding safely, making it difficult for children to cross roads, indeed making playing in the street a thing of the past, and so on; or they're in car parks which is all space that could be housing, retail, commercial, leisure etc.

This is a problem that isn't going to go away, it has to be addressed, and doing so isn't a war on the motorist and nor does it make anyone rabidly anti-car.

Since when do children play outside, not for the last 20 years or so, they are on their electronics? There are no children were I live anyway, but my cars are parked off the road.

It could be retail or commercial but if no one can get to them, there is little point in having commercial or retail, go to most city centres and see how dead they are most of the time, I guess you could put housing where the retail was and retail where the housing was

[hidetheelephants]

DonkeyApple said:

We rant a fair bit in PH about the national policies regarding cars but in reality these are progressive. In total contrast are the regional anti car policies of devolved powers. Such devolved powers are all too often fiscally incompetent and highly prejudiced while running the default setting of it all being someone else's fault. They are childlike in their actions and thoughts.

More worryingly is the aspect that under the next Westminster government they are collectively going to take control.

The uncomfortable reality is that the car is essential and integral to a thriving community and policies to ban them are simply third world extremism from parochial minds.

On the other side, unfettered use of cars, weak alternatives and excessive vehicle size are equally bad for an urban community.

The solution, as it always is, is to not tollerate extremists but to work in the middle ground and to devise policy that is sensible, prudent, beneficial and most importantly does not impinge on the economic mobility of the least well off.

Such a policy would need to accept that cars are essential but to progressively steer users via a top down approach into not just much smaller cars but their less frequent use.

All urban transport pollution studies since the 70s have shown that it is the size and frequency of use of private motor vehicles that are the root drivers of congestion, pollution and lost economic activity.

The smaller the vehicles the greater the space available for alternate transport expansion, the higher the traffic flow rates, the lower the pollution, the safer the roads and the higher the economic generation as a result.

A very simple and beneficial policy would be to favour it via local taxation the use of the smallest private vehicles while not favouring the use of the largest. The argument being that excessive vehicle size is a waste but also a function of individuals with the economic means to easily change.

In an extreme case you could simply prohibit cars greater than a certain width and length from operating within the area, charge vehicles below those sizes but above a minimum a sufficient amount to discourage their use but not inhibit and absolve the smallest vehicles completely.

But parochial governments do not by their nature function on practicality but instead by extremism, prejudices and lower levels of intelligence, education and ability of those individuals able to reach the higher levels of authority.

Kei cars and motorbikes should be exempt from all congestion charges and charged at a reduced rate if at all in low emissions zones. Why this didn't happen from the beginning of the congestion charge and ULEZ is not clear. Modern cars are bloated whales and this would reverse the trend somewhat.

[gt_12345]

durbster said:

This is basically inevitable for all our cities isn't it?

The annoying truth is that we can't build our cities around cars any more. There are just too many people, and if you have to get lots of them into one place and back again then cars are the least efficient way of doing it by some way. On top of that, cars need an enormous amount of space, infrastructure and the money to build and maintain it all.

All this is only going to get worse as the population continues to grow so at some point I think we're going to have to accept reality and make public transport the priority.

God knows how we achieve that given the state of things at the moment but the positive is that the better the public transport, the emptier the roads.

Oh look. Another benefit of high immigration eh?

[gt_12345]

Is this all planned, to effectively close high streets and turn them in to flats?

[gt_12345]

JagLover said:

It is more of an attitude that private freedom is an evil that should be curtailed.

The Left do not like people having control.

[gt_12345]

FiF said:

I really dislike Birmingham. Though there is no money, so is this just hot air.

https://www.birmingham.gov.uk/downloads/file/14861...

rabid anti car council people said:

The allocation of road space will change away from prioritising private cars, to support the delivery of public transport and active travel networks. (Note:- Active travel apparently means, walking, wheeling i.e. wheelchairs and disability equipment, cycling, scooters.)

The city centre of Birmingham will be transformed through the creation of a network of pedestrianised streets and public spaces, integrated with public transport services and cycling infrastructure. Access to the city centre for private cars will be limited, with no through trips allowed.

Parking will be used as a means to manage demand for travel by car through availability, pricing and restrictions. Where development potential exists, land currently occupied by car parking will be put to more productive use.

On-street parking replaced with outdoor hospitality space

Divide the city centre into seven segments (the city core and six peripheral segments bound by the A4540 Ring Road), is a first step towards encouraging sustainable freight movements. Each segment can only be accessed from the A4540 Ring Road, while movement between segments is only possible for public transport, pedestrians, and cyclists. All other vehicles cannot cross the segment boundaries due to physical measures such as bus gates and road closures, and so would need to go back to the A4540 Ring Road to move between segments.

Reduction in council owned car park spaces (at least by 2,500 spaces since 2012) and redevelopment of a number of large car park sites. Car parks to be redeveloped into housing.

Review of all parking provision including areas outside the A4540 Ring Road.

Existing Controlled Parking Zones in place and extend these to remove free car parking from within the A4540 Ring Road, from neighbourhoods on the outskirts of the city centre, and from local centres.

Thought there was "No war on the motorist."

Edited, I forgot to include the proposal 20mph standard limit, except strategic roads, 30mph.

Safe to say, assuming still driving by the time this comes to fruition in 5/7 years will be avoiding the place. Pretty much avoid it now. Hell hole.

tt said:

The climate emergency is setting the pace of change for our transport network. The latest evidence shows that a rapid shift is needed away from single occupancy private car use.

This literally means they want to stop private car ownership. Wow.

Remember how much less traffic there was in 1997, before Labour (and then Tories) opened the floodgates.

[grumbledoak]

gt_12345 said:

Is this all planned, to effectively close high streets and turn them in to flats?

If you can decipher it you can read all about their plans for us here -
https://sdgs.un.org/un-system-sdg-implementation/u...

Follow the "Smart Cities" section and links.

[realjv]

https://www.birmingham.gov.uk/downloads/file/14861...

rabid anti car council people said:

The allocation of road space will change away from prioritising private cars, to support the delivery of public transport and active travel networks. (Note:- Active travel apparently means, walking, wheeling i.e. wheelchairs and disability equipment, cycling, scooters.)

The city centre of Birmingham will be transformed through the creation of a network of pedestrianised streets and public spaces, integrated with public transport services and cycling infrastructure. Access to the city centre for private cars will be limited, with no through trips allowed.

Parking will be used as a means to manage demand for travel by car through availability, pricing and restrictions. Where development potential exists, land currently occupied by car parking will be put to more productive use.

On-street parking replaced with outdoor hospitality space

Divide the city centre into seven segments (the city core and six peripheral segments bound by the A4540 Ring Road), is a first step towards encouraging sustainable freight movements. Each segment can only be accessed from the A4540 Ring Road, while movement between segments is only possible for public transport, pedestrians, and cyclists. All other vehicles cannot cross the segment boundaries due to physical measures such as bus gates and road closures, and so would need to go back to the A4540 Ring Road to move between segments.

Reduction in council owned car park spaces (at least by 2,500 spaces since 2012) and redevelopment of a number of large car park sites. Car parks to be redeveloped into housing.

Review of all parking provision including areas outside the A4540 Ring Road.

Existing Controlled Parking Zones in place and extend these to remove free car parking from within the A4540 Ring Road, from neighbourhoods on the outskirts of the city centre, and from local centres.

It's not the what it's the how. What they are trying to achieve is fine and has the potential to be really great if tackled as a long term project and not botched or deliberately sabotaged for petty political gains. The 'how' part is a little concerning in that it seems to be all stick and no carrot. The only thing they say about how they are going to achieve the proposed outcome is to make driving/parking impossible/difficult and nothing else. That's a concern and unlikely to work.

[Previous]

realjv said:

It's not the what it's the how. What they are trying to achieve is fine and has the potential to be really great if tackled as a long term project and not botched or deliberately sabotaged for petty political gains. The 'how' part is a little concerning in that it seems to be all stick and no carrot. The only thing they say about how they are going to achieve the proposed outcome is to make driving/parking impossible/difficult and nothing else. That's a concern and unlikely to work.

Fully agree.

Those cars won't magically dissappear if there is no alternative means of travel provided.

Bristol here. E bike and motorbikes aren't an option unless you can park in a private secure staffed car park as they will be stolen and the theives operate with impunity (For example bikes are regularly nicked in plain view whilst chained in the security staffed Cabot Circus (main central shopping centre) car park).

As a regressive action it'll affect the lowest paid the most - nurses, hospitality workers etc. Contributing to worse social outcomes.

I agree that the problem needs to be addressed. Always seems to beca 'stick' based approach though with very little thought to the detail as to how exactly it'll work.

[Ziplobb]

gt_12345 said:

Is this all planned, to effectively close high streets and turn them in to flats?

Yes I am convinced , as a shop owner in a town, that this is the end game

[Electro1980]

gt_12345 said:

JagLover said:

It is more of an attitude that private freedom is an evil that should be curtailed.

The Left do not like people having control.

None of it curtails private freedom, and unless you hadn’t noticed, our current government is very much not a left wing government.

[Hugo Stiglitz]

horseshoecrab said:

I live in Edgbaston and the quickest way for most people on my side of the city to get to Spaghetti Junction is to drive into town and join the urban motorway literally 100m from New Street Station. It's frankly insane.

