Bus passengers in north Birmingham face continuing delays to their journey, unless city council plans are overturned it is claimed.

Several organisations have now lodged formal objections to the scrapping of bus lanes along the Tyburn Road.  They say thousands of passengers a day have faced slower journeys since the bus priority measures were suspended as an ‘experiment’ in summer 2004.  A city council report acknowledged that the move had only led to a very slight improvement for the smaller number of motorists and that local residents had also had to endure heavier traffic flows as a result.

Although consultation on the future of the bus lanes has been put back to 2007, the temporary  suspension order will expire this month.  This has forced Birmingham City Council to seek a permanent order to remove the bus lanes – a procedural move that is now being opposed by the West Midlands public transport body Centro-PTA, as well as major bus company Travel West Midlands and other passenger groups.

Centro, which carries out policy on behalf of councillors across the West Midlands, says its work to tackle congestion could be threatened.  It says the region’s bus strategy agreed with Birmingham City Council aims to deliver high quality services and increase passenger numbers to 355 million trips a year by 2010/11.  These targets will be difficult to achieve without bus priority measures like the Tyburn Road bus lanes, it claims.

West Midlands councils were recently ‘fined’ £2.2m in reduced transport funding because Government targets were not being met.

Update: Birmingham City Council decided to permanently suspend the bus lane despite opposition.  An attempt to 'call in' the decision for scrutiny failed by one vote, the casting vote of the chairman.