Goody goody Brum Brum (Transport in Birmingham)

Member Name: davidbuttery

Product:	Transport in Birmingham
Date:	29/06/02 (295 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Lots and lots of buses, Good Centro information, Trams feel posh

Disadvantages: Awful bus seats, Exact fare buses

As I've said on (give or take) seventeen billion occasions, I don't drive, so anyone wanting an in-depth analysis on how to drive through Brum city centre (other than "don't, you fool!") isn't going to get one. No, in this op I shall be concentrating on the three main modes of public transport - train, bus and tram.

"Wot no taxis?" I hear you cry. And indeed, they can be considered public transport. But I practically never use the things in Birmingham, so I don't think it's fair to say more than "those taxis with the South African flags on (advertising the SA tourist board) look very smart, don't they?"

***TRAINS***

First we shall survey the barren wasteland that is, or was, the Railtrack network. Actually, things aren't nearly so bad as that, and in fact the West Midlands has a pretty good rail network, with most of the major towns and cities connected by fairly frequent services.

The local rail system can broadly be defined as a radial one, with "spokes" emanating from the Birmingham "hub". As with many British cities, Birmingham has more than one station, and which one you go to depends upon where you want to go:

NEW STREET is the largest, busiest and best known of the city's railway stations, and is the place to go for most long-distance services (especially those run by Virgin), for Cross-City Line trains to Lichfield and Redditch, for Coventry, Wolverhampton and Walsall/Rugeley services. In addition, some trains towards Kidderminster, Worcester and Hereford go here, but only at certain times of the day.

New Street was until recently an "open station", but now has permanent ticket barriers, and a good thing too (though WH Smith, who recently changed their shop layout to take advantage of the open system, can't be too pleased!). The station itself is reminiscent of a small Euston - a big noisy concourse, the oc
casional aggressive beggar, nowhere at all to sit down (the platforms themselves do have some seats, though) and vastly overpriced food. For better value, go to one of the shops in the Pallasades shopping centre, which leads directly onto the concourse.

SNOW HILL is a desolate sort of a place after the evening rush hour is over - the toilets are often closed, the single tiny shop (whose assistants are very helpful) closes quite early, and so does the even tinier coffee bar. This is the station to come to for most trains to Kidderminster, Worcester and Hereford (but see New St above), for local services to Stratford and Leamington and for the (excellent) Chiltern Railways trains to London.

MOOR STREET is one stop down the line from Snow Hill, and the only reason for mentioning it is that it is closer to New Street than Snow Hill if you need to change lines. Chiltern Railways are refurbishing the old, much larger Moor Street terminus, but this won't be finished for a while.

BIRMINGHAM INTERNATIONAL is halfway between Brum and Coventry, and serves the Airport and the NEC. It can get very crowded here when there's an exhibition on, and the platforms are rather cramped, so you might want to wait inside for as long as possible.

Local trains are a wide variety - all the Cross-City trains, and many of the Wolverhampton-Coventry ones, are newish electrics, which have nasty plastic seats (but with reasonable legroom) and graffiti-crazed windows but give a decent ride and show a good turn of speed. Other local trains are generally Class 150 DMUs, which are old, cramped and noisy but do the job. If you're lucky, you might get one of the new Class 170s on longer trips, which are lovely and comfortable, but tend to break down.

Almost every station within the West Midlands metropolitan area (ie that controlled by Centro, the Passenger Transport Executive) is staffed all day, which is a great boost. This even applies to tiny
stations like Stourbridge Town, a mere 3/4 mile from Stourbridge Junction on Britain's shortest branch line! This, of course, means that you have no excuse whatsoever not to hold a valid ticket at all times! I have no sympathy for fare dodgers, and if you do it I hope you get caught - it's no better than shoplifting in my book. Centro and the operators lose **huge** amounts of income here which could otherwise go to improving services information - though I have to say that the timetables and maps are generally pretty good.

Talking of Centro, prices in the area are pretty reasonable. If you're travelling after 9:30am (or anytime at weekends), your best bet is a Daytripper, which costs £4.00 and covers all travel on the local trains, trams and buses. There is, thankfully, no idiotic afternoon peak restriction similar to that on Liverpool's Saveaway tickets. If you need to go earlier, the One Day Centrocard is a pound more. There are, of course, longer-period season tickets, such as the Railmaster (rail only) and Centrocard (bus, tram and train). One other ticket worth mentioning is the West Midlands Day Ranger. This is a rail-only ticket that allows you to travel (again, not in the morning peak) around a large chunk of the area - as far as places like Crewe, Shrewsbury, Hereford, Evesham and Leamington, for example - but it's quite expensive at around £12. It's also almost completely unadvertised, and it's a good idea to buy it at a larger station as staff at smaller ones sometimes don't seem to know about it!

***TRAMS***

I like trams. Always have, even when the only places you could see the things working were Blackpool, Llandudno and a couple of museums. So I'm delighted to see them back in Brum, even if the system - precisely one line, to Wolverhampton - is pathetic when put up against places like Sheffield. The Midland Metro, as it's officially known, is hoping to expand soon with a branch using a
n old railway line through Dudley (a large town with no central railway station) to the Merry Hill shopping centre, and another street-running section linking New Street with Snow Hill, echoing Manchester's highly successful Piccadilly-Victoria link. A current court case (about how high above the road rails can protrude) might delay things, though.

