Open letter: No more deaths on our roads

Filed under: General

All recipients have replied to our open letter – we have published them in a separate post.

Councillor John Cotton,
Council Leader, Birmingham City Council

Councillor Liz Clements,
Cabinet Member for Transport, Birmingham City Council

Andy Street,
Mayor of the West Midlands and West Midlands Mayoral Candidate 2024

Richard Parker,
West Midlands Mayoral Candidate 2024

Sent by email

26 January 2024

No more deaths on our roads

Dear all,

In the past month, there have been two further pedestrians killed and another serious injury on Birmingham’s roads. The serious injury took place in a location we have repeatedly highlighted as suffering from dangerous driving.

These are preventable tragedies, and are regrettably in line with the expected trend for the number of people killed in collisions on our streets. Every two weeks, one person is expected to be killed on our roads: another family and community torn apart.

Since our letter in June 2023, we have been encouraged by the efforts that authorities have put towards making a safer Birmingham. Partnership working and increased transparency is making a difference. We are proud to have been a catalyst for making this happen.

We are writing today as allies in achieving Vision Zero: a city in a region that sees every road death as unacceptable.

It is clear that efforts towards that goal from all authorities must continue at pace. Therefore we are today issuing a series of challenges to you and your authorities:

• Ahead of the mayoral election, we challenge the West Midlands Mayoral candidates to commit to prioritising road safety policing.
• We challenge the Mayor of the West Midlands to establish a multi-agency working group for Operations Close Pass, Hercules, Park Safe, Snap and Triton that meets regularly to monitor progress and effectiveness against measurable targets. Let’s aim to reduce deaths and serious injuries by a third every 3 years, to stay on track for Vision Zero by 2041.
• We challenge West Midlands Combined Authority and Birmingham City Council to direct highways maintenance funding towards retrofitting streets to Safe System and Healthy Streets standards, making them safe for walking and cycling.
• We challenge Birmingham City Council specifically to deliver on its measures announced in response to our June 2023 open letter:
  1. deliver 30mph speed reductions by this April.
  2. deliver 6 average speed cameras by the end of this year.

We are also calling for Birmingham’s residents, city councillors and MPs to back the draft Road Harm Reduction Strategy: a pivotal and ambitious document, essential for making Birmingham safer.

We are determined to create safer, healthier and happier streets for Birmingham. Vision Zero, the Road Harm Reduction Strategy, and the measures set out in our above challenges are critical to this.

Let us be clear: every Brummie must get home safely. We need to do everything within our collective power to achieve this, quickly.

Kind regards

Martin Price and Mat MacDonald
Co-chairs, Better Streets for Birmingham