A bus ride too far - learning the lessons of the South West Birmingham Bus Review

A report of the Assistant Director (Development Strategy) to the Transportation and Street Services Overview & Scrutiny Committee on the lessons learnt from the South West Birmingham Bus Network Review, Bus ride to improvement for South Birmingham, has concluded that conflicting objectives is the key issue from the review. The report highlights that the different objectives and expectations of the different organisations involved should be considered in forthcoming reviews.

It should be made clear for future reviews that NXWM’s commercial considerations are the prime driver and hence the reviews are led by them, with input from the City Council and Centro (with the latter needing to address any resultant gaps in terms of access standards) but not necessarily an equal partnership between the three.

Other issues that need to be considered from the review are the areas being covered and catchments. Catchments offer a better and more manageable area to review routes and deal with neighbouring areas that may have services impacting on the review area. A consideration of local issues is also considered important for reviews to determine opportunities to feed in to the network design and a need to consider other operators in the review area.

A map of the review areas is shown below: