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Why did the UK stop trams?

An extensive tram network covered large parts of London for several decades during the first half of the twentieth century. By the 1950s, however, trams were seen as old fashioned and were gradually phased out to create more room for buses and cars.



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However, the demise of the streetcar came when lines were torn out of the major cities by bus manufacturing or oil marketing companies for the specific purpose of replacing rail service with buses. In many cases, postwar buses were cited as providing a smoother ride and a faster journey than the older, pre-war trams.

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But the trams had become a political football (in Leeds it was Labour that did for them, in Liverpool it was the Conservatives). They were unwanted clutter from the past at a time when operating costs of public transport networks were rising and meeting housing targets was the big priority for investment.

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However, the demise of the streetcar came when lines were torn out of the major cities by bus manufacturing or oil marketing companies for the specific purpose of replacing rail service with buses. In many cases, postwar buses were cited as providing a smoother ride and a faster journey than the older, pre-war trams.

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NYC started with street level trams and elevated trains. they worked for awhile, but added to the congestion and blocked light. As a result, they were largely removed and only remain in a few places - including the 1/9 which I can see from my living room!

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Operating systems
  • Blackpool.
  • Edinburgh.
  • South London.
  • Manchester.
  • Nottingham.
  • Sheffield.
  • Tyne and Wear.
  • West Midlands.


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York at the beginning of the Twentieth Century was still very much a pedestrian city. Horse-drawn trams and cabs had helped the upper classes to move around the city but it was not until the electrification of the trams, beginning in 1909, that the wider population felt the benefit.

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The advent of buses and large-scale competition meant that buses often ran the same routes as the trams and would jump in front to grab customers, and buses were able to move into Dublin's expanding hinterland more quickly and at less cost than the trams, and the belief that trams were outdated and old technology, ...

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Often they are known locally by the regional transportation authority's name for the system: such as MAX in Portland, Oregon. A lot of cities in America, Western Europe and Japan have closed down their tram systems mid-century.

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The Roosevelt Island Tramway provides the most modern aerial tramway in the world, running every 7-15 minutes from 59th Street and Second Avenue in Manhattan to Tramway Plaza on Roosevelt Island.

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Together the two are multiplied together to give the drag area. 0.8 x 12 = 9.6 for a double decker bus, compared with 0.3 x 6 = 1.8 for the tram. This, combined with the rolling resistance, means a trams energy expenditure once up to speed is a fraction of that of a double decker bus.

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Trams cannot go around obstacles, they don't mix well with bikes, they take up too much space and “they cost a fortune,” as Washington DC can tell you.

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The Tramlink is a tramway system that operates in South London running from Wimbledon to Beckenham via Croydon. Since the 2000s, Tramlink has become a very popular mode of transport. The network is connected to seven stations and one London Underground station (Wimbledon on the District Line).

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The Roosevelt Island Tram in New York City is perhaps the most iconic tram in North America, as well as one of the oldest.

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The world's first experimental electric tramway was built by Ukrainian inventor Fyodor Pirotsky near St Petersburg, Russian Empire, in 1875. The first commercially successful electric tram line operated in Lichterfelde near Berlin, Germany, in 1881.

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In the first place we find the tram network that serves the Australian city of Melbourne. Consisting of twenty-eight lines, it is the largest network in the world with 245 km of tracks. Inaugurated in 1883, it has 28 lines and 1813 stops.

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Between 1992 and 2004, five other English cities saw new tram networks open: Manchester, Nottingham, Sheffield, Croydon and Birmingham. Bristol narrowly lost out due to delays in drawing up plans, rows about where the route should end, and cost overruns in other cities.

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New York City's buses are slow and unreliable because a crush of cars, delivery trucks, pedestrians and traffic lights impede their path and dedicated bus lanes remain scarce. It is a common trend in heavily populated places.

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Cable cars were invented in 1873 by Andrew Hallidie to climb the hills of San Francisco. Many cities once had cable cars, but today, San Francisco's Powell-Mason, Powell-Hyde, and California Street lines are the only ones left in the world.

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