West Midlands authorities are asking the Government to pump more than £1bn of transport investment into the conurbation over the next five years to maintain the pace of regeneration, while trying to prevent runaway traffic growth.
Main schemes in their new local transport plan include a £500M redevelopment of Birmingham New Street station – making its first LTP appearance – a 419km network of Red Routes to increase road capacity by 10%, and longer-championed Midland Metro extensions to Brierley Hill and central Birmingham.
A complete replacement of Metro rolling stock, introducing larger and longer trams, is also proposed.
The New Street station upgrade, to improve train throughput and passenger facilities, is expected to be completed by 2012/13 but depends on agreeing a funding package with Network Rail, the regional development agency Advantage West Midlands, and the private sector.
West Midlands transport champion, Councillor Roger Lawrence, said the authorities and the passenger transport authority would submit an outline business case for the Metro expansion ‘in the next few weeks’, although traffic management issues in Birmingham city centre had still to be resolved. Ministers have promised a swift response.
‘We believe we have a cost-benefit ratio to meet government targets, particularly with the extension to Merry Hill shopping centre, where there’ll be a substantial private sector contribution,’ said Lawrence.
These and other schemes, together with up to £10M a year of integrated transport spending on bus showcase routes, aim to maximise capacity and reduce car traffic, stimulated by regeneration and growth. More than 165M extra car trips are projected by 2011.
A key target is to hold down the increase in road traffic mileage to 7% between 2004 and 2010 – it was 3.3% between 2001 and 2003.
On highway maintenance, the authorities expect the Birmingham PFI to inject £60M into the city’s roads and footways over the contract’s first three years, which the document says is expected to begin as early as November. But they say they are unable to be precise about the programme until details of the PFI are resolved.
They warn that, as the PFI will reduce the total allocation to the metropolitan area, non-PFI authorities may struggle to meet national targets.
New accessibility targets in the plan include putting 50% more people within half-an-hour of a major NHS hospital by accessible public transport. Currently, more than 78% of the population – around 2M people – do not have this ease of access.