Of course, many cities do have tram lines - Manchester's network is substantial, reuses abandoned railway lines in part, and has received a lot of investment in recent years including a project right now to put a second line across the city centre.
Many are surprised to hear London has a tram line (South of the river, near Wimbledon), or that other towns have light rail schemes put back in within the last 20-40 years.
Guided bus routes have also started to emerge: smooth, segregated routes that run every few minutes using relatively cheap, replaceable and potentially entirely green vehicles with less up-front planning, consultation and construction than a light or heavy rail solution.
It's interesting to me that we seem to be going into an age where people value public transport more and more, but I suspect that's because VED and other costs associated with running a car in the UK have risen so sharply in recent years.
Only about 11 currently operating, apparently [1].
As for London, Wimbledon is one of four termini. The vast majority of the system is in Croydon, including loops through the town centre. There's regularly proposals for new extensions, but at the moment it looks like all of them are on ice down to lack of funding.
In Scotland at least the abysmal project management of the (new) Edinburgh trams has likely killed any chance of more new tram lines in Scotland (I don't think any party has new tram lines in their manifesto for next month's elections).
For those who don't know, it was budgeted at £375 million, and eventually opened in a cut-back scheme (with about half the route cancelled) at £776 million.
It was something of an administrative nightmare in that it was paid for by Holyrood and project managed by the local council. There's an inquiry into the causes of the failure which has also run over budget, absurdly. But I don't think it's entirely dead, there are still noises about extending it into Leith sometime in the next decade.
Meanwhile the Borders railway appears to have opened successfully - and is immediately full at commuting times. I hope they left enough space to double track it.
> Meanwhile the Borders railway appears to have opened successfully - and is immediately full at commuting times. I hope they left enough space to double track it.
Not for all of it was — there's certainly provision in places, but there's also parts where doubling would be incredibly expensive (the viaducts especially, where the maximum dimensions of the trains it has been built for are larger than it was originally built for, are inherently single-track now).
There's passive provision (ie: at not a lot of extra cost - perhaps no real new infrastructure, not entirely sure) to run a 4tph service to Gorebridge + continue half of them to the rest of the line.
I think a 4tph / 2tph service pattern is fine and future capacity could be gained by platform extensions + longer trains.
I'd rather they 'value engineer' it to that level now than build a double track railway at significantly extra cost, and spend the ~£100m (educated guess) on other railway improvement projects for other areas (eg, the quad tracking of the ECML near Musselburgh to allow them a 2tph service - will cost around £100m for the various improvements).
Several of the completely new bridges were built with single track capacity as well. I suspect the government thought they were being a bit clever forcing Network Rail to shave a few million off the cost this way, but actually just not laying the second set of rails doesn't really save much so actually the savings came in places where they will cause a lot of pain later
To be fair it was budgeted at £450m when it was approved and the work started. Current expectations are that because all the preparatory work was done, and the trams and track were already bought, the route can be completed to Leith for about £100m (in 2007 prices), so overall it's coming in at somewhat less than double the expected price. The reasons were a combination of poor project/contractor management and significant unexpected difficulties with utilities.
It doesn't really seem in this case that the budget overrun is the most controversial bit. The sting in the tail is that it resulted in the duplication of existing bus routes with an infrequent service and a comparable travel time. As an MVP it is terrible - what would the Show HN comments be like? "did you even identify your target market?"
The more disappointing part is that it tends to poison the well for ambitious public transport projects in future. That Leith extension will come some time after the Last Trumpet.
But, you know, just as long as RBS got their lovely public funded tram linking Gogar Deathstar to town then it was all worth it.
Every time I've been on it it's been busy and reasonably fast, an impression which is well backed up by the usage stats. Definitely speeds up a lot of journeys from Edinburgh park. My impression is that most of the criticism comes from people heading to the airport where the bus is still by far the best option, although even then trams successfully drag people onto public transport who have strong prejudices about buses.
It is pathetic slow. This trams should travel 70-100km/h not 40km/h. It is also almost empty between 10-16 when people are at work in banks (Gogarburn, Gyle). Ticket system is also ridiculous, you need to validate you card twice.
Many are surprised to hear London has a tram line (South of the river, near Wimbledon), or that other towns have light rail schemes put back in within the last 20-40 years.
Guided bus routes have also started to emerge: smooth, segregated routes that run every few minutes using relatively cheap, replaceable and potentially entirely green vehicles with less up-front planning, consultation and construction than a light or heavy rail solution.
It's interesting to me that we seem to be going into an age where people value public transport more and more, but I suspect that's because VED and other costs associated with running a car in the UK have risen so sharply in recent years.