Birmingham metro extension plans nowhere near original vision
Mar 16 2009 by Paul Dale, Birmingham Post
The proposal to extend the Midland Metro tram from Snow Hill Station to New Street Station is either the first stage in a brilliant transportation strategy, or it is a complete waste of money on something that relatively few people will use.
At first glance, the £60 million extension appears to involve spending a lot of money without any guarantee of anything much in return. It is true that the route will be of benefit to people who want to travel between New Street and Wolverhampton, but apart from that it is hardly going to revolutionise public transport in Birmingham city centre.
It could be argued that council leaders, in a desperate attempt to be seen to be doing something, have grasped at the shortest length of Metro track that they think they can get funding for.
It also cannot be denied that the current council leadership has never been particularly keen on taking the Metro from New Street up to Five Ways via Broad Street, as was originally envisaged. The interruption to buses and cars and the thought of trams sharing narrow roads with other traffic was just too much to bear.
When that plan collapsed through a lack of government funding, after council leaders rightly refused to allow themselves to be bribed into running congestion charge experiments, it seemed to many that the Metro was dead.
But a new, bolder, plan was being formed at the Council House which involved running trams from New Street to Birmingham Airport and the National Exhibition Centre. It may be that the Snow Hill-New Street extension acts as a catalyst to deliver a route to the airport, although when this might happen is in the lap of the gods.
There is though, despite Centro’s attempts to talk the project up, no certainty that all of the funding required to build the Snow Hill-New Street line can be obtained. A bid for £25 million has been submitted to the government, but that will have to take its chances against all of the region’s other transportation priorities.
And even if ministers do agree to hand over £25 million, huge questions are still to be answered about securing the remaining £35 million. Some of this will come from Section 106 planning gain money, but any thoughts the city council had of raising the remainder through land sales must surely be put on the back burner for the forseeable future.
Supporters of the Metro, and there are many in Birmingham, will be cheered by the latest turn of events. But what is being proposed is a pale shadow of the grand plans that the city once had.