The system originally relied on self-service ticket machines, but vandalism was so bad that these have now been taken out of use, and all trams have conductors, a change that many people have welcomed. One much less desirable result of the attacks, though, is that the operators have been forced to increase fares by huge amounts - 30% and more in some cases - merely to make ends meet. Some season tickets have also become less useful - for example, the Zones 1&2 Centrocard is not now valid on trams at all. This is a dreadful outcome, as tickets were already a little steep, though a bus/tram day ticket isn't bad value at £3.50.

Inside, the trams are reasonably well designed, with fairly comfortable seats (the ones behind the driver go very early, unsurprisingly!) and plenty of standing room - important, as with trams only every 8 minutes they can get very busy at times. The journey is very smooth for the most part, even if you're standing up, though the constant bings and bongs can get on your nerves after a while. The voiceover announcements are very clear - certainly much better than the mumbling you get on Manchester's Metrolink - though the voice had to be changed after launch as it was "insufficiently Brummie"! (It's still not very, if you ask me.)

The trams are effectively trains for most of the journey, as they use an old railway line (though there are far more pedestrian crossings and far fewer fences than on a railway, as trams have much better brakes). The last mile or so into Wolverhampton City Centre (yay! *City*!), though, are street-running, and I still t
hink it feels rather special to be gliding along ordinary roads in your electromobile...

***BUSES***

All change! No, I haven't gone back to the trains section by mistake. I'm merely drawing attention to the fact that it's important you carry some change with you if you want to use the buses. Why? Simple - the maximum off-peak fare is 95p (there now follows a short pause for those of us who live in rural areas to sob quietly ..... are you done?), and the buses don't give change - you drop your coins into a slot and take a ticket from a dispenser.

This is, far and away, the most irritating thing about Birmingham buses. Travel West Midlands (TWM) claim it's for "speed and security", but neither stands up under scrutiny. The "speed" argument is undermined by the fact that just about all of TWM's competitors (and even one of its own subsidiaries, Travel Merry Hill) *do* give change. And as for "security" - why not follow the lead of City Line in Bristol and give change in tokens, redeemable against future journeys rather than cash?

On the plus side of the ledger, though, there is a very comprehensive bus network in and around Birmingham, and you shouldn't have to wait more than 20 minutes at a stop for a bus to more or less anywhere. It is a good idea to take account of the size of the place, though - it might not seem like a very long way from the City Centre to Merry Hill, but in fact it will take well over an hour. And that's after you've found your damn stop - Birmingham doesn't have a proper central bus station at all, instead relying on an arcane collection of stops slapped down more or less at random throughout the city. The guides aren't much help (yes, okay, so it's stop Ak, but where *is* it???), so it's squint at the map and take pot luck the first couple of times. The other big towns and cities in the region - Wolverhampton, Dudley, West Brom
wich, Walsall etc - do have bus stations, some very new and posh, which is a blessed relief.

TWM has been buying an awful lot of new buses in the last few years, and this has its good points and its bad points. On the positive side, breakdowns are much less common and there's a lot less graffiti. But someone at the buying department seems to have forgotten about the c-word - "comfort". Some of the new double-deckers, in particular, quite apart form having far too few opening windows, have so little knee-room that even an averagely tall man like me (5 foot 10) has to sit diagonally to get in at all - to give them their due, TWM have slightly improved things on some buses, but in general the new-style plastic moulded seats are fantastically uncomfortable, incomparably worse than the older bench models. Why they persist with this madness I have no idea.

It should be noted that some routes - such as the 79 from Birmingham to Wolverhampton, which for some reason is run with single-deckers - can get *very* busy, even in mid-afternoon, and you really do not want to be carrying more than you really need to - yes, you *will* be told to get your bag off the seat on such buses, and if you're selfish enough to sit on the aisle seat you deserve all the abuse you get. Those routes upon which double-deckers ply are generally much better in this department...

...though of course all the problems which have plagued double-deckers in the past are still around. Smoking is less common than it used to be, but it's still something you'll come across, and asking someone to stop is a distinctly uncomfortable experience at best. Rowdy schoolkids are normally not too much of a problem, as they'll leave you alone if you leave them alone, but drunken, aggressive "youths" (as the crime reports call them) on Friday evenings are another matter. My advice here is to get off at the next stop where there are plenty of people around a
nd wait for the next bus - the few minutes in the open air will calm you down, apart from anything else.

Of course, it's easier to do this if you're using a pass rather than paying in cash. Getting a pass is highly recommended, as it also bypasses the "exact fare only" problem. There's the all-modes Daytripper (mentioned under Trains above), but the best bus-only one to go for in most cases is the TWM Daysaver, which is available at anytime except for weekday morning rush hours, and costs £2.50. You can only use it on TWM buses (obviously), but in 95% of cases this won't be a problem. One misunderstanding people often have can be cleared up simply: with a Daytripper, you can use non-TWM buses, but can't leave the West Midlands county; with a Daysaver, it's the other way around.

Birmingham and its local area have a pretty good public transport system by today's standards - nowhere near London's, of course (all you Londoners who whinge about it, we'll take it off your hands like a shot!), but acceptable. There are, as we've seen, quite a few niggles that could easily be sorted out at little cost, but overall you can be reasonably confident of getting about the area without a car.

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