Our response to early plans for Hagley Road

Filed under: Consultation

We welcome that Transport for West Midlands is looking to address the Hagley Road corridor. The corridor is currently hostile to walking, wheeling and cycling, and buses often suffer from congestion caused by a lack of priority.

Rebalancing our city’s main corridors through road space allocation is important for addressing road safety and congestion.

We welcome this project delivering multimodal improvements compared to other corridors delivering modal improvements in separate projects. We also welcome early engagement starting at a high level.

Our comments

Walking, wheeling and cycling

We welcome the addition of new crossings to make Hagley Road and side roads safer and more permeable to those not in a vehicle. We note that it is important that along any corridor, it is easy for people wheeling and cycling to access bidirectional cycleways from the opposite side of the carriageway and side roads.

Side road junctions should be narrowed, squared off, and be designed as continuous footways, following the treatment that has been used in the city centre cross-city bus proposals.

We assume that the intention of the cycleway is to extend towards Bearwood, Quinton and Wolverhampton Road’s cycle super route – which we welcome – but have not been able to verify this to be the case. We would expect cycle route usage to noticeably increase once the route is connected to the Harborne Walkway and Bearwood local centre.

The onward ‘last mile’ cycle route from Five Ways to the city centre core area remains unclear. Birmingham’s LCWIP identifies Route 14 to Brindleyplace via Grovsenor Street West and Route 15 to New Street via Tennant Street as parallel routes, but do not appear to have been fully implemented and both require clearer signing, route repeater signs and cycle marking in the carriageway for reassurance.

The cycleway to serve Morrisons and the Edgbaston Village tram stop requires new sheltered cycle parking as the supermarket does not currently offer provision.

We expect that the drastic upgrade in cycle provision will enable many more people to cycle for short trips and to the city centre. This will then add to the need to build other routes within the LCWIP, and would ask that the project team look ahead using the latest identified routes (e.g. Harborne Walkway, and Supplementary Routes 10, 13 and 19).

Bus lanes and rapid transit

Bus priority measures should be more ambitious with continuous lanes in each direction – given Hagley Road is a 4 to 7 lane highway and this is a busy bus corridor.

We are unclear how this fits into wider plans around the Hagley Road Rapid Transit study. Will the bus lanes be turned into Sprint routes and tramways with time? If so, this suggests that continuous bus lanes ought to be put in place now so that all the required land is secured.