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Comment by andrewl-hn | Hacker News Reader

Besançon in France is one of the cheapest conventional tram schemes in Europe at €17.5m per km and €1.81 per tram (132 passengers). It’s a conventional tram track with overhead catenary wires: as standard as one can get with those things. Presumably in the UK the costs would be somewhat higher: France is a modern tram capital, with a lot of relevant talent and expertise available locally.

I haven’t found the projected figures for Coventry but it would be very, very awkward if they can’t beat the numbers above with a supposedly much cheaper track.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trams_in_Besan%C3%A7on?wprov=s...

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CVLR is projected to cost £10 MM per km, but we all know what projections are worth.

Still, there's no point comparing build costs between France and the UK as they're completely different cultures and jurisdictions. Instead, a more reasonable approach is to compare to recent similar project in the UK.

Edinburgh's tram covers 18.5 km and cost at least (they're still uncovering overruns years later) £1 BN. That's ~£50 MM or ~€60 MM per km. That's what CVLR should and will be benchmarked against.

Very good point. There’s also a potential for future upgrades. They may invest into catenary lines at some point, get rid of batteries and increase capacity inside vehicles. Or, switch to hot-swap batteries and increase vehicle turnaround and frequency. Or, they can switch to traditional concrete reinforcement for rails for future lines if they decide that the rails-on-slabs approach doesn’t work out as well as they hoped for. Their vehicles while custom-built are running on top of standard tram lanes, so they will be able to use traditional tram tracks, too.

VLRT seems gimmicky at first but the more I look at it the more sense it makes.

Manchester's Metrolink should also be used as a benchmark.

The Airport line extension cost £368m with 15 stops over 14.5km of track (which shakes out at roughly £25m/km), and was completed more than a year ahead of schedule and under budget.

That line is really slow, it can be faster to get to the airport by getting the tram to East Didsbury then changing to a train.

Well it depends on where you're trying to go.

As a means to get to the airport from the city centre? Yeah, heavy rail is probably better.

But that's not the only reason for the line. It's used to get to and from other points on the route too.

As a means to get to the airport from almost anywhere, heavy rail can be quicker. TBF, the route planner on the TFGM website will tell you if this is true and tram tickets to the airport are valid on the train.

The Airport Line might be better labelled as the Wythenshawe Line.

> they're completely different cultures and jurisdictions

Separated by huge distance of 20 miles, both have thousands of same EU laws )still on the books, share thousands of years of history and at one point ruled by the same aristocracy.

There are lots of national laws outside EU laws. For example, in France, compulsory purchase of private land by the state (to do things like build new railway lines) has to be 1.5 times its value, the idea being that this only happens when they really want to do it.

Okay, but still completely unhelpful to judge per km costs in one versus the other due to the enormously different political and legislative environment.

If they enormously different, what are you going to call South Korea, Armenia, China? I mean is anything comparable?

The real point I was trying to make is that they achieve similar outcomes, in passenger safety comfort.

And if we really do believe that legislation is so different, then is there any point of arguing about an innovation in the physical parameters of the system, after all you can only make a tram 20% lighter, but you can make the legislation 300% worse or 300% better

True. And yet, they are completely different cultures and jurisdictions.

This is a great look at why UK infrastructure is so expensive: https://www.samdumitriu.com/p/britains-infrastructure-is-too...

TLDR: Because they always try to do innovative things rather than just copy tried-and-tested methods from other countries.

If only there was some sort of mechanism to easily enable talent sharing between the UK and the rest of Europe.

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