Can someone please explain the practical appeal of trams?
They require roads to be dug up to retrofit rails.
Overhead wiring is costly, fragile, and dangerous if damaged.
Fixed routes so they can't easily divert or overtake.
Aren't electric buses just more convenient & practical?
@Edent So I live near a bus and tram system that run more or less parallel to each other and the advantages of trams are:
1. Speed (especially acceleration).
2. Reliability (they rarely break down compared to buses).
3. Capacity (200 vs 80).
4. Don't share infrastructure so no getting stuck in traffic etc.
5. Because they can't overtake etc. it means you can run them with very little headway (i.e. close together).
For heavily-used urban routes, trams win over buses IMO.
@Edent The big downside is that when the trams fail, they fail badly and it's hard to recover. So I would say 95% of the time they're better than buses in this scenario, whereas 5% of the time they fail and recovery is painful. But the buses fail a lot more often - rarely is a tram late whereas the bus timetable might as well not exist.
@falken @tpuddle @Edent It's a bit more complicated than that due to devolution - GM fares will stay at £2 for example. The medium term plan seems to be to give more places GM/London powers to regulate bus routes and fares.