Ep. 7 – The Future of Railways in Birmingham with Gareth Dennis

Filed under: Podcast

https://youtu.be/S3afjTPb0WI

In this conversation, Gareth Dennis discusses the pressing transport challenges facing Birmingham. We talk about he importance of electrification for environmental reasons and for a more integrated public transport system that is accessible to all. Finally, there is a need for a more aspirational vision for Birmingham’s transport future.

https://www.youtube.com/@GarethDennisTV

Transcript

Kevin Carmody (00:05)
Hello and welcome to the Better Streets Birmingham podcast. I’m Kevin Carmody and today I’m joined by railway engineer author of How The Railways Will Fix The Future and host of the popular Rail Natter podcast Gareth Dennis Thank you very much for joining me today

Gareth (00:21)
Hi Kevin, hello, it’s a pleasure to be with you. Hello all listeners out there in podcast land.

Kevin Carmody (00:27)
Okay, so in Birmingham, probably one of our biggest issues initially is capacity. We’ve got stations in some really dense urban areas, ⁓ which only get like two trains an hour, like Stetchford, for example, and I know we’ve got some new lines coming up. I mean, if we’re looking at trains as a means to create a mode shift to get people out of cars, then can we just add more trains to this system?

Gareth (00:52)
Yeah, it’s one of the main problems that Britain as a whole actually has is a really fundamental lack of suburban capacity in our big cities. And we have several big cities over a million people in population outside of London. The way that you solve this problem is by splitting out long distance services from suburban services and having separate segregated, as you generally would see in Europe, separate segregated suburban systems. Probably the biggest crime that was suffered in the middle of the 20th century.

People might have heard of Beeching but around about that time was not the closing of these little ⁓ kitsch rural railways, but was getting rid of lots of duplicated capacity in our city centers. Birmingham is the perfect example of this, where you had multiple railway companies with different systems. By the way, not very efficient. None of them were perfect. All of them had gaps. All of them conflicted with each other and made a right mess in various parts of the city. Getting rid of that duplication as we did through… went from having seven major railway terminals within the city center in Birmingham down to, for a brief period, only really one in the form of New Street. Moor Street has a bit of a reprieve again in more recent years, and then Snow Hill opened in the early 90s. So there’s been a bit of a reversal of that, but we still fundamentally have a conflict between different service types. We have a very limited railway network that lots of duplication has been removed. And all at the same time, you’ve got the Cross City Line, which is one of the most successful suburban railways in terms of the growth outside of London.

Gareth (02:20)
Sorry, the most successful, not one of the most successful. And you also have several other suburban lines, Camp Hill, da-da-da-da-da, XYZ, suburban lines, again, are all seeing tremendous growth. Birmingham is a city crying out for more real capacity. The trouble is those long distance services and freight and some of those regional services as well that go kind of a little bit further afield are all hogging the two track railway that those suburban services are trying to run on. It’s a mess. Ultimately, in the long distance, we might get into what that… what the needs of the city are. But in the medium term, this is what projects like High Speed 2 were intended to solve. It taking some of those long distance, well, ideally as many of those long distance services as possible off the existing railway network, giving more capacity for more suburban trains.

Kevin Carmody (03:04)
Yeah, because New Street itself is at capacity now, isn’t it? And there’s something with the layouts of the tracks kind of limits how many other services can go into New Street.

Gareth (03:14)
Yeah, the foundations of buildings are the side and the ground conditions mean that you’ve got what we call the throat of the station. So the fan of tracks where you go from the tracks feed into the station to the total number of platforms. You’re very limited in how much more you can squeeze, not just in terms of the total number of platforms, but also how many more trains you can squeeze through those throats, as we call them. It’s very, very challenging. It’s one of those actually New Street stations might be better suited as a dedicated suburban station rather than having all those mixes of services that actually it just primarily focuses on the cross city line and perhaps one or two other local services and then the long distance services go elsewhere. there’s always a challenge to match with the fact that there is a lack of railway real estate now in the centre of the city thanks to those closures 50, 60, 70 years ago.

Kevin Carmody (03:59)
Yeah.

