Poor public transport explains the UK’s productivity puzzle
Birmingham is a motor city. You don&#x27;t get a bus, you drive. It is as simple as that. The infrastructure was built for cars and the leafy suburbs have plenty of parking. People drive in and don&#x27;t get the bus.<p>I use the term &#x27;people&#x27; to refer to people with proper jobs, if you work in the NHS as a nurse or if you do cleaning, work in a shop or anything else serving customers then you are waiting an extremely long time for a bus and having quite a walk at the other end. Things may have changed recently but from what I remember you had absolutely silly waiting times after 6.30 p.m. Stay at your desk one minute past 5.30 and you have that thirty minutes of walking and waiting before your bus comes along if you are lucky.<p>There are other factors such as the cost of living in the city. Although not London prices, if you want to &#x27;get on the housing rope-ladder&#x27; then you are going to be off the bus route and driving in.<p>People do like their cars in Birmingham, for religious reasons a lot of young men don&#x27;t drink. This leads to a lot of them taking a lot of pride in their motors to therefore never take the bus.<p>There is a large pedestrianised area in the centre however there are also roads that are as big as motorways going through the city. Things like the exhibition centres and other things alluding to Birmingham&#x27;s status as second city were very much built with the car in mind.<p>I cycled when I lived there and my experiences of the bus was gained after I got run over by a car from the other carriageway collecting me on his bonnet. The bike didn&#x27;t take it too well so the bleak misery of the bus was not my choice. The waiting was definitely bad for productivity.<p>There was one other cyclist at that workplace of sixty or so other people and only the receptionist got the bus, starting at 6.30 a.m. from Lichfield to be there before 9. Everyone else drove.<p>I did have reason to drive there once, it was on work business and I made the mistake of taking the wrong exit from 5-ways roundabout. A mile later stuck in the slowest traffic ever in Halesowen I was ready to abandon the car and set light to it. Luckily it wasn&#x27;t my car so I spent the best part of an hour trying to get back to the right exit of the roundabout. That was not &#x27;productive&#x27;.