Who owns what and how to fix things

Request something new

Beware promising new things to residents. Everything in transport is more expensive than you would think: tramway is £130m per mile, zebra crossings cost up to £100k, getting double yellow lines installed can cost in the region of £10k, new highway signage costs around £1,000 per sign as you have to pay forward for maintenance. Everything is more complex too with business cases and legal orders.

• Bus stop (also relocation or removal) - can request on Transport for West Midlands, note that current policy seems to be to space stops out more.
  
• Small safety critical changes to streets - can be requested through Birmingham City Council’s online ‘request highways works’ form - limited budget, safety critical changes more likely to be built.
  
• Resident parking schemes - can be established but costs money for the consultation and legal orders, would need to be implemented using Councillor funds. 
  
• Bigger local schemes - e.g. speed bumps, chicanes, junction narrowing, build outs, modal filters - More likely to need to use a dedicated fund. There are several funds. The easiest one for Councillors to access is the Environment and Transport Neighbourhood Fund: £10,000 per councillor per year - all funding is now allocated until the election. Schemes after the election will need to tightly follow the Healthy Streets approach.
  
  We discourage the use of speed cushions as in our experience, they are ineffective and mean you end up back at square one. Instead, consider whole-carriageway speed humps or speed tables, continuous pavements, chicanes, narrowing junctions and carriageways, planting trees, formalising parking bays or preventing through traffic if it’s not a main road. Transport for London and Cambridgeshire County Council have produced good explanatory guides.
  
• School streets where fewer or no cars on a residential street next to a school - Talk to Councillor about this - school needs to be on board. Residents need to be brought on the journey with this, especially if you need modal filters to make it work.
  
• School journey improvements - there’s a relatively new and small fund for improving school changes - for example, crossing improvements and pavement parking measures.
  
• Private land - Contact the owner of the land e.g. shopping centre owner or business.
  
• Bus lanes, tram extensions and new rail stations - Beware, these are dealt with at a regional level (West Midlands Combined Authority). Lots of work goes into selecting and funding routes and they can take several decades to build and open. There’s a pipeline of major schemes selected until 2032 and beyond. Campaigning for them is sensible, promising you’ll build something would not be advised.
  
• Cycle lanes - Mainly funded by government grants, the pipeline and its ordering is agreed between Birmingham City Council and West Midlands Combined Authority. Cycle friendly streets are more likely to be achieved in a shorter time frame - where traffic is calmed and cycles are painted in the road.

Get something fixed

• General road issues - signs, pavements, bollards, potholes - Report through Birmingham City Council’s website - the way this is funded is through the Highways PFI - there’s around £130m budget a year for repairs.
• Traffic lights and pedestrian crossings - Report through Birmingham City Council’s website - they will come to fix them as soon as possible with an on-call team - If an entire junction is out, call them and they’ll send someone instantly - 0121 303 4149
• Road sweeping - Request through Birmingham City Council’s website
• Flytipping - Report through Birmingham City Council’s website - usually fairly quick to remove if it’s on the public highway, won't clear private land
• Public litter bin overflows or damage - Report through Birmingham City Council’s website
• Bus stop - Glass, signage, lighting or broken real time information screen - Report through Transport for West Midlands’ website.
• Park and ride - Report through Transport for West Midlands’ website.
• Rail station - Anything within the station footprint, report to West Midlands Railway.
• Rail line side - Report to Network Rail (In an emergency: 03457 11 41 41).

Get enforcement

• Pavement parking - If obstructive (have to go into the road, can’t get a wheelchair or double buggy through), send it to West Midlands Police through Operation Snap.
• Inconsiderate or double yellow parking - Report to Birmingham City Council so that they can visit the area. We are awaiting a new contract to improve the parking service.
• Speeding on residential streets - Report to West Midlands Police’s ‘Contact us’ tab on local neighbourhood police team page. Note that Police don't generally enforce 20mph streets. The proven solution for this is to reroute through-traffic to main roads, which can have camera enforcement.
• Speeding on main roads - West Midlands Police have a rotating list of speed camera positions where it’s deemed safe for the vans to park up - recently expanded their capacity! The Council has a priority list of speed cameras focused on main roads.
• Box junctions and banned turns - BCC are running a trial of banned turn and junction cameras, hope to get a programme of them afterwards, especially as part of new bus schemes.

Other bits to note

After someone is killed in a collision, funding becomes available to improve the street, regardless of what happened.

Who owns what?

Rail

Road

Check land ownership. New developments might not be adopted (yet or at all) or might retain ownership of roads, paths and cycle routes through their site. Car parks are typically privately owned.

There are several examples in the city where swathes of publicly accessible land is privately owned. For example, Longbridge Town Centre and Chamberlain Square in the city centre.

Bus

Trams

Tickets

Transport documents

We have collated links to strategies, plans, reports and statistics into one page.