Anti bus snobs to be made to pay
A recent report to Birmingham City Council has reccommended road pricing as the only viable method to get ‘snobby’ drivers who could use buses and trains out of their cars and onto public transport. The report did recognise that improvements in standards of public transport, both the reliability of the service and the standard of the vehicles, would need to go hand in hand with road pricing.
A number of motorists have complained about the suggestion that they should pay for the congestions they cause and have cited, mostly outdated, opinions on the standards of public transport in Birmingham.
Percieved safety on public transport in Birmingham has improved somewhat, mostly because the police have started boarding buses to deal with trouble makers, but there are still issues around antisocial elements (in particular smokers and teens who play music through they mobile phone loud speakers, so distorted that there can be no realistic claim that they can enjoy it unless they are utterly amusical). The main cause of problems around reliability of service seems to be caused by the very congestion that road pricing is targetted at. The bus part of my journey to work can take anywhere between 15 minutes and 2 hours depending on traffic conditions on the Stratford Road. Indeed I have found that leaving the house at 9am gets me into town only 5-10 minutes later than leaving at 8am does.
Hey Stephen,
Happy new year! I’m glad to see you’re still around here!!
As for the “congestion charges” I’d be all for them, just so long as the “dramatic improvement” to the quality and performance was guaranteed. Well, maybe not so much the quality of the busses, but the service I use to get to town doesn’t seem very regular, desite supposedly running a bus “every 10 minutes”… =\
TravelWM do seem to have some pretty wierd ideas as to how to run a bus service. My main route to the city centre is the 37 — a fairly busy route, I’ve rarely seen a bus on the route running less than half full (maybe on a Sunday morning) — which used to run a double decker every 4 to 6 minutes at peak times. They have changed it to a single decker every 10 minutes. Not suprisingly they’re all jammed full.