50% of Brummies want to cycle more. Why is it so hard?

In a motor city like this one, bikes have become political

By Dan Cave

The best way to clear your head in Birmingham? Wait until there’s a clear, dry evening (your best bet is sometime between late spring and early autumn, like the pastel orange one I’m writing this piece on) then, if you’re able, grab your push bike and get into town. Meet a friend, a lover, a cherished companion for a drink or a light bite. If alone? While away some time watching the world go by: get an iced coffee, sit by the fountain in Victoria Square or on the steps of the Chamberlain cut-through, and enjoy city centre life as strangers mill about you. As the late day bleeds into the first ink-dark blots of twilight, get back on your bike and point it south, toward the A38 cycleway — better known as the blue route. Once you’re past the fiddly switchbacks, seeming dead ends and busy crowds in the Chinatown and Gay Village, and beyond the never-quite-in-sync traffic lights of the Belgrave Middleway-Bristol Road intersection, keep going until you hit the Ballet School just past Priory Road. This is where the real fun begins. 

Here, the cycleway becomes a wide boulevard guarded by two rows of trees. When there are few other cyclists around, it’s safe enough to properly crank forward with momentum. High gear, strong pushdowns from your legs, and you can get up enough speed for the rushing air to bring tears to the corner of your eyes and, critically, clarity to the head. In one long curve of cycle lane — a minute or two of cycling — you can start to glide. Freewheeling, it can feel like you’re the only person in this usually busy city. That is until the bright white lights of a Tesco Express and the stumbles of drunken students bring you back to earth at the other end.

Boulevard of two-wheeled dreams. Photo by: Dan Cave/The Dispatch.

Fleeting escapism is not the entire point of riding a bike in this city. But whether cycling for leisure, health, work or in your day-to-day tasks, achieving just a minute or two of cycling serenity is a rare thing in Birmingham. According to 2020 Birmingham City Council figures, 70% of residents don’t think our cycle routes are good enough. Only one per cent of trips in the city are completed on bikes. Routes such as the A38 (or A34) are among the few properly segregated cycleways in Birmingham, and even these have their issues — taken over by parked cars or construction, and at points difficult to navigate. in a city proud of its automobile heritage, cycling can often feel embattled. 

This is despite 50% of us Brummies wanting to cycle more, according to the same council numbers. Jasdeep Sandhu runs her business Forij, which encourages more sustainable produce buying, from her bike and cycles all over the city. Yet she says that when she’s cycling with her kids, she often takes circuitous routes or gets her children to use pavements. “It just doesn’t feel safe enough,” she adds. Sandhu’s instinct is born out in the data. Between 2019 and June 2023 there were 28 deaths of vulnerable road users. A joint Sustrans and Birmingham City Council survey, published in March 2024, found that only 30% of residents think the level of safety for cycling in their area is good. 

Officials and camapigners feel similarly. Adam Tranter, appointed cycling and walking commissioner in 2021 by ex-mayor Andy Street, has been consistently outspoken about road safety in Birmingham and the West Midlands. In 2023 he said we must stop treating road deaths, including cyclists, as normal. The role, which Tranter was the first to hold, has a broad remit: putting pressure on central government to commit to devolved funding control and safer roads with improved cycling infrastructure; steering policies and plans in the region, focussing on council delivery of cycle schemes and being accountable for everything from safety to infrastructure. The West Midlands followed Manchester and London in appointing a commissioner, with travel infrastructure campaign groups like Better Streets for Birmingham critical in getting the area to follow suit.

Jasdeep and her children stop on the bridge leading from the Mailbox to Brindley Place. Photo supplied by Jasdeep Sandhu.

To find out more about safety and infrastructure for cyclists in Birmingham, I took a bike ride with Better Streets’ policy lead Martin Price from Selly Oak to Northfield, an area he says has some of the best cycling infrastructure in the city. Even here Martin is able to detail multiple issues along the way: being forced to cross arterial roads, cycling on pavements with upturned paving stones while fighting for space with pedestrians, and having to mount curbs. He also says there are local political beefs, culture wars — over Low Traffic Neighbourhoods — and, in places, a failure to properly consult with residents that can cause issues for future active travel — walking and cycling — improvement plans. Even quieter greenways and residential routes need focus, he says. “Often getting to these main routes can be dangerous, and that’s before the bigger task of unlearning basing the city around the car,” he adds.

The authorities know this. Birmingham City Council’s Birmingham Walking and Cycling Strategy with Local Cycling and Walking Infrastructure Plan — yes, that is a mouthful — interlinks with an ambitious Transport Plan which outlines goals for a “sustainable, green, inclusive” city where walking and cycling are the first choice for short journeys. There are targets, such as having 10% of journeys made by bike by 2033. The plan highlights the need to reduce deaths and serious injury, and improve enforcement against poor and dangerous road behaviour — linking this all to the economy, the climate and health. Elsewhere, it notes that poor surface conditions, an overreliance on cars and conflicts active travellers face with other road users are barriers to progress. Last summer, the death of a 12-year-old boy in Yardley made national headlines. As Adam Tranter tells me: “Riding a bike around the city can too often feel like a matter of life and death.”