So we are seeing ⁓ plans for expansion at Moor Street and Curzon Street, which will essentially become almost a mega station really. Is it for them to take on more long distance capacity?

Gareth (04:13)
Yes, yep.

Yeah, so Curzon Street, in an ideal situation where HS2 was built in full as envisioned in late 2020, Birmingham would have been the heart of Britain’s intercity railway network actually. Not London, but Birmingham. And you’d have seen services going off towards the northeast, towards the northwest of Scotland, south to London, and potentially in longer distance out you’d have seen the cross-country services finding their way onto new high-speed lines maybe into the 2040s and 50s. That’s all been

had somewhat the kibosh put on it and we’re just seeing high speed 2s being a single stub down to London, which will provide some limited relief, but far less than original. So, Curzon Street should be delivered as it was intended to be so that at least the stations there ready when there inevitably there is a realization, no, we do still have to deliver these new lines. What that would have become is Birmingham’s long distance hub station. It wouldn’t have completely got rid of all those long distance services through the existing network because you still have the challenges of getting out to places like Telford, Stafford.

are challenges, but what should have ideally been done is reshaping that intercity network which put as much into Curzon Street as possible. Moor Street would then have been largely a regional and suburban station. So you’d have seen some of those longer distance regional services pulling into Moor Street, as well as some of the suburban services to take a bit of capacity or share a bit of the load of capacity with New Street station. And New Street really at that point would have been the west-facing regional services and then could have carried a lot more of those

Kevin Carmody (05:15)
Yeah.

Gareth (05:44)
suburban services, those high density services, the cross city line being the key core of that, but also all the others disappearing up north, south, and east, west as well.

Kevin Carmody (05:53)
Yeah, so I think as well we’ve got the development of what’s referred to as the Bordsley chords, which is essentially linking two lines together, isn’t it? Two crossing lines. mean, will that help relieve the capacity issues on New Street?

Gareth (05:58)
Yes.

Yeah. So Bordsley is really about providing a further, basically taking more trains out of New Street and putting more trains into Moor Street it’s about really maximising what you can achieve with a lot of the fairly dense suburban services that don’t run nearly frequently enough that go out towards Stratford-on-Avon, Leamington Spa, in that direction, through places like Yardley Woods, Henley, the other line through Dorridge, Lapworth, those sorts of services, Solihull.

and providing increased density of those services, but also with the services coming up from what will eventually be running through Moseley Village, Kings Heath, Pineapple Road, the new stations that should be opening this year. It’s an enormous opportunity to create a tidier railway network. Midlands Hub is this name of this collection of projects and this aspirational service version. Actually, Midlands Hub is a little bit more of a regional

project as much as it is a local project. Because actually lot of the determinations from Midlands Hub are about connecting up those regional places, Leicester, Burton, Derby, up towards Yorkshire and down towards sort of the Chil… It’s providing some of that regional connectivity, but in doing so it will free up additional capacity for more suburban services to an extent. Again, this is all medium term. What this will do is, this is enough to accommodate current demand…

Well, maybe not even that frankly. This is enough to give a bit of headroom on current congestion. As we’ll see with any of these sorts of investments, the additional capacity it creates will be instantly gobbled up and we’ll be finding ourselves going, huh, well, right, maybe we should have delivered that quicker and maybe we should have been thinking a bit more boldly.

Kevin Carmody (07:44)
Yeah.

Yeah yeah that cross city line has already you know kind of something like quadrupled in use over the past 10 years hasn’t it so it’s um yeah there is there is

Gareth (08:04)
It’s spectacular.

There are a things at play here that are some of the reasons why this is going so slowly. The first in Britain is the massive level of centralization we have. way too much power held by Treasury down in Westminster, not even sent out to the departments themselves, in terms of devolution within central government. But crucially, Birmingham should have a large pot of money that it has total control over and can spend itself exactly how it sees fit. It should not have to go cap in hand asking permission from Treasury every year or two.

It’s just that Treasury Westminster should have absolutely no say in how Birmingham and the wider Birmingham metro area spends what should be a sizeable chunk of money. If we look at how much money has been spent on transport within the M25 in my lifetime, since 1990, that would put between £5,000 and £10,000 per person in everywhere outside the M25. So for Birmingham, you’re talking about £10 £15 billion, if not a little bit more.

