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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

Interestingly London had one of the most extensive tram systems in Europe, but sadly it was mostly abolished in favour of the Car because:

1) cars = freedom

2) trams are for the poor

A good little mini-doc by Jay Foreman spells it out nicely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ji3C_PjJonM

Interestingly, a very similar story in the UK surrounding bicycles. :\

I wouldn't call Zurichs streets perfect though; by sheer coincidence I spent the majority of today exploring the city for the first time in my life and was very confused on how to cross the road at a lot of very ill-thought-out junctions. And there are still a lot of very loud cars on the road.

However; I will admit there is a "feeling" when walking through the city that it was well thought out in general, I felt like I had a lot of space and I didn't get the same claustrophobic feeling I get in NYC or the cramped "intruded" feeling I get in London.

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Well, part of that non- cramped feeling comes from the fact that it's a city that's almost an order of magnitude smaller than London or NYC. I'm a little bit torn because honestly, Zurich was one of my least favorite places in Europe: subjectively very sterile and boring.

Fortunately I've been to Zurich, London and Melbourne. Melbourne's inner city streets have good practical examples of all modes (tram, subway/heavy rail/car/pedestrian... limited separated bike priority examples though) as a practical study available in terms of street design and with a larger population, albeit still not as large as NYC or London.

An example of tram priority is available on street views of Collins st and Nicholson st Melbourne with a higher population. But we're still in a country/city with car culture as well.

Local experience here suggests that you still get this weird psychological effect: the number of people who have proclaimed to me the "wasted space" of the street down Collins is staggering, even though i would argue by objective accounts Melbourne CBD compared to Sydney CBD is a visible success story of pedestrian priority, vitality, and design. And when you sit down and actually do the numbers (as in physically count) these 'wasted streets' are moving more people than cars or buses on equivalent roads.

You also get this weird effect of out of towners or suburbanites proclaiming the superiority of buses: which I can't disagree more strongly with, and again point out that the areas with trams are bustling with life, value, density and services (it seems pretty objective to me to say the main problems/ limits is the traffic, not the trams) relative to the areas that many of these critiques come from, and yet there's a ststrange urge for outsiders to "fix" them with suggestions of cars/buses and how there's "wasted space" in the densest and most commercially and culturally successful parts of the city (with little introspective insight that the two might be fundamentally connected in some way).

Plus there's another side benefit: emergency vehicles can actually get where they need to go at all times of the day: rush hour, dead of night, doesn't matter, fire engines and ambulances can drive down these swerving around the trams. Good luck doing that on a non dedicated tram line during peak hour...

It's near tautological that tram is better for people who live and work and sleep at tram stops, and worse for people who don't.

Two things there:

I'm not sure that it is tautological.

There's a definite "psychology" of lobbying for more car resources and the psychological fury of being "caught behind a tram" or seeing the "wasted space" or a "tram going by ahead of you", but trap the same person in a car at a standstill in traffic with less throughput and the fury disappears and a kind of quiet resentment yet passive acceptance replaces it. Put a motorist behind a tram and it becomes the object of their hatred. Put them in gridlock and the car in front becomes "just a drop in the overall frustrating flow, with the proportional amount of blame".

Secondly, back to the "wasted space observation" phenomenon. There's this paradox of space wastage observations in the higher density/high utilisation part of town made by people from low density/low utilisation parts of town.

Higher density areas provide and support services that are intrinsically unattainable in low density areas, so it's not immediately apparent that someone outside the high density area is worse off, because they now have a greater diversity of opportunity/facilities accessible even if they live outside the high density area. You can visit and access those services even if you don't live there. Personally, i'd rather live in a Melbourne suburb without a tram than a Sydney one, because the Sydney CBD is comparatively dead/pedestrian hostile.

The obvious example is the central business district or downtown. While it's a popular polemical tactic to pit the car drivers against the dense pedestrian core, it's a very "brave" position to argue that denser well-connected areas provide no benefit to those who live outside them.

The counter example is the wasted space, neighborhood destruction and bizarrely barren wastelands of some American cities: strip malls, multi lane highways, car parks, etc, and the realisation that they can neither sustain thriving local communities or neighborhoods, but culturally can only be populated with mega-stores and generic chains/stores accessible by mass cars and mass culture.

If a tram station in front of someone else's house prevents a hundred cars from needing to drive past man, I'd consider that a net win for everyone.

Where is a subway in Melbourne?

