Mappa Mercia is the home of the OpenStreetMap community in the UK Midlands. Sunday, 22 July 2012 All Change for Birmingham City Centre Buses A mapper's job is never finished! For those of you who might think that the UK and Western Europe are pretty much complete and we don't have much to do - there's ALWAYS something changing somewhere. Today, Sunday 22 July, is the culmination of several months of planning and roadworks to complete a major reconfiguration of Birmingham City Centre's  bus stops which bans buses from the City Centre, grouping bus stops into 5 separate Interchanges on the periphery of the business/retail downtown area. This has been done firstly to improve traffic flow on the bus network and secondly to free up streets for a Metro line extension from Snow Hill railway station to New Street railway station (so more changes for us later) We're proud to say that we have completed mapping and editing 80% of the changes today. ALL the physical changes have been surveyed, mapped and edited: what's holding us back is untangling and re-routing the relations for bus routes. Another example of the combination of dedicated local mappers, OpenStreetMap and the editing tools at our disposal, being unbeatable! The 2 organisations responsible, Network West Midlands and Centro, have published very good information and their staff have been very co-operative. Birmingham was blanketed with their staff today, helping out hapless passengers, who despite a week of blitz publicity, were still very confused. We made