10 to 15 billion pounds, we should be thinking a little bit more aspirationally than a couple of chords and slightly enlarging one or two stations. We might get into what that could look like in a moment.

Kevin Carmody (09:11)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, I think, think, yeah.

It’s it’s one of those things like transport for west midlands. They should they should really be taking ownership of What transport is happening and it should be the people who living there and need to use this transport should be really the people who are You know in control of saying this is this is what should be built

Gareth (09:36)
Yeah, Britain is a uniquely centralised country. There is no other country that has the level of centralisation we do. And that is precisely why we have such challenges with more broad bases economic productivity. But fundamentally, the challenges of productivity are because of our lack of decent transport infrastructure within and between our cities.

Kevin Carmody (09:56)
Yeah, yeah. And we see the lines that are, high speed two being the great example of lines which are and aren’t being built are decided by a very kind of London centric view and the cancellation or postponement of some of those northern legs is, I so I jumped to this question quite early. Are they building the right high speed two leg? Because it would be a question.

Gareth (10:23)
Yeah,

it’s one of those interesting… It’s like, well, yes, but only as much as we should also have been building the others as well. They’re all equally important. The bit that’s currently being built will only provide relief to the southern end of the West Coast Mainline, which is, at the moment, the most congested part of the West Coast Mainline. Fine. Okay. But HS2, as it was originally proposed, imperfect, but basically robust, would have provided relief not just to the West Coast Mainline in South Birmingham, but the West Coast Mainline

Kevin Carmody (10:36)
Yeah.

Gareth (10:52)
up to Manchester, but crucially also the cross-country line out of Birmingham towards Derby and Yorkshire. The Midland main line from Sheffield South to London and going through the Midlands. And the East Coast main line over in the far end of the East Midlands, as well as providing the relief from Yorkshire Southwards as well. So HS2 was about, when I talk about

relieving capacity. What I mean is taking the long-distance services off the existing network and allowing those… When you have a train that goes non-stop, all the trains in front of it have to get out of the way so that it can keep going at 125 miles an hour without hitting anything. So that means you have huge gaps in the timetable. Get rid of those long-distance services and you can actually run many more frequent stopping services. This is precisely the problem that Birmingham has. And one of the challenges we have is that what was a very Birmingham-centric

railway system. In fact, the good thing about HS2 is that wasn’t originally, it was not London-centric because what it did by relieving capacity in those main lines was enable the cities like Birmingham, like Manchester, like Leeds, to actually get their own railway networks back and start running more suburban services. So was in fact the opposite of London-centric. What’s now happened with the fact that it’s just a shuttle connecting Birmingham and London for the moment is that it’s not going to provide a huge amount of capacity relief. It will just be a fast alternative service along the west…

paralleling the West Coast Mainline, which is far less than it could have achieved. And you will see, therefore, as it currently stands, and crucially, with the pressure from government to run more fast services on the existing railway network, as HS2 drops its trains prematurely onto the existing railway network, service is going to be worse, not better in Birmingham as a result of HS2 as it’s currently being delivered. That is not a reason to not build the bit of HS2 they’re currently building. It is a reason to get on with building the rest of it.

Kevin Carmody (12:37)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. mean, I guess it’s also ⁓ that point of this should be a rolling program of development. It shouldn’t just be this one project and we’re done.

Gareth (12:44)
Yeah, exactly.

Without getting into the weeds of railway chat, there is almost nothing that we do in terms of railway world that should be delivered as a single project. Pretty much everything should be in some form a rolling program because you retain the skills, you deliver things more efficiently. For Birmingham, electrification is a core part of that. Birmingham benefits from a pretty well electrified railway network, a decent number of services run fully electrified, but there’s more to be done on that front. Again, a rolling program, and ideally one that was being administered from central Birmingham, not from Westminster.

Kevin Carmody (13:00)
Yeah.

Mm.

Gareth (13:18)
should be a natural and normal part alongside things like re-signaling. A bit like London had its Crossrail and Thameslink programs, these huge programs at work, Birmingham should be having the same.

Kevin Carmody (13:29)
and works which immediately filled their capacity as soon as they were opened.