Same thing in Munich. It feels pleasant to just walk around in a way that I haven't found in the US. Some US cities are reasonably walkable (e.g. SF, NYC, Boston), but they don't really feel nice to walk around like Munich. Munich manages to be fairly dense -- at least by American standards -- without feeling crowded.

They were also very effectively replaced with expanded rapid transit, regional rail, and buses, all of which carry many more passenger than trams ever did.

London still has one of the most extensive underground railway systems in the world, as well as the most iconic buses.

Notwithstanding the nostalgia that we often associate with them, trams are not a magical method of transportation. Nothing of value is lost if you can get the same job done with trains underground and buses above. Underground railways have the additional benefit of not taking up precious urban space that could be used by e.g. bicycles. It just happens that digging tunnels is much more expensive than embedding a pair of rails in the pavement, so cities have to think harder about short-term costs vs. long-term benefits.

I would very much love to agree with you. But London’s public transportation system, while very good considering its age and the extensiveness of deployment is not perfect; it is not a stretch to call it overburdened.

I lived there for 5 years and absolutely dreaded commuting.

A quick win would be to prevent the morning and evening rush. But that’s another discussion entirely.

If you have ideas on how to prevent that daily nightmare there are 10 million pairs of ears ready to listen :-)

I've done the London commute for 6 years now.

My solution : work out flexible hours with my employer. If I have the stand-up at 11 I can jump in the underground at 9:30, after the worst of the rush is done. Likewise in the evening, work until the worst of the rush is done.

My SO solution: live in the city, work on the outskirts. The commute is effectively against the traffic. Can get a seat and plenty of space at 8:30, top of the rush hour.

There are some solutions but I'm not sure that they scale, though.

Trams are actually a strange beast that's not as cheap and flexible as a bus, and not as efficient as the underground but still quite expensive to build and maintain, which is the main reason many cities abandoned them. A big advantage is that they are electric but once electric buses really take off they'll be a much better compromise for public transport overall. Much of the surface traffic would have to be reduced anyway.

The main advantage of trams over a bus is that in general, the layout is more conducive for rapid boarding and alighting, and the trams can physically be longer and have more room for people.

The main advantage of trams over an underground is that they can be much cheaper to build. Crossrail 2 in London is expected to cost 32 billion GBP; you could build quite a lot of tram for that kind of money.

Only the fact that trams can be larger is inherent in trams. The rest could easily be applied to a bus if someone had the vision to do so.

The on-boarding/off-boarding efficiency of trams would be very hard to replicate in a bus design.

Low floor and equivalent disabled access would be hard too.

The efficiency of metal on metal movement is harder to match with buses.

Big heavy vehicles on bitumen and rubber particulate have environmental costs and maintenance costs (I haven't looked at this one, but people frequently ignore that tyres themselves being used create air particulate pollution).

You can have the equivalent shared pedestrian zone with a tram: search Bourke st mall Melbourne or watch how pedestrians jaywalk with abandonment down Brunswick st Fitzroy that you can't get with heavy rail because of the start/stopping times, and that you don't get with buses because pedestrians don't have the psychological certainty of their travel direction and momentum.

And lastly there is a real psychological town planning point with fixed rail that sees density and value build up around better around permanent paths and installments. It's well and good to dismiss that as someone could do it differently if they wanted to, but its arguing using "shoulds and coulds" against empirical reality.

Aren't most modern city buses with low floors and wheelchair ramps?

Like the other pros and cons, it's a matter of degree and trade off.

We have buses as well (I still use them locally for trips too). I don't have a wheel chair, but I do have a stroller and no car, so I'm using then both heavily. In my old city I often put my bike on the front of the buses and relied on the express bus with commuter dedicated lanes that came every 5 minutes for a commute which worked very well in a town of 400,000 of mostly car drivers. But does it scale?

You can get several prams practically straight onto and off of a flat bottom tram without almost any stopping or logistical penalty.

On buses, not only is it comparatively awkward to get on and off, you have to nod, thank, praise every other passenger for getting out of the way, and you spend most of your time praying you'll be the only one using that particular aspect of the bus, because otherwise it becomes a lot more complicated.

Could you run three times as many buses to accommodate? Sure, but then you end up running into increasing start-stop-merging problems and the bus bunching problem presents itself earlier along the supply curve than with the tram.

Getting the bike on a (small) bus is not the best experience. But that's what trains or subways are for. They take hundreds of people longer distances to the general destination area. Perfect use case if you cycle.

