If I am wrong about the lunacy of trams, I'll crawl over Waterloo bridge on all fours
MATTHEW PAR RIS
Metropolitan Spectator readers bear with fortitude our witterings about country life, so forgive me, green-wellie brigade, a column about trams. Disturbing news this week demands that I repeat the argument against an idiotic and expensive vogue.
Trams are to public transport what outside lavatories are to domestic sanitation: a great advance in their time, long overtaken by happier arrangements. obsolete.
Unfortunately, we are experiencing a new fashion for trams. Weak-minded transport strategists are bringing them back. I dare say there will be a fashion for outside loos, too, in due course; but the money that it is possible to waste on retro-chic sanitation is small change by comparison with the billions being blown, or projected to be, on new urban tramways. Manchester now has them and is covered in steel poles. Croydon has them. Sheffield has them. And this week it has been announced that the metropolis is to get them: two extensive tram systems are to be built in London. One, in west London, will run from Uxbridge to Shepherd's Bush via Acton, Ealing and Southall; the other will run from Camden and King's Cross through Euston and Waterloo to Peckham and Brixton.
The mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, says that they will cost about half a billion pounds and take about ten years to complete. Certainly the work can be done in that time — ten years of appalling traffic jams in central and west London while all the roads are closed and dug up is as much as anyone can be expected to bear. But about the cost Mr Livingstone is simply wrong: there is no way that the infrastructure and rolling stock can be provided for less than fl billion, and if in ten years' time he can prove me wrong, I'll crawl on all fours across Waterloo bridge, which by then will be infested with hideous overhead poles and cables ruining its present beautiful, clean silhouette.
Let me remind you why trams were abolished in the first place: because they were slow and noisy and expensive to build: did not mix easily with other road vehicles; had poor braking and acceleration, making them dangerous to life and limb; required a truly disgusting tangle of overhead metalwork (the street furniture is an aesthetic disaster); and because they were liable to block not only all following trams, but other traffic, too, whenever a tram broke down.
Let me remind you why buses took over: because a bus is basically a tram on rubber wheels which can be steered. This gives faster acceleration and safer braking, quieter running, the ability to manoeuvre round any unexpected obstruction, including other buses, and the flexibility to change routes or be operated away from any route and anywhere in the world. Buses can therefore be mass-produced in standard models and are much cheaper; and they require no infrastructure of rails, poles or cables because they use the road which is already there. At root a bus is more forgiving: of things in the way, of failures of power supply, and of sub-standard road surfaces.
Beyond sheer nostalgia (and the socialist's anal obsession with anything which runs on rails, cannot stray, and can therefore be tidily packaged in a municipal transport planner's mind), there are five arguments for a new generation of trams.
Though steel wheel on steel rail still makes for noisier running and poorer adhesion, modern trams are faster and quieter and can brake better than their predecessors; but they remain inferior to buses. The atmospheric pollution they cause is at the electric power station rather than where they run. Linked together, they can carry more passengers than a single bus. Being considered a 'cutting-edge' new development in transport, their advocates can browbeat local authorities and the police into giving them a `dedicated way' from which other traffic is barred. And (as a spokesman put it this week) they do not have the 'image problem' which buses have attracted.
If the choice is between buses and trams, only the last two arguments carry much weight. A good, modern bus still accelerates and stops faster than a tram, and can be run as quietly. Buses do pollute, but compared with the pollution which would be caused if those they carry were to drive or take a taxi, a busful of passengers represents a huge reduction in exhaust emissions. The further reduction (or transfer to the environs of the power station) which a tram brings is minor by comparison. If we could get half of Londoner road-travellers out of cars and into buses, we would achieve an improvement to the city's air quality undreamed of by transport planners so far.
It is true that trams, especially multiplecar trams, can carry more per vehicle than London's present generation of buses. But buses can be linked into mini-trains just like trams, and are in many European cities. Here we keep our vehicles single and short to make them more manoeuvrable, as London's narrow streets and sharp turnings require. If you want to go to the expense of ironing out London's throughways to take trams, you could do it for jumbo buses too; but most passengers will tell you that frequency, not size, is what they require.
And this returns us to the real reason why trams are winning the transport argument. Trams are cool. Trams are happening. Buses are for sad people. Margaret Thatcher is said to have remarked that if at the age of 26 a man should find himself on a bus, he can count himself a failure in life. A transport consultant with a proposal for tramways gets an excