Raise the Hammer

Having gone to University in Birmingham, Birmingham City University, formerly the University of Central England, on a 6 month exchange program I can tell you that, Birmingham has over a million people (city not area) it is a major rail air and road transport hub in the UK. It is still a somewhat an industrial hub as well being the largest automobile producer in the UK. However, in adapting to a post industrial future as a pedestrian people friendly place, its way ahead of Hamilton. It has 4 or 5 universities, a LRT line (The Midland Metro) which is currently expanding and has been trying to become more people friendly since the 1990's and it seems to be succeeding, finally. I am sorry to say Hamilton is so far behind this city in becoming more people and pedestrian friendly. Birmingham gained the non people friendly tittle because of its industrial nature and a urban free way system that is unrivalled in the UK and most of Europe. In fact, when you measure road traffic, bus transit & LRT usage, Commuter Rail, Inter City Rail and Air Traffic passenger counts its the busiest place in the UK, outside of London. It is most definitely not a good comparison in that way to Hamilton. It is however, well on its way to shedding its industrial only, past and is coming around to be a people friendly place.

When it comes to the actual people, it has always been very people friendly about 20% of the population is Moslem and contrary to certain reports, they are as warm and friendly to non Moslems, as the rest of the population. One of the most interesting things that they did when I was there was the planting of trees, anywhere! Their industrial past had destroyed quite a bit of the local tree stock so when the industrial sector was in decline they started planting trees. They made a competition out of it and from recent pictures I see its finally taken root, so to speak. At the time in the early 90's the plan was to try and plant 10,000,000 trees. Now, this was not going to succeed at that level but even if they only planted 500,000 and had 50% of the trees die since then, it would still be the biggest urban reforestation effort I have ever seen in North America or Europe! That to me was a great idea and boy, is it people friendly as well as cheap, compared to other pedestrian efforts.