Boost For Cycling And Walking In Birmingham’s Post-Pandemic Emergency Transport Plan

Birmingham—the U.K. “motor city” of Spaghetti Junction fame—said in January that it wanted to reduce the number of car journeys in the city, but the coronavirus pandemic is allowing it to boost and expand these plans.

The “allocation of road space will change away from single occupancy private cars,” promised the Birmingham Transport Plan launched on January 13. That objective is now more central—and more urgent—in Birmingham City Council’s Emergency Transport Plan, released on May 14.

The plan sets out the short, medium and longer-term actions the famously motor-centric Birmingham will take to enable a low carbon, clean air recovery from COVID-19.

The new plan, says a statement from the council, “prioritizes and accelerates some of the measures that were outlined in the draft Birmingham Transport Plan.”

One of the key plans is to “reallocate road space,” taking room away from private cars and giving it to public transport, walking and cycling.

Going forward, the city will have “limited access for private cars,” says the council’s new plan.

It promises that across the city people will be “put first, creating stronger communities.”

Car parking spaces will be removed. “Land and space currently occupied by car parking” will be “repurposed for walking, cycling and social distancing,” says the revised transport plan.

The city will be “assessing the key route network and other roads to identify where there are opportunities to convert space to support walking, cycling or public transport.”

There will be extra room allocated to cyclists in the city, including a pop-up cycleway linking key workers to City Hospital via the Jewellery Quarter.

“COVID-19 has greatly impacted our city like many others,” said Councillor Waseem Zaffar, transport lead for the council.

“We must ensure our city is well-prepared to provide all our communities with the opportunity to deliver a green, sustainable recovery. Transport and connectivity is critical to that and our Emergency Birmingham Transport Plan is the first step to this response.”

He added that the Emergency Birmingham Transport Plan is a “reset” for how people move around the city during the lockdown and after it ends.

The council has already begun working on creating more space for people on Kings Heath and Erdington high streets through the removal of some on-street parking.

Prior to the lockdown, 25% of all car journeys in Birmingham were one mile or less. To discourage such use—and reduce congestion and improve air quality—Birmingham had plans to introduce a motor-traffic circulation plan similar to the one that the Belgian city of Ghent implemented in 2017.

Officials divided the Belgian city into six zones and, through signage and hard infrastructure, motorists were diverted on to distributor roads rather than being able to drive directly from zone to zone. Furthermore, a small central zone, including much of the old town, was closed to cars completely. Driving in the six outer zones—or “cells”—was still possible, but car journeys became longer.

Pedestrians and cyclists were not subject to the same restrictions, and could travel swiftly into central Ghent. Because of this ease of use, and fewer cars, there was a massive jump in the amount of people who cycled in the Flanders city, rising 60% between 2016 and 2018. This surprised city planners, who had assumed such a figure would not be realized until the plan’s end date of 2030.

Birmingham’s transport plan announced in January included a Clean Air Zone, restricting road use by vehicles powered by petrol and diesel, and a workplace parking levy which would charge the city’s businesses £500 per parking space; such a scheme was successfully used in Nottingham to part-pay for the extension of its £580-million tram network.

Birmingham’s traffic cell plan means motorists wanting to make car journeys between quadrants would be directed out on to the A4540 Middleway ring road.

Ghent’s traffic circulation plan is based on much earlier ones introduced in Dutch cities during the 1970s and 1980s. The first was Groningen which, against much local opposition, divided its city center into four quadrants. Private motor traffic could only go from one quadrant to the other via a ring road, and a system of one-way streets was installed literally overnight. Two-thirds of all journeys in Groningen are now done by bicycle, and no business owners would want cars to dominate the city again.


Birmingham has recently designed for more active modes of travel—the A38, a key access road into the city, was upgraded last year to include protected cycleways, partly repurposed from a former tramline, dug up in the 1950s.

In a blog post published last year, Councillor Zaffar said Birmingham needed to “become a place where walking, cycling and using green public transport are the best and most preferred ways of travel, reducing our reliance on private cars.”

In a foreword for the plan revealed in January, the councillor had not tempered his views: the city must change, if it wants to avoid gridlock:

“Over-dependence on private cars is bad for the health of ourselves and our families, bad for our communities and bad for business as measured by the millions of pounds of lost productivity caused by congestion,” stated Zaffar at the time

He added that car use is “bad for the future because of the very significant damage caused by vehicle emissions and their impact on climate change.”

Instead, stressed the city’s transport lead, the “more journeys we take by walking and cycling, the more we will improve air quality and our health and the more we will reduce congestion.”

The Birmingham Transport Plan went out to public consultation at the end of January, but its progress was halted by the lockdown. The emergency plan incorporates many of the original plan’s ideas, and, because of the “new normal,” is likely to be met with less opposition than previously expected.

According to Councillor Zaffar, Birmingham wants to “build a future in which the car will no longer be king.”

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