Our email to councillors for July 2022’s Transport Delivery Committee

Filed under: General

We sent this email to Birmingham councillors who sit on the West Midlands Transport Delivery Committee (TDC). This is a West Midlands Combined Authority committee made up of councillors from across the region which receives reports on transport in the region.

Transport Delivery Committee’s meeting agendas and documents are published on WMCA’s website. Here is the agenda for July 2022.

Dear Councillors,

Better Streets for Birmingham is a community group which campaigns for changes to our travel and planning infrastructure to improve the sustainability, efficiency and safety of our streets. We believe that through connecting Birmingham to reduce car dependency, we will make it a more pleasant place to work, live and play.

As representatives for Birmingham on the WMCA Transport Delivery Committee (TDC), please find enclosed concerns we have around agenda items for the meeting on 11 July 2022. While we appreciate that TDC takes a regional political party approach, rather than as a constituent authority, we are apolitical.

We are concerned about the number of items not published in advance. Items 10 and 14 are verbal reports and are not restricted from the public. At time of publishing, item 16 is still listed as “To Follow”. This follows the worrying trend in the last committee year, which avoids public scrutiny through lack of advanced sight of reports. We would urge that all public items are published in good time rather than multiple document packs emerging.

Item 9 – Forward plan

In regards to the Walking & Cycling Monitoring Report, to be presented at September’s committee meeting, we feel it is important that specific requests are made for the contents of the report. Historically, these types of reports have been a fluffy round robin with attitudinal data and West Midlands Cycle Hire usage.

We would like to see:

A line-by-line progress update on Active Travel Fund (ATF) and City Region Sustainable Transport Settlement (CRSTS) schemes. These amount to hundreds of millions of pounds-worth of schemes to be delivered by 2027 and as soon as 2023. It is important that the progress is publicly available and updated regularly. It is currently unclear how WMCA intends to publish updates and progress seems to have gone into a pan-local authority black hole. We would ideally like to see this included as part of the TDC Capital Programme Delivery Monitoring Report (item 12 of this meeting).
The CRSTS programme timetable
Cycle route counter and historical counter data, which would ideally also be publicly available (open) data published on the TfWM data portal

Item 11 – Financial Monitoring Report

We are concerned to see that the Cycle Hire scheme has overspent by £149,000 in the year to date due to lower than anticipated revenues. We would urge TfWM and Serco (the Cycle Hire scheme operator) to review usage data and reposition underused docks and suggest that NCN Route 5 might be a good revenue-generating route for repositioned docks.

Item 12 – Capital Programme Delivery Monitoring Report

We are concerned that the Cycle Hire scheme (bullet point three of section 3.1) is yet to find a sponsor as this restricts the growth of the scheme to capital-funded projects.

Item 15 – Member Engagement Groups Update

We would encourage you to join the ‘Safe & Sustainable Travel’ Member Engagement Group.

If you have questions about any of our concerns, please feel free to reach out and we’ll be happy to clarify.

We are hoping to email you prior to each TDC meeting. We hope you enjoy the summer period and look forward to getting in touch in early September.

Best wishes,

Better Streets for Birmingham Committee