Building new tram systems is a waste of money and bad transport planning

Despite trams being de facto value-destroying, advocates roll out the language of capacity and modal shift to justify for spending billions on what are little more than municipal virility symbols

Building tramways in Britain is expensive. 

Building a mile of tramway in Britain costs more than double what it does in the rest of Europe (on average). The UK’s high costs have meant that fewer British cities have mass transit than any other wealthy Western country. Otherwise promising tram schemes are frequently canned as a result. Leeds, Bristol, Hampshire, and Liverpool have all seen tram projects cancelled on cost grounds. Many cities don’t even consider tramways because they know how expensive British projects can be.

While there are regulatory and planning costs the main reason is that Britain’s utilities (all those pipes filled with gas and water, the wires filled with electricity, data and conversation) are buried under the roads. Ben Hopkinson from Britain Remade sets out how this might be changed making it a little easier, quicker and cheaper to build tramways.

I have a different answer, or rather a question. If building tramways is so troubled and difficult, why do we persist with the idea that having trams on our city streets is such a good idea? Here in the highlands on the edge of the West Yorkshire conurbation, we have been told how excited our mayor is at the prospect of trams being built connecting places we don’t go to with other places we don’t go to. You can visit the Mayor’s consultation on the proposed tram routes. One that goes from Bradford city centre to Leeds city centre and the second going from St James Hospital to the White Rose Centre in South Leeds. I’m sure that lots of people will point out that there’s no tramway proposed connecting the airport to the cities.

There are already two rail connections from Bradford to Leeds, one via Shipley and the other via Pudsey. And the short trip to White Rose has a regular bus service, some on a guided system. It isn’t clear how adding a third route adds to the scope or quality of the region's mass transit options. In truth, we are building a tram for one reason: people who are into trams keep crying into their decaf oat milk lattes that Leeds doesn’t have one. Demanding money for a tram (because of England’s crazy system of local government finance) is important, not because building one resolves any of Leeds’ transport challenges, but because big cities have trams.

Trams, like other fixed rail systems, are old technology. Leeds and Bradford built trams, discovered they were expensive to run and loss-making so shut them down in favour of buses (and the private car). Since then repeated waves of nostalgia have washed over our cities resulting in a fixed enthusiasm for trams as the only possible solution for West Yorkshire’s transport challenges. The truth is that, pretty much everywhere, building a tram network is an act of corporate indulgence, a sort of municipal ‘keeping up with the Joneses’.

Tram systems are expensive and underused. Across the UK just 8% of journeys were made on public transport and tram systems amounted to just 3% of those public transport trips. Even when we look at a city, Manchester, with a substantial tram network, the share of journeys for this expensive system amounts to less than 5%.

Yet, as we see from the otherwise excellent Foundations review of UK under-investment, we remain obsessed with trams:

“Due to their efficiency on heavily travelled routes, many countries are now renewing and reopening tram lines. The outstanding case is France, which has built 21 tramways in recent decades.”

The statistics (and the loss-making) tell us that building trams doesn’t resolve transport challenges and that, because tram systems lose money, they are essentially value-destroying unless they are able, as in Hong Kong, to capture uplifts in land values and/or rents. And if, as with most UK systems, the tram is integrated with existing roads the result can be disruptive for other public transport systems such as taxis and buses without providing any obvious shift in use. In Manchester the users of trams are overwhelmingly leisure users and people whose fares are subsidised by national or local government.

So if trams are a poor investment (yes they are), what should we be doing to develop future urban transport networks? Instead of investing money, see also football stadiums and concert halls, simply to look good, perhaps we should focus on the systems - taxis, buses - that are well used and make them better? Maybe we need to look at reducing the need to travel and at extending successful long-term initiatives such as getting people to ride bicycles? We could, for example, experiment with driverless systems and consider how we move from a 2D model to a 3D model? There will be circumstances where a fixed rail system makes sense like taking people from the world’s busiest airport to the centre of one of the world’s richest cities but in most cases people’s travel behaviour demands the flexibility that, right now, only taxis provide.

And taxis present the opportunity to use a largely empty space in our cities, the sky:

The first flying taxi could take off in the UK by 2026 and become a regular sight in our skies two years later, if a government announcement goes to plan.

Wouldn’t it be more exciting and probably more useful if Leeds decided that short haul air travel, flying taxis and drone delivery was a better way to invest £2.5 billion? Add to this some trials of driverless buses and taxis alongside the extension of app-based travel demand systems like Uber. Not only would this represent a genuinely radical transport strategy but it could be delivered far more quickly than the 15-20 years anticipated for the limited tram network. Leeds and West Yorkshire have the opportunity, but won’t take it, to step over historic obsessions with fixed rail transit systems, and focus on emerging transport and communication technologies as the basis for a transport plan.

We will of course continue to produce plans with tram or metro systems at their heart because that’s what cities do. Despite the evidence that these systems are de facto value-destroying, their advocates will roll out the language of capacity and modal shift as a justification for spending billions of public funds on what are, in the end, little more than municipal virility symbols.