Gareth (13:32)
Yeah, exactly. Two projects which were immediately full and making people grumpy because they couldn’t find a seat. Yeah, exactly.

Kevin Carmody (13:37)
Yeah, electrification is a great point. Yes, there has been some electrification, but I think it’s the Midland Mainline is that’s been paused for electrification. And this then has.

Gareth (13:49)
The line up to Derby is a good example.

Regional services up to Derby very frequently use cross-country services that run diesel trains but spend a lot of their time under the wires. That is one of the rare little bits of 125 mile an hour railway on that route that isn’t otherwise a north-south main line is up to Derby, lovely Derbydos. And that line, 125 miles an but it’s not electrified. It’s an example of a regional service. The thing about electrification isn’t just that it gives you a completely better railway and gets rid of emissions. It’s that you have trains that accelerate more

more quickly and also crucially have more similar performance. Different diesel trains, regional, suburban, long distance, all have quite different performance. Whereas those trains, when they’re electric, basically all perform the same, which means you can fit more of them on the same length of track. Again, coming back to the capacity issue, because as you rightly start out with the beginning of our conversation, it’s all about capacity on the railways. We are right at the knife edge of delivering as much capacity as we can with the infrastructure we have. The railway is a system. You need the trains, you need the infrastructure.

need the signaling, the electrification, the whole picture, staff as well. All of stuff needs to be tied together to maximize that throughput. It’s not all about railways. It’s also the other thing that we need to see is actually that shift of, well, that’s the railway and that’s the railways business. No, no. West Midlands Railway, what I think are the brilliantly branded little diamonds or honeycombs or whatever you want to call them. think that identity is great, by the way. I think it’s fantastic. Crucially though, it’s tied into the rest of the transport for West Midlands identity.

bit like you have in London. Now, with the oncoming ⁓ Great British Railways that some people might be aware of as this restructuring of the rail industry or bits of the rail industry, not the whole thing. Now, there are discussions about whether West Midlands Railways becomes a Great British Railways branded service, which it absolutely should not be. You would never dream of telling Londoners that London Overground is going to become a Great British Railways branded railway service. So why on earth would you do the same thing in a big city like ⁓ Birmingham Metro area? So yeah.

Kevin Carmody (15:46)
Yeah.

Gareth (15:47)
want to be seeing those train services become part of the West Midlands integrated system. So therefore tickets on those trains also work on the trams, also work on the buses, also work on hire bikes and so on. That’s a really crucial part because it’s not just about railways.

Kevin Carmody (15:59)
Yeah, yeah, and we are a little way, I think, from an integrated ticketing system. But yeah, I think so. Yeah.

Gareth (16:06)
can dream. the irony is the technology is there. The challenge of course is that those services run in amongst all those other longer distance regional services. It’s kind of difficult to split those out from a ticketing perspective, let alone from the infrastructure side.

Kevin Carmody (16:19)
Yeah, yeah, I know as well with the so we’re changing bike hire provider within Birmingham Shortly over to Lime bikes. So, you know with that would be able to remain within the same kind of branding and

Gareth (16:31)
is one of those challenges is that it sits, as it does in London at the moment, it sits out as its own separate, privately provided. And actually that shouldn’t be the case. The bikes should be part of the integrated system and therefore you shouldn’t have a separate charge system. it’s all very well contracting out to Lime because he said that Lyme hold the commercial risk. But actually is it making life easier for people who want to move around in Birmingham? I’d say maybe Birmingham is a big enough city to be more assertive with what that contract looks like and how the funding looks and the ticket.

Kevin Carmody (16:59)
Yeah. think as well, the other thing, I mean, as we touched on electrification there, the other thing that’s really important is getting those diesel trains off the tracks. I think if anyone who’s kind of spent any time in New Street knows, with its kind of underground platforms, it’s, yeah.

Gareth (17:15)
You got a nosebleed in five minutes if you spend any time on the platform. It’s horrible.

It’s grim.

Kevin Carmody (17:20)
And these are, you know, they’re well above kind of EU safe working limits. Now, yes, it’s horrible for people traveling through there, but I mean, people have to work in there as well. You know, that’s

Gareth (17:28)
Yeah, absolutely.

