Letter: Little for Frustrated Drivers

By MIKE KELLY

Dear Editor, Your leader “City to get car share lane” will achieve little to alleviate the horrendous peak time traffic jams in Birmingham.

This system was used over 20 years ago in Chicago – all of Chicago, not just a three-mile parochial zone, and driver only cars are not allowed in the fast lane. They also have extra lanes used during rush hours, flexible lanes to meet traffic demands – morning and afternoons.

A three-mile planned stretch in Castle Bromwich, costing pounds 260,000, will do little to de-stress frustrated motorists on the Hagley Road, Bristol Road, Pershore Road or Stratford Road.

We are now paying a heavy price for the years negation and any semblance of future planning on transport.

Forty years ago an iron bridge was placed over the Dibeth/ Coventry Road, one lane into the city in the mornings, switched to the out traffic in the afternoons. This marvellous feat of engineering by the Gallagher family was a role model for what should have followed over the following decades.

Wednesday’s traffic debacle on Dartmouth Middleway and the A38 Queensway Tunnel, grinding traffic to a halt as far back as the M42 and M6 northbound, fully illustrated the importance of “over and under” principles of traffic movement in central Birmingham. The whole city ground to a halt for the day with these two main Birmingham traffic arteries closed. When re-opened the days log-jam was cleared within 30 minutes.

My own proximity of Kings Heath high street has been a traffic planners fiasco for the 40 years that I have had to use it, total log-jams on a daily basis.

Parking Control Plus, charged with monitoring parking and helping traffic to move smoothly, focus on Alum Rock Road and Institute Road, Kings Heath – easy pickings, earning an average of pounds 250,000 annually for each of these roads with parking fines but achieving nothing for traffic flows in the city.

Pershore Road, from the Tally-Ho Police College to Stirchley, has been ignored by parking controllers, illegally parked cars blocking the smooth flow of one of the key access routes into and out of the city.

Bus lanes again are ignored by planners, the cause of so much peak-time congestion. Parking tickets and the removal of illegally parked vehicles on the six main roads servicing the city are largely ignored.

Parking Control Plus have bigger fish to fry in the lucrative easy-targeted side streets of Birmingham with their pounds 60 parking tickets.

This new scheme is a complete waste of pounds 260,000 of ratepayers money, too little too late. The traffic planners of Birmingham should all hang their heads in shame after 40 years of total abrogation of their responsibilities towards motorists, transportation and commerce in Birmingham.

It left us all with the mess we all witnessed on Wednesday last, the whole city grinding to a halt because of two traffic accidents and a broken down car in the Queensway tunnel at Great Charles Street.

MIKE KELLY

Kings Heath

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