LONDON鈥橲 last tram trundled along the streets of the metropolis in July 1952. Following the government鈥檚 decision last month to approve the 拢154 million Croydon Tramlink, London鈥檚 next tram should start running in 1997.
In 1927, Britain had nearly 14 500 trams in dozens of towns and cities. By 1990 there were fewer than 100 trams left, all of them in Blackpool. But the tide has now turned. Since 1992, Manchester and Sheffield have opened new systems and between thirty and fifty local councils have been looking at plans to build light rail lines 鈥� to all intents and purposes, tramlines. In the capital alone, 13 councils have been talking trams to London Transport (see Diagram).
How is it that a form of transport that was rejected as unpopular and antiquated fifty years ago is now seen as the transport of the future?
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Back in 1931, the Royal Commission on Transport roundly condemned trams, describing them as 鈥渁n obsolete form of transport鈥� which caused 鈥渕uch unnecessary congestion鈥�. The disadvantages of the tram were so serious that 鈥渉ad the motor omnibus been invented at the time 鈥� not a single mile of tramway would ever have been laid down鈥�. The commission did not prescribe 鈥渁ny definite period for the extinction of tramways, but 鈥� it will be to the advantage of the inhabitants of the towns where they exist to get rid of them by degrees鈥�.
Sixty-three years later, in 1994, the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution examined Britain鈥檚 transport policy and reached the opposite conclusion: 鈥淟ight rapid transit systems can improve the urban environment by reducing local noise and pollution and by improving safety鈥�. It advised the government to spend more money on building tramways.
Phil Goodwin, director of the transport studies unit at the University of Oxford, says that today public transport is seen as important, and destroying the old tramways as a mistake. 鈥淚f we had known then what we know now, many towns wouldn鈥檛 have ripped them up,鈥� he says. The mistake was compounded by not giving the buses that replaced the trams priority over other traffic.
The swing in attitude towards trams has been more dramatic in Britain than anywhere else. But the same U-turn has taken place in other countries such as France and the US. In Paris, for example, trams disappeared in 1938. They returned to Saint Denis, in northern Paris in 1992. In the US, tramlines were dug up all over the country from the 1920s onwards, but in the last decade a dozen new systems have been built in cities such as Los Angeles, Buffalo and Portland.
Other countries, however, notably Germany and the Low Countries, have always backed trams as an important part of urban transport. Cities such as Amsterdam, Brussels and Cologne adopted a longterm policy of modernising their systems.
The reasons behind the differing attitudes towards trams are complex. But one factor was technology. At the turn of the century, the electric tram had a clear edge over the primitive and unreliable motorbus with its solid rubber wheels and petrol engine. But thirty years on, this advantage was less marked when the tram came up against a diesel-powered bus running on pneumatic tyres.
Lewis Lesley, professor of transport science at John Moores University, Liverpool, says that Britain鈥檚 archaic legislation governing tramways was another factor. Trams were subject to obscure charges and operators even had to pay rates on the land occupied by the rails. Lesley says that in the 1920s these charges were costing Liverpool鈥檚 electric tramways 拢500 000 a year 鈥� equivalent to 拢15 million a year today.
Municipal trams did have one advantage. Many local authorities used to run their own power stations. In the days when electricity was mostly used for lighting, trams helped to balance the load by using power during the day. But the nationalisation of electricity in 1948 put an end to cheap power.
Lesley says that one reason that trams survived in Germany and vanished in Britain can be traced to different reconstruction policies after the Second World War. To boost the economy, the British government set quotas for motor industry exports and supported this drive by paying over the odds for scrap steel. As a result, steel from many trams ended up in replacement buses. By contrast, Germany wanted as many hands as possible to work in industry. It favoured trams because they are bigger than buses, so more people could be carried by fewer tram drivers than bus drivers.
