Customer story: Transport for West Midlands, UK

Connecting the West Midlands

Transport for West Midlands, working in conjunction with the West Midlands Combined Authority and Birmingham City Council, needed a consultation platform that would help them realise an ambitious transport project.

They wanted the public’s opinion on ‘Sprint’, a new transport system that will cover the combined authority area in its entirety. The project will connect the whole region, increasing accessibility to tourist attractions, new housing developments and Birmingham Airport. Because the project is so large, they needed a way to consult residents from all of the different councils and boroughs in an efficient and unified way.

They chose Citizen Space

Transport for West Midlands chose Citizen Space for its consultation. They made use of loads of the platform’s integrated features, such as embedding images, fact banks and interactive maps, so that respondents were fully informed before sharing their views. This enabled the consultation team to garner targeted, informed public input regarding specific areas across the whole region, all on the same unified platform.

Question routing, or ‘skip logic’, meant that citizens were only responding to questions relevant to them, and the comprehensive analytical tools in Citizen Space’s back end enabled the team to recognise trends and frequently raised concerns.

Clear, comprehensive feedback

This in turn meant that the feedback offered to citizens after the consultation closed was comprehensive and made clear how the public's suggestions were incorporated into the overall plans. When it came to releasing this feedback, the most frequent concerns were clearly addressed and categorised by the respective transport route so that respondents could easily locate the feedback elements most relevant to them.

The success of the consultation has meant that Sprint is on target for completion by 2022, in time for the Commonwealth Games which will be hosted in Birmingham.