Cycling campaigners laud the council’s vision. “The plans sound great. I want to live in that Birmingham now,” Price says. Though there are clear successes — such as an improved ability to report unsafe driving and have it actioned against, cycling education, free bike schemes, data showing that segregated lanes do encourage cycling, and recent infrastructure wins on the Dudley Road and in Rubery — there’s still a way to go. A 2023 open letter signed by multiple campaign groups, including a representative from Cycling UK, Better Streets for Birmingham, and Living Streets, called for faster progression. For the 1,500 miles of roads in Birmingham, council data shows that there are only 144 miles for cycling are traffic-free, and often of variable quality and including very narrow canal towpaths. A 2022 report shows progress for active travel improvements is mixed. On many cycling projects, by the council’s own admission, there has been no substantial improvement.

One of the confusing parts of the A38 cycleway. Photo supplied by Dan Cave for The Dispatch.

The open letter called for more robust delivery timescales, improved co-creation with communities during consultancy and better accountability and work structures from the authority on the issue of active travel. “We’ve had design agencies turn up with crap plans for local roads while the slow pace of improvement can’t continue,” Price says, adding that the projects meant to be delivered in 2022 are still held up now. And earlier this month worries regarding the slow pace of delivery were exacerbated by shifting political sands. Street, who appointed the West Midlands Combined Authority’s first cycling commissioner in 2021, lost his mayorship to incumbent Richard Parker. Campaigners say Parker is lukewarm on cycling. “Parker’s manifesto is more like: we commit to the sentiment of doing this [improving active travel],” says Price, bemoaning the lack of concrete commitment. 

After Street went, his cycling and walking commissioner, Adam Tranter, then stepped down. Tranter, say campaigners, has been critical in unlocking central government funding and driving delivery across the regions, ruffling feathers along the way and calling out colleagues publicly. He was in situ when the West Midlands achieved a high Active Travel England rating for its cycling commitments and projects, which helps unlock future central funding. Cycling campaigners told The Dispatch they liked his hyper-focus on delivery, his ability to hold others to account when he dislikes delivery speeds and his ability to cut through bureaucracy. “Because he wasn’t politically affiliated, he came into the system, communicated well, and took a hard look at things that weren’t performing,” says Price. As such, the campaigning community is sad to see him leave.

For cycling, these weren’t the only blows. In the same week that Tranter announced he would be stepping down, the transport and highways council cabinet role (held by Councillor Liz Clements) was rolled into a broader transport and environment brief that includes waste and parks (held by Councillor Majid Mahmood). Clements did not reply to The Dispatch’s request for an interview, but both Price and David Cox OBE, a Birmingham-based campaigner through Push Bikes and ex-Chair of Cycling UK, lauded her as a champion of active travel and worried that, balanced with other briefs, active travel delivery could become an afterthought. “Waste management along cycling? There’s a huge chance this just gets lost,” says Cox. 

Me, posing by a traffic reducing planter.

Despite three blows in quick succession, campaigners remain somehwat optimistic. Parker has committed to replacing Tranter, which pressure groups say is critical to ensuring ongoing project delivery across Birmingham and the West Midlands. And though the council is effectively bankrupt, there is some central funding still in place, some will likely come from property developers, and there is a chance to, as campaigners say, get access to broader sustainable transport funding with the right commissioner in place. Plus, there is a statutory condition for the council to focus on road safety. Ergo: progress does have to be made. Cox also points out how far the city’s cycling infrastructure has come in the 40-plus years he has cycled here. Long gone are those faded white lines painted on dangerous flyovers. “It was pointless and you’d ignore it to stay safe,” he adds.

Yet it’s Cox’s long view of cycling in the city that leads him to caution that political will, and pressure from officials, remain important to ensure cycling doesn’t slip off the agenda. He argues that this mode of two-wheeled travel only really started to enter the debate in the city in the early 2010s, when the new Labour Council, led by Sir Albert Bore, worked alongside campaigners to get funding for plans that eventually turned into the blue routes. This, he says, worked well until battles with unions and issues that would eventually fuel Birmingham’s bankruptcy took the focus off the agenda, “They lost the pizzaz to deliver,” he adds. Optimism aside, there’s a worrying parallel in the city just ten years on. 

At the Commissioner level, Tranter says whoever replaces him can drive future success even in this moment of flux. “But the role has to be more than just a champion… this role needs someone to get stuck in — not just to promote active travel but to enable it through delivery,” he says. “The role needs to be able to threaten to take money off the table if appropriate, ask difficult questions, and deliver security — that’s if Birmingham is serious about this.”

Until a new commissioner is confirmed, and the outline of their role understood, it might be up to the campaign groups to keep active travel, and cycling, on the agenda. Especially with worries that council focus could end up elsewhere. Even though Tranter is a business owner, he came from this campaigning background originally. Cox, at least, thinks the groups are up to the task. “Compared to the 1970s, the 1990s or even in 2012, when we worked to get the council to pay attention to this area, the campaigning ecology is smarter,” he says. “We’ve built bigger alliances, we have brilliant campaigners and new charities. They won’t drop the issue.”

While campaigners may be dogged and strategic — they were the first to lead the outcry online and in the press when Tranter stepped down, putting pressure on Parker to retain the role — in the meantime, it’s important for cyclists to keep our wits about us and plan those routes well. And not, like me, get too lost in clearing your head.

---

Note: An earlier version of this article referred to Martin Price’s position within Better Streets for Birmingham as co-chair. This has since changed to policy lead and the article has been edited to reflect this.