Breaking the concrete collar at Masshouse around 15 years ago was the first step to making a more llivable and walkable city. It took away some crappy car parks but didn't stop people driving into town. It did lead to the creation of several thousand new dwellings, a park, massive expansion of one of the city universities and an incoming HS2 station. The Clean Air Zone was the first big nudge to get people out of cars and this is being followed by carving up the city centre like a trivial pursuit cheese so that traffic has to go around rather than through. This has been handily aided by the Curzon Street HS2 development and the new Metro line through Digbeth.

If I have a meeting in London or go shopping in Oxford Street I don't expect to drive there. Cars are being pushed out of Birmingham city centre and although directly affected by this everyday I generally support what is being done but only if public transport options are in place. The city core is set to expand enormously out to the A4540 Middleway. It's already a more pleasant experience but if you want to avoid the place it's probably for the best.

In two minds - I can't wait for Manchester to have the congestion zone. I'm sick of seeing one person per car queuing in then out of the city. They aren't shopping driving in and out at peak times.

But I'm against any parking controls outside of these two time periods.

One of the things I noted about central Birmingham is that it's full of taxis running their engines. Get rid of those bloody things.

[durbster]

hidetheelephants said:

Kei cars and motorbikes should be exempt from all congestion charges and charged at a reduced rate if at all in low emissions zones. Why this didn't happen from the beginning of the congestion charge and ULEZ is not clear. Modern cars are bloated whales and this would reverse the trend somewhat.

Yeah I agree with that. A lot of cities around the world are dominated by motorbikes and they obviously don't cause the congestion that the same number of cars would.

If people switched to motorbikes, ebikes, scooters, hoverboards etc. it would definitely reduce congestion, and they need much less space when they get where they're going so you could replace half the car parks with actual parks.

Motorbikes aren't really part of British culture though so I can't see it happening.

[heebeegeetee]

irc said:

1. Dumping them on the sides of roads? You mean parking.

2. Parked vehicles hampering cyclists? I can't say I've noticed.

3. The only problem that needs addressed is the anti car policies of some politicians.

1. No - the keeping of cars on the road. ie your logbook tells you who the keeper of the car is, but where is the car to be kept? It should be kept on your own property, it should never have been a thing imo that we can just take public space for our own private use.

2. It means your choice is to cycle either too close to the traffic passing, or in the door zone of the parked cars, and when any collision occurs, it will always be the cyclists fault.

3. The only problem? So not that the roads are now absolutely rammed, and that journey times are now nigh on unreliable? I would say that the biggest problem I notice nowadays, is that just about every motorway journey I do either my side or the other side is delayed. That's not just confined to UK either, btw.
The policies of UK politicians for decades is that the car is king. This hasn't worked for anyone, least of all us drivers, and the UK transport infrastructure is now fully 50 years out of date imo. As motorists we have been used to abject privilege, but as they say, any attempt at equality just feels like oppression.

[DonkeyApple]

hidetheelephants said:

Kei cars and motorbikes should be exempt from all congestion charges and charged at a reduced rate if at all in low emissions zones. Why this didn't happen from the beginning of the congestion charge and ULEZ is not clear. Modern cars are bloated whales and this would reverse the trend somewhat.

Yup. Personally, I wouldn't go as far as such undersized cars. It can be quite difficult to use a kei car for anything other than a single person commute and when we look to Japan we do find that many users simply have two cars and just use the kei as someone might a moped.

Solutions mustn't be extreme and those with extreme solutions must always be treated with the contempt of all extremists. Extremism is a disease and removing their voice is the cure. Our decades of appeasing such people has had the result that appeasement of intolerance always has, the revulsion of the very people one seeks to assist and the polarising of the rational into views they wouldn't naturally hold.

What we can say is that private cars the size of vans are almost always not a necessity and that almost always the smallest normal cars on sale can fulfil more than enough essential duties to not be a hinderance to economic mobility.

Given the proven relationship between economic expansion, or rather M2 money supply and consumer spending habits we know and have always known that the more spending power consumers have the larger the size of cars they use, the larger the number of cars they use, the less efficient these vehicles are and the more frequently they use these cars.

So we do have to ask why no environmental policy whether at local or national level has or will focus on the solution of limiting consumption but instead stimulate consumption? Pretty easy to answer that one though.

More nuanced is the question of why national government remains fixated solely on using the tax system to steer consumer activity when today so much consumer activity is governed by credit supply in the first instance not the taxation on the back end?

20 years ago we all knew the basics that increased consumer spending led to increased detrimental car activity of various forms. So over the last 20 years we have applied various taxes to these activities retrospectively. We've allowed bad things to happen in the first instance and then had to resort to punitive taxation to try and get it back into the box.

