Designing Safer Roads for the Jewellery Quarter

Road safety is one of the issues we hear about most often from people living in the Jewellery Quarter.

For years, residents have raised concerns about speeding, dangerous driving and roads that can feel hostile to people walking, cycling or simply trying to cross the street. Great Hampton Street has seen fatal collisions. Elsewhere across the Quarter, residents regularly report cars travelling at excessive speeds, drivers using streets as racetracks, illegal quad bikes, dangerous parking and other antisocial behaviour involving vehicles.

There have also been collisions in which people have been injured, alongside persistent problems with drivers gathering in particular locations, excessive noise, littering and suspected drug use.

At our recent Neighbourhood Forum meeting, road safety was raised again as a serious concern. The message from residents was clear: people have had enough.

So we want to move the conversation forward.

What would safer roads in the Jewellery Quarter actually look like?

Rather than starting with a list of individual complaints or jumping immediately to particular solutions, the Jewellery Quarter Neighbourhood Forum is bringing people together to work through the problem properly.

During September and October, we plan to run a small series of hands-on design workshops where residents can help us build a shared picture of what is happening across the Jewellery Quarter and what needs to change.

These will be practical, structured sessions using maps of the neighbourhood and design-led methods to explore the issues street by street.

Together, we will:

• identify the roads, junctions and locations where residents are experiencing problems;
• look at how frequent those problems are and how serious their impact is;
• explore what may be causing or enabling them;
• consider possible ways those root causes could be addressed; and
• start building a shared vision for safer streets across the Jewellery Quarter.

That could include everything from street design and crossings to traffic management, enforcement, parking, lighting or changes to how particular roads are used. We do not want to decide the answers before residents have had the opportunity to explore the problems.

The workshops will help us identify where there are clusters of problems and where particular issues keep appearing. Once those areas have been identified, we will also ask the wider neighbourhood to contribute their experiences so that we can build a stronger evidence base around them.

What happens afterwards?

At the end of the process, the Neighbourhood Forum will bring the work together into a  report setting out the main problem areas, the issues people are experiencing, the likely causes and the changes residents would like to see considered.

We will then be able to take that to Birmingham City Council and other relevant organisations and say:

This is what people who live in the Jewellery Quarter are experiencing, and this is what we want you to do to ensure safer roads in our neighbourhood.

Where particular streets or junctions emerge as priorities, we also want to help residents organise around those individual areas, gather further evidence and build support for action.

This is the first step in what is likely to be a longer piece of work, but it gives us something important that we do not currently have: a shared people centric picture of what needs to change.

Join the design workshops

We are now inviting anyone who would like to take part in the workshops to register their interest.

Use the form below to tell us that you would like to take part and give us an indication of your availability.

We will then be in touch once the workshop dates have been arranged.

If speeding, dangerous driving or unsafe streets affect you, help us design what better could look like.