> a flat bottom tram

Only modern trams have this, just like any modern bus. But consider this, a single bus costs several hundreds of thousands of E/$ (double if it's electric). A single tram costs several millions. That's before laying track.

At least in the US, buses tend to only be partially low floor, with a higher section where the engine and fuel tank are in the back.

Bus tires also are generally larger diameter and wider than the wheels of a tram, so the wheel well physically juts out into the low floor section and reduces available space.

And (this may be fixable) the doors on a bus tend to be narrower, almost but not quite wide enough for two people to walk off simultaneously, and are more poorly laid out to minimize distance for passengers to the door.

They are and it takes all of two minutes for the buss driver do deploy the ramp and secure the wheelchair to the cabin

Two minutes is a long time in an individual person's commute, especially if it is done multiple times on the route.

Two minutes is often the difference between making a timed connection to another route and missing it.

> but its arguing using "shoulds and coulds" against empirical reality

Not every city sees it this way. Maintaining the existing infrastructure is very expensive (and even disruptive), not to mention building more. Many cities use it as a backbone to connect several main nodes which makes sense. But they are not very suited to having short stops, can't take you everywhere, and it's hard to re-plan. So in the end they still have to maintain some pretty massive bus fleets that can use already existing road infrastructure.

Vehicle features like accessibility depend on the model of bus or tram, modern ones all have them. And many cities find it a bad idea to mix any kind of traffic with pedestrian zones. The explanation of "travel direction and momentum" doesn't really make sense to me. Buses have a very obvious "front" while trams are usually perfectly symmetrical. And trams are far more dangerous in any accident (weight, stopping distance, metal wheels). If you ever saw a tram breaking down, an accident on the track, or works on the road you know how much more disruptive this can be compared to regular traffic (with trolleybuses coming in a close second). I lived in places where this happened every few days in the morning rush hour.

For cities with deep pockets and which can interleave tram and subway lines to have as much coverage as possible it may be easier. But most cities don't really have deep pockets. Which is why the are many bus-only cities, probably none or very few tram-only cities (none that I've heard of anyway).

If the goal is to replace personal cars a city has to offer something "close" in comfort. Electric buses are a good clean alternative and they're as close to personal car comfort as public transport will ever be.

It's not always _just_ about objective features. I really like trams and trains in general, because they feel "solid" – like an immovable part of the city infrastructure. There are mental benefits to this, I feel. Buses jostle around, abrupty change speeds, etc. Trams... just glide. You are on a movable walkway, seeing the cityscape unfold on both sides as you commute to work.

Trams do not glide. The trams in portland sound like nails on the chalkboard when they round a turn. They also vibrate and thud and have to deal with traffic all the same if they aren't grade separated.

You should see what busses are like now. They are twice as long with an accordion in the middle to round right angle turns. If you need more length you just run more of these busses on the lines. Some of the buss lines I take also accept paying fare at all three doors with the tap card (although fare dodgers are at least 50% of the riders on my bus).

Smartphones have probably changed that a bit. What you say absolutely used to be a factor in my not taking buses. I still don't take them much but it is easier to figure out the routing and where you are these days.

Those buses in the US tend only to be 60 feet long.

To put this in perspective, the longest single tram unit is 183 feet long in Budapest: https://welovebudapest.com/en/2016/04/14/budapest-now-has-th...

And because trams are basically just street legal trains, they can be coupled together like a tram. Seattle eventually plans to couple 4 96 ft units together, for a total length of 384 ft. You couldn't run a bus that long safely in mixed traffic; trams are able to do this because the vehicle is fixed to the tracks.

My untested theory re: trams over buses is that trams are predictably less random.

You’re a tourist. You board a bus. Where does the bus go? A: literally anywhere.

You’re a tourist. You board a tram. Where does the tram go? A: where those tracks, that I can see, go.

This is obviously less relevant for non-tourists but I wonder if it’s a factor nevertheless. It’s hard to go disastrously wrong on a tram, whereas on a bus you might find yourself inadvertently half way down the freeway.

In the US the only thing that stopped municipal trams was bribes from auto manufacturers

In LA they were run by a private company that was mandated by the city to keep fares the same as in like 1910 despite costs being far higher in the 1950s. Service was cut and cut and ridership therefore fell and fell until the company folded and the city ripped out nearly all the rails.

By contrast, nearly the exact same thing happened in NYC. All the trains there were private, went bankrupt, but the city bought and expanded the system instead of tearing it out.