The obvious solution is and was to limit the amount of capital available to facilitate those bad actions in the first instance. We would then not have the social animosity of the endless tax meddling nor the farce of affluent tax payers receiving benefits to switch to EV, causing further social division.

As a thought exercise, imagine that if the government back in 1997 hadn't hugely deregulated consumer lending and successive governments hadn't deliberately kept secured car lending in weaker regulation than other lending but instead done something very innovative such as to set a cap on the amount of debt that a consumer could secure against a car? Imagine if such a cap had been defined something as simple as the minimum wage x the 40 hour week? No one would have been locked out of any form of essential mobility but very few consumers would have been able to purchase cars much above that level which tends to be your larger cars and less efficient cars.

The credit demand would have bulged out elsewhere just like capping mortgage credit in 2011 saw the demand shift from property to cars and kitchens etc but more than 25 years on today the U.K. private car fleet would look completely different. It would be smaller in average unit size and much more efficient.

Now imagine that when EVs became viable and we wanted to incentivise higher income earners to switch to them, instead of distorting the market with subsidies to people who do not need to receive tax payer funds and instead of triggering social aggravation against EVs, as we have, all we instead did was turn to the FCA and exempt EVs from those credit controls. Suddenly anyone wanting a large car for pleasure and who had the income would be instantly freed to procure such a vehicle, except it would be zero emission. So subsidies, no political friction, those with the income means to borrow and the desire to have a larger vehicle would simply be released into the market to act using their own earned funds and to create the future EV market out of their own pocket and service demands.

We went very badly wrong in not recognising the power of consumer debt to create a desired market by freedom of choice and without retrospective taxes and unnecessary political friction. And so we end up where we are today with a problematic ICE fleet, a politically messy EV policy that creates social divide and the rise of intolerant, extremist views on car usage as a whole with lunatics demanding the necessity of the car is ignored and extremist isn't wanting cars banned actually having a voice!!

It's a genuine shame.

[heebeegeetee]

Oliver Hardy said:

1. Since when do children play outside, not for the last 20 years or so

2. It could be retail or commercial but if no one can get to them,

3. Go to most city centres and see how dead they are most of the time,

1. Not since cars started to be kept on the streets, I reckon.

2. There is the the belief, I accept, that in the UK that nowhere is accessible unless accessible by car.

3. In UK yes, from what I'm seeing travelling a bit around Europe, not at all the same. amongst other places I was amazed by the lovely independent shops and stores on a trip to Sofia, Bulgaria a while back, and last year we spent a week in Chartres France. What a lovely, lovely town centre, mostly pedestrianised of course, and with a thriving retail sector full of shops and stores that you simply don't see in the UK anymore. Not a charity shop in sight.
Plenty of housing around the town, I guess it could be described a s a 15 min city, something that we are being repeatedly told is terrible, for some reason.

[Oliver Hardy]

Previous said:

Fully agree.

Those cars won't magically dissappear if there is no alternative means of travel provided.

Bristol here. E bike and motorbikes aren't an option unless you can park in a private secure staffed car park as they will be stolen and the theives operate with impunity (For example bikes are regularly nicked in plain view whilst chained in the security staffed Cabot Circus (main central shopping centre) car park).

As a regressive action it'll affect the lowest paid the most - nurses, hospitality workers etc. Contributing to worse social outcomes.

I agree that the problem needs to be addressed. Always seems to beca 'stick' based approach though with very little thought to the detail as to how exactly it'll work.

How do you expect people to get to work?

[heebeegeetee]

Oliver Hardy said:

How do you expect people to get to work?

Good, clean, reliable, civilised, subsidised public transport* would be a start, and I reckon one of the biggest beneficiaries would be those of us who like driving.

• I do realise the UK is now completely incapable of building such infrastructure. Again, being decades behind the curve hasn't helped.

[oyster]

Electro1980 said:

gt_12345 said:

JagLover said:

It is more of an attitude that private freedom is an evil that should be curtailed.

The Left do not like people having control.

None of it curtails private freedom, and unless you hadn’t noticed, our current government is very much not a left wing government.

Are they restricting private travel on foot or bicycle?
If not, what is this nonsense about curtailing freedom.

[valiant]

heebeegeetee said:

Oliver Hardy said:

How do you expect people to get to work?

Good, clean, reliable, civilised, subsidised public transport* would be a start, and I reckon one of the biggest beneficiaries would be those of us who like driving.

• I do realise the UK is now completely incapable of building such infrastructure. Again, being decades behind the curve hasn't helped.

What's public transport like in Birmingham realistically?

I don't really know the city except the odd occasion I have to brave New Street station or the NEC. Is it cheap, reliable, predictable with an overarching authority like London?

How a city that size doesn't have a metro is bewildering and incredibly shortsighted.