Better Transport

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• Tel: 0121 440 7092

West Midlands Campaign for Better Transport campaigns on local issues and supports the national organisation in pressing for sustainable transport.

Latest News :

July 2010: The group has put out a press release (PDF, 65K) commenting on changes to bus services in Birmingham. It predicts that the plans will cause "chaos". 

West Midlands Campaign for Better Transport is also organising a petition against the plans to withdraw the 21 bus service; anyone who would like a copy of the petition form for distribution should contact the group.

January 2010:  West Midlands Campaign for Better Transport and Birmingham Friends of the Earth are working on a 20's Plenty campaign to get Birmingham City Council to adopt a 20mph speed limit on all residential roads within the city. This builds on the work done in Portsmouth where the council introduced a 20mph limit across the entire area. The group organised a forum in Central Birmingham following a letter writing campaign conducted over the summer and autumn, which got 500 residents across Birmingham to write to the city council calling for lower speed limits.  The idea is to meet representatives of local neighbourhood forums and community groups who have issues with speeding in their areas and encourage them to campaign on 20's Plenty.

December 2009: Kevin Chapman comments on Wolverhampton, the "hokey cokey" council as he calls it, where bus passengers continue to suffer from below-par reliability on one hand and are seeing their hard earned council tax being thrown down the drain on the other.

November 2009: Rail passengers can put away those champagne bottles – despite headlines proclaiming that rail fares would rise by just over 1%, Kevin Chapman reveals that tickets for many journeys will rise by considerably more.

July 2009:  West Midlands Campaign for Better Transport has commented on the "Connecting Communities" paper which was published by ATOC in June:

Read the letter to ATOC (PDF, 38K)

March 2009: West Midlands Campaign for Better Transport used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain “Local Transport Plan Delivery Report: 2006 – 2008” which suggests punctuality is currently little better than it was in 2002/03, when 60% of bus services operated between one minute early and five minutes late. If current performance continues, West Midlands authorities will be well off track in meeting the 2010/11 target of 83%. 

Read the press release about the report (PDF, 45K)

February 2009: West Midlands Campaign for Better Transport is campaigning against the fare rises imposed by bus operator National Express West Midlands over the Christmas and New Year period. This group has been set up on Facebook to call for lower fares.

December 2008: The group has called on the bus operator National Express West Midlands to postpone a fare increase planned for early January.

Read the press release about the increase (PDF, 33K)