Of course it's far from perfect. It's an ancient, organically grown city that contains roughly the same number of people as the entire country of Switzerland.

Instead of romancitizing about European cities that are 1/20 of their size, I wish Londoners and New Yorkers would look to China and Japan for better examples. Those guys know how to build and maintain 21st century infrastructure for millions.

Transport For London itself doesn't look to small cities. They even offer consulting to large cities (Hong Kong, Sydney, Boston) to share their experience.

https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/business-and-commercial/commerci...

> Those guys know how to build and maintain 21st century infrastructure for millions.

Maybe Japan? Haven't visited. But China has lots of terrible city planning and they are way too into cars. I lived in Beijing for 2 years and Beijing traffic is just the worse.

Beijing is also not a very good city to be a pedestrian in, as every major street typically has 12-16 lanes and waiting at intersections takes forever. It feels like walking along a motorway. Finding shortcuts throughs the alleyways of a city block is also really hard as many of them are gated. Same goes for any major Chinese city really, except for the ones with surviving colonial city centres like Shanghai. The metro is pretty good, but definitely not pleasant to use during rush hour, and changing lines usually entails a lot of walking around underground tunnels.

Besides cost there is also time. Many of London's lines are very deep, and so it takes significant time just to get down there & back up again.

Being on the surface adds a lot of value for short trips in a tram (or similar). To reach the subway takes 2-4 minutes of travel down to platform level and back up. To cross the car lane to the tram station in Zurich takes 10-30s if you see the tram coming or read the digital signage, and a few minutes later you can be at your intended destination. Zurich has of course large parking garages, and if you bring your car in to the city you would leave it there and be able to hop around on the trams & buses, taking only a few minutes between your different shopping and eating destinations. I also think as a wealthy car driver you can differentiate yourself from the poor public-transport-dependents by choosing to stand on the tram, showing off your high-end branded shopping bags.

Trams have the advantage of not being blocked by traffic. You can achieve the same with dedicated bus lanes, but motorists don't always respect those and they take more space.

Not all trams have dedicated tracks. Usually some main lines, otherwise they share the road with cars.

The worst part is that they share intersections with regular roads, exactly where most accidents tend to happen. And the accidents can be a bit more disruptive because a tram can easily block even bigger intersections.

">Nothing of value is lost if you can get the same job done with trains underground and buses above."

I would argue that seeing day light is a thing of value. Also the ability to look out a window and see life is also much more interesting than staring out into dark lifeless subway tunnels. Berlin and Amssterdam both have trams and neither seems to have impinged on space for bicycles.

Why not trains underground and trams on the surface in the pedestrian environment like Melbourne CBD :p

(See my other post in this thread for real benefits and design choices trams make over buses and rail)

I think a cyclist would feel more safe and less gassed alongside a tram, than a bus (the majority of buses not being electric).

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Los_Ange...

The immense streetcar network in the Los Angeles area.

Ripped out to run busses on freeways. Look at how that turned out. They were about to build an extensive subway network and grade separate many of the streetcars, but urban planners back then didn't think it would be possible for freeways to experience traffic.

Now, 60 years later, we are paying out the ass and taking decades on transit builds and all there is to show for the last 25 years of LA Metro is three light rail lines (none are grade separated, are crowded and delayed during peak hours, and they take 40 minutes to go from their termini to downtown), one heavy rail line that doesn't have enough stops or short enough headways, and a stub with, once again, not enough stops or short enough headways that they've been working on extending for three years and won't finish for another 4. There is also a BRT, which was supposed to be rail and funded to be rail, but LA Metro backed down to the 50 NIMBYs in the room screeching during the public presentations instead of plugging their ears and building better transit for the hundreds of thousands living along the orange line.

This city has 18 million living in the metro area and the transit system is an embarrassment. Every other major artery should have rail running underneath it by now. The whole LA basin should have a fisherman's net of trains criss crossing it by now.

The only saving grace is if the federal government one day steps in and plows through these transit projects with the army corps of engineers. LA Metro is in over its head and can't be trusted to pick a contractor that isn't going to overstate, embezzle, underdeliver, then get picked for the next contract because they've made friends with the board and did just sooo well on that last project that was overbudget and behind schedule.

Headways - I believe many Pacific Electric routes had a car every 5 minutes. Not once every 1/2 hour like a lot of light rail.

As somebody besides me put it, if you have to check the schedule it's not a real transit system.

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