And all the tracks in there are, or other than one of the through roads, pretty much all the tracks through there are electrified. Isn’t it do-lally that we have a situation where the majority of services going through there, or a sizable chunk of the services going through there, are diesel services, not electric services? If Britain was a sensible country, wouldn’t be having the conversations about electrification because we’d have finished the majority of electrification as much of Europe has decades ago.

The idea that you have an incredibly dense corridor of railways chucking out fumes and adding to an already very polluted urban core, is the case. Air quality in Birmingham is extremely poor ⁓ and clean air zones go some way to resolving that, but the railways are contributed to that. The concentrations of pollutants around New Street in particular are dreadful and electrification is a key part of that. Not the only part of picture, but the trouble y’know Lots of people saying, you can fix that with batteries. It’s like, well,

There’s a whole other story about the system that you need to have a railway that relies on batteries more than for very edge cases. And that’s something that the railway itself is currently reckoning with and government thinks it’s found a panacea. yeah, they will not solve that problem. Ultimately, wires do.

Kevin Carmody (18:41)
Yeah, I mean this also, of the solutions that have been proposed in Birmingham’s more kind of urban metro area. So we have the trams, I we call it the Metro. I think they’re not really a Metro, you know, it’s, yeah. And they really, they fit well as a kind of…

Gareth (19:01)
Just trams. And that’s great. Trams are great, but it’s not a metro.

Kevin Carmody (19:08)
an improvement on like a known bus service rules, you know, and they have good capacity, obviously they’re expensive to roll out and we aren’t at a time where, you know, there’s lots of money. So ⁓ one of the proposed solutions was the Coventry Very Light Rail service. I’ve heard this proposed on some corridors, which I know, you know, are sort of 5,000 plus.

Gareth (19:10)
Exactly.

Kevin Carmody (19:34)
people per hour corridors in cars to then propose something which is, you know, of eight, maybe a thousand people an hour. It will just crush it.

Gareth (19:46)
Kevin, I’m so pleased that you raised that point. It sounds a bit fiddly to talk about passengers per hour per direction. But actually, this is an absolutely fundamental measure of how many people are moving along a corridor. And therefore, if you want to go, well, we should have 50 % plus sustainable transport, then how many people can feasibly cycle? Okay, well, you take those off. How many people do we then leave driving? Okay, well, that’s fine. And that gives you how many need to be moved by mass transit, whether it’s

buses or fixed transport or whatever it is. And yeah, you’re right. Look, the Coventry system is, the VLR system is kind of a bodge to fit around an attempt to create a legal loophole to enable devolved authorities to deliver trams. The trouble is, it’s a half solution in terms of it’s providing a lower capacity than an equivalent heavy bus service would.

So I always fall back on it. It’s not that it’s completely a bad idea, but it’s like we’re doing the classic British thing of circumnavigating and creating these inventions and ideas that aren’t particularly novel. It’s kind of going back to an old street car from 80, 90 years ago. It’s not a hugely novel thing. Don’t be fooled by any of stuff about autonomy. It’s just a regular single car tram vehicle. But we’ve got all this round and round the houses to come face to face with the fact that we still haven’t really got through the loophole because

Kevin Carmody (21:02)
Yep.

Gareth (21:12)
The law at the moment is preventing Coventry from allowing any passengers on that system. They still have to ask permission from the Secretary of State. So it’s still that centralization question. So by the time you devolve power down to the West Midlands, as we should be seeing, a much more greater devolution of power to the West Midlands. We’ve been in a situation where if they’re spending that money on Coventry VLR for a nominal additional amount,

or let’s put it this way, they spend the money on Coventry VLR, it’s instantly full. They’d have to dig it up and build a tram anyway. just build the tram. Trams are not some high tech scary technology. This is just absolutely basic way of moving people around in a large town, let alone cities the size of Birmingham. yeah, it’s not that I… I’m watching with great interest the project there, but it is one of those situations where we’ve created ourselves this immensely complicated system, a bit like battery trains.

bit like all these immensely complex systems to just avoid doing the thing that is normal, which is electrifying railways or building trams.

