In Defence of Trams
More than buses that can't turn left.
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A perfectly lovely coffee with a former Treasury staffer almost came to blows the other week, when he dismissed trams as “just buses that can’t turn left”.
“People would definitely take the tram!” he went on, adopting the voice of the sort of silly person who thought we should spend public money on new urban transport infrastructure for, say, Leeds. “I mean, not me. But other people.”
We can all be impressed, I think, that I remained civil.
My former civil servant friend is far from the only one to make this argument – he was, as he admitted, merely parroting Treasury orthodoxy, which explains rather a lot (especially to, say, Leeds). A few years back, the Economist, too, dismissed trams – streetcars, in the American vernacular – as a “waste of money”, and noted that: “Critics grumble that streetcars gobble up scarce transit funds for a slow, silly service used mainly by tourists.”
I instinctively do not buy this. Comparing Manchester to Leeds, or the average European city to the average American one, it feels pretty obvious to me that trams are better than buses; and I think people do respond to them differently. (This is not quite the same thing as saying “they are therefore worth the money”, but is a necessary starting point.) It’s worth stress testing one’s views once in a while, though, so here, best one can tell, are the arguments for and against trams.
The case for the prosecution: trams suck
Trams are disruptive. New bus routes don’t require digging up roads for months or years.
Trams are expensive. An oft-cited cost comparison, from the American Public Transportation Association, puts the per mile cost of a streetcar at between $30m and $75m; that of a rapid bus service just $3m to $30m.2
Those figures are both American and a decade old and are also, in a British context where it’s closer to £87m ($113m!), significantly understating things. It’s also just the upfront cost: you have to pay for maintenance, too.
Trams are hard to change. You screw up the planning of a bus route, you can redirect the bus to where it should have gone. If you screw up the planning of a tram route, well, the good news is you can still redirect a bus to where it should have gone, it’s just that you’ve already spent those millions digging up the road. Bum.
Trams can’t go around obstacles. Nice tramline you’ve got there. Be a shame if someone were to… block it.
Bikes can get stuck in tram rails. This one isn’t that big a deal but I had it on the list and my OCD won’t let me skip it.
Trams take up space. The way to get around the last couple of problems is to segregate them. But space is at a premium in cities, and if you’re using it for trams you’re not using it for any other form of traffic. So: trams take up road space.
(That seems to explain many of the criticisms in the Economist piece I linked to above: in many of the US cities to reintroduce trams, they’ve not been segregated and consequently inch forward with the rest of the traffic. No wonder only tourists use them.)
At any rate – if you see trams through that lens it’s not clear why you wouldn’t just invest in much cheaper buses instead. Except...
The case for the defence: trams are brilliant!
Trams are cleaner. No noxious gases pumped out of the exhaust, no particles thrown up by the tyres.
Trams are more comfortable. Tracks mean smoother acceleration and braking, and less jerking.
Trams are more visible. Not just in the vehicles themselves, but in their stops, and in the way the more limited nature of a tram network lends itself to mapping better than a much more complicated bus network. And legibility is important in getting people to switch to public transport.
Trams are easier to segregate. Bus lanes get chipped away at; bus rapid transit, a form of transport involving buses that work like trams, is prone to “bus rapid transit creep”, in which local pressures and cost cutting leads to removing the segregated sections and other benefits, until what is left is basically a bus. Which you just spent a lot of money on for no reason.
Trams, though, generally need at least some segregation, which means it’s harder to lose all those advantages. And if you do segregate them…
Trams are faster and more predictable than buses. Because they don’t interact with traffic. They’re more like trains, but which can have sections on streets.
Trams are hard to change! That is not always a bad thing – partly because it defends transport against cuts (a bus route is all too easy to curtail or remove), but also because it affects how everyone else responds to them. As Martin Wedderburn, a transport analyst at the Centre for London think tank, once told Wired: “Think of trams as an urban development project rather than a transport scheme: the physical permanence of the rails has a much bigger impact on developers and investors, especially in the UK where bus routes can be changed or withdrawn at such short notice.”
All of which means:
Trams are more prestigious. Think of the times – I’m sure you’ve had them – you’ve been in a city and felt your heart lift to see a tram. It seems unlikely, assuming you aren’t an American sitcom character on your first trip to London, that you’ve ever had a similar response to a bus.
There is a reason they’re a hit with tourists.
None of which is to say trams are definitely always worth the money. Projects can cost more than expected; passenger projections can be too high (Sheffield) as well as too low (Edinburgh). And you do need to segregate routes as much as possible to get the full benefit. To quote the Economist again: “European tramlines tend to be fairly long and isolated from other traffic, which ensures a swifter journey. But in America streetcars travel shorter distances along rails that mix with other traffic, so streetcars invariably inch along.”
But buses have other problems, too. They’re much harder to segregate from traffic. Their very flexibility is a drawback as much as benefit. And they simply lack prestige.
And the reason trams work as urban development schemes is because people or businesses will pick a property to be near a tram. Whoever did that because of a bus route? It’s probably not fair to suggest the sort of theoretical passenger my Treasury friend cited doesn’t exist at all – but enough people would switch to the tram for the investment to be often worth making.
Put it this way: London has one of the best, most extensive and most iconic bus networks in the world. But can you imagine Canary Wharf and the rest of the last 40 years of redevelopment of Docklands happening if it had relied on that, and not the DLR?
Trams may not work in theory. But they nonetheless work in practice.
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