But the biggest factor in the demise of the tram was the advent of the car. By occupying the middle of the road, trams attracted the ire of motorists. The architect and planner Patrick Abercrombie, one of Britain鈥檚 most influential postwar planners, saw no place for trams in his vision of the future. He helped to redesign Hull, Plymouth and Greater London, and his perspective was coloured by the view from behind the steering wheel, says Lesley. 鈥淗e was very much a car driver. You could see that for him planning was to allow him and his friends to drive their cars.鈥�
The wheel has now come full circle. Public transport is no longer seen as holding up cars. Cars now hold up public transport. The 1994 Royal Commission recommended curbing the use of the car (鈥淗ead-on collision over transport鈥�, New 杏吧原创, 12 November 1994). Its carrot and stick approach involves not only deterring people from driving with higher petrol prices but also enticing them from their cars with better public transport.
But high-quality public transport is expensive. The choice between bus, tram and train depends largely on the number of passengers expected to travel a particular route. A train can carry far more passengers at higher speeds than a bus. While few cities have the passenger flows to justify an underground line, says Lesley, there is little doubt that these cities would build one if they could afford it. From this perspective, trams are a good alternative. 鈥淎 tramway is a sort of halfway house where you get 95 per cent of the benefits of a metro at 10 per cent of the cost,鈥� he says.
Laying the tracks to start a new tramline needs far more capital than starting a new bus service. However, if you double the number of people travelling by bus you more or less double the cost of running the service. The same is not true of a tram, where the extra costs of carrying extra passengers is fairly small.
Trams are inevitably slower than trains, partly because they tend to make more frequent stops and partly because mixing with other traffic in the streets causes some delay, even when they are given priority over other vehicles. But this is not necessarily a disadvantage. Running in the streets makes trams more accessible than tube trains. It takes people less time to walk to a stop in the street than to reach a platform on the underground. Lesley says that a study he carried out in Budapest found that only when people travelled more than 10 kilometres was their door-to-door journey quicker by train than by tram.
Part of the 1994 Royal Commission鈥檚 enthusiasm for light rail systems stems from their ability to persuade people to leave their cars at home. A survey of passengers on Manchester鈥檚 new tramline found that about 40 per cent had cars, but had decided instead to travel by tram.
Other studies have shown that motorists are reluctant to take buses, possibly because they think that if they are going to wait in a traffic jam they might as well be in their own cars. But modern trams have an attractive image. Wayne Kearns, London Transport鈥檚 community liaison officer for the Croydon project, says that trams running through the streets of Saint Denis 鈥渁re much smoother than a bus. They seem to glide down the street and lure people out of their cars.鈥� Trams can be faster than buses. One of the features of the Croydon system is that it will link New Addington, the largest centre of population in the London area not served by train, with Croydon town centre and its station. At present, this journey takes up to an hour by bus. Kearns says that the trams will take less than 20 minutes.
Trams also have environmental advantages. They displace pollution away from city centres. And they are also quiet. Lesley says that they are also safer to fit into pedestrian areas, because unlike buses they have a predictable path.
Poles axed
Manchester鈥檚 trams have their critics, notably the Royal Fine Arts Commission, which criticised the forest of poles that support the overhead cables. Kearns says that London Transport, one of the partners in the Croydon venture, has learnt from this. The legislation for Croydon allows the company to fix supporting wires to buildings in order to minimise the number of poles.
A big factor in the tram鈥檚 renaissance is that large-scale road building has become politically unpopular. Kearns says that light rail systems are more acceptable as a way of easing traffic congestion in towns than building major new roads.
All Britain鈥檚 new tramways rely, or will rely, on public and private money. The Department of Transport reorganised its funding of local transport schemes last year to help switch from road building to trams. Under the old system, the budget for trams was enough only to allow one line to be built at a time. On the other hand, there was a far larger budget for road building, so if a council wanted to attract government money into its area it was politically expedient to propose a new road.
The new system, however, requires local authorities to put forward a package of measures, part of which could include light rail lines. This change is intended to make it easier to divert money from building urban roads to other projects, such as tramways. When it approved the Croydon project last month, the government also gave the go-ahead for a tramway in the Midlands 鈥� the first time it has approved two light rail schemes at the same time.
The department鈥檚 funding change is designed to keep it up with the times. In 1870, the Tramways Act forced operators to pay for repairing any damage caused by iron-shod hooves either side of the tracks. Two years ago the department repealed the law. So now, the tram operators in Manchester, Sheffield and, in 1997, Croydon will not have to pay for the road damage caused by their horses.