Kevin Carmody (22:11)
Yeah and you just have to think what if you’ve got a major route, how do we move the most people through it? at the moment so much of our transport planning is based on how many cars do we move through an area and they are so, you know, this is much, what Better Streets work will say, how do we make this more efficient? How do we make it safer? But also, how do we then unlock kind of economic opportunities in an area? Because, you know, we know there’s a lot of latent demand in these routes of people who, there’s one particular route I’m thinking of, which is the Hagley Road and it is two lanes of cars either way no bus lanes it would be it’s got a tram that has just come up been developed up to one end of it to Edgbaston Village so it’s got it’s got an actual extension there but at the moment a lot of people i know won’t travel into work in the city because it just takes too long to get in to sit on a bus that sits in traffic

You’re just not moving people. You’re not moving the people who want to get in. And it constrains the people in the city.

Gareth (23:22)
It’s a really good example because

that part of Birmingham is totally bereft of any fixed infrastructure links. There wasn’t really much ever built. It historically never did. The main road through there is a core corridor of just a huge transport desert. There’s just nothing. The buses that run through there are in complete conflict with road traffic. It’s an example where by putting the trams in, you change the urban realm, you’d also make it quieter so all the businesses along Hagley Road suddenly start having

a much nicer environment to sell to people. Trams use up less space than road traffic anyway. you have an opportunity to actually create a corridor of opportunity rather than those things are often a sink of poor air quality. If you get the air quality map up at Birmingham, that road, the A456 is a really congested, nasty air polluted route. Trams reverse that and you actually create an area of opportunity. Trams are more than just the transport they provide. They’re more than just the passengers per per direction.

They allow you to reconfigure the way the city works. And in the longer term, trams don’t move. We talk about PPHPD. Trams don’t move the numbers that a full-blown metro would. And Birmingham is any city bigger than a million people justifies having a dedicated metro. And really, if we’re talking about aspiration, trams are great. But the trams are the thing we should be thinking about delivering within a decade and doing a huge network by that point. Metro is something that Birmingham should be talking very, very sensibly and assertively about.

that’s not really on the cards at the moment because we’re in such an austerity driven mindset of no, you’ll get a mile of tram and you’ll be glad of it. Actually, Birmingham deserves a full metro system.

Kevin Carmody (25:00)
Yeah, so the tram extensions that we are getting are to, in this current, you know, kind of small funding pot that we’ve got, is going to an area known as Sports Quarter, which at the moment, a lot of it is industrial land, but it’s with the aim of future developments happening there.

And this is again one those thoughts of, we focus on moving the people that we’ve got there first or are we focusing on growth? And do we need to be attracting investment into the city rather than necessarily, you know, kind of better utilizing the space that we do already have.

Gareth (25:40)
Yeah, it’s one of those situations where I say do both. You can’t just create tram lines that go to an empty open area. London did this very successfully with the Docklands. Docklands light rail, which has not anything to do with the light rail system. It was a metro off the hoof. So the Docklands metro system, if you like, went out to… There are some fantastic photos of it going out to just barren nothingness.

And all of a sudden this huge amount of growth and prosperity happened and all the opportunity accordingly. But that didn’t happen in isolation. At the same time, you had investment in the tube lines that very much went through existing, very populous areas. And alongside that, you had the expansion of London Overground, which served areas that had lost their rail services or had their rail services almost totally obliterated. So you have to do all of it. You cannot just do both. And again, the lack of funding to cities like Birmingham means that choices happen to be made between

serving residents now or serving potential growth creators that might increase business rates in the medium term. Both need to happen. And we’re also in a world where infinity growth cheat is not the way our economy is going to work in the next 10, 20 years. It just isn’t. It’s already starting to look, well, it has been looking shaky for a long time since the pandemic and even before. So actually, we should be looking at the people who are in the city now and looking at the way they move around and why they move around and where they move to around to.

and building transport networks and map onto that.

Kevin Carmody (27:04)
Yeah. Okay. I’d also like to touch on, if you don’t mind, on pricing. at the moment, pricing is, it’s really made available to, best available to those who can pay upfront. Upfront rail cards who can book well in advance. This doesn’t feel like a particularly well democratized system of pricing.

Gareth (27:27)
Yeah, absolutely. It’s one of the, as you put it, the great irony is that only the rich can afford the cheap tickets. And it’s completely upside down. I’m strongly unhappy about the existence of advanced tickets on the broader railway network because they might make it cheap for people who are not in time poverty and who are not living hand to mouth and therefore making quick decisions. The reality is that we need to really have a think about not…

Kevin Carmody (27:34)
Yeah.

Gareth (27:54)
do we drive increased revenue on our transport systems, but how do we ensure that our transport systems are reaching the most people and are accessible to the most people possible? London’s Oyster Card system, the unified ticketing system in London, is not necessarily super cheap. It is not super cheap. But it is reasonably egalitarian in that generally you will have the same cost no matter who you are or where you’re traveling or how far in advance you want to travel. You’re seeing the same

the same tickets as everyone else traveling, sitting around next to you on the tube. That needs to be case in every city. For long distance journeys, okay, advanced tickets hold some merit. But for urban areas, big suburban areas, sprawling metro areas like Birmingham and the West Midlands, those need to be unified into zone ticketing systems like London has ⁓ that just completely do away with the peak, off peak, advanced, whatever it is. No.

And also where rail cards potentially are something that needs to be thought about as well as how fair are the way that we roll out rail cards in places outside of London. So yeah, there’s a lot of thought needs to be put into that. But again, there needs to be this fear of, but it might knock revenue. needs to be, but how much revenue are we losing currently by how inaccessible our railways are? If we had more people traveling in our public transport systems, then we would be gaining more revenue as well. there’s this mistake we have in Britain where we see that transport systems as being a business. No, no, no.

a business that has to generate its own revenue and wash its face as a commercial entity. It’s like, Public transport, mass transit, railways, whether it’s goods or people, are there to facilitate economic activity and to allow people to move around, not just for work, but for joy, leisure, what have you. It’s not that they need to make their business sense in a small… it’s just the railway sense. They are part of making sure that Britain works, that the UK works as an overall entity.

if we broaden our view on that. The idea of having schools wash their faces is self-serving business. The idea of having hospitals wash their faces is self-serving business. Thankfully, Britain, think, is ridiculous. Well, public services like transport, railways, buses should be seen in the same light.

Kevin Carmody (30:01)
Yeah,

yeah, I mean we do with universities though, which you know, that was the thing that changed wasn’t it?

Gareth (30:06)
Yeah, and that’s why universities are

currently, the whole sector is collapsing in on itself. Financialization is not, know, financialization of things that are ultimately a public good and cannot really go bust has not worked out for us over the last 40 years. yeah, it’s interesting to see, yeah, there are moves to reverse this in various quarters, but, you know, ultimately seeing that end state of we want to move as many people as possible, as easily as possible, as excessively as possible.

Kevin Carmody (30:14)
Yeah.

Gareth (30:33)
is got to be that long term vision and reducing cars, reducing road deaths, reducing pollution.

Kevin Carmody (30:39)
Yeah. Okay, so my last question to you then is I’ll give you the opportunity to be transport dictator for Birmingham for the next five years. What is the one thing that you would do that will probably make people mad as hell but would just work and would just improve the state?

Gareth (30:56)
Congestion charge. So off the bat, is a congestion charge is something that I’d be rolling out kind of more aggressively than the clean air zone. But also I’d be spending a sizable chunk of money on developing a full metro system for the West Midlands and the Birmingham metro area as well. So making sure that we’re not throwing good money after bad and trying to squeeze a lot out of an existing railway network and potentially spending unending billions.

I’d be saying, right, okay, what would a new completely blank slate metro system look like for Birmingham? And let’s throw some good design money after that and wait for Treasury to be abolished and then start funding it ourselves.

Kevin Carmody (31:32)
Alright, brilliant. Okay, well thank you very much for your time on this. ⁓ I would say to all my listeners ⁓ or people watching this on YouTube, make sure you go and check out Rail Natter where you’ll see a lot more detail in ⁓ not just Westmids or HS2 but also across the whole country. ⁓ Yeah, thank you very much for your time.

Gareth (31:55)
No, thanks Kevin. Thanks everyone for listening.