[rsynnott]

Also, it likely worked better before cars became popular. In Dublin, at peak, in 1928, we had 23 tram lines. By 1949 they were all gone. Today we have two to four, depending on how you count them (some branching is involved), but they were only built 20 years ago.

What happened to the old ones? They were largely replaced with buses. Some of Dublin’s bus lines _still_ follow the path of tramlines from a century ago. And the thing is, _at the time_, this kind of worked. Not many people had cars in 1928. There was no significant traffic, and the buses operated about as fast as the trams, and were cheaper to maintain (and the trams from a century ago weren’t the 400 person capacity monsters you get now; they were similar capacity to buses). A few decades later, when traffic picked up and suddenly the buses weren’t so fine, the tram infra was all gone, and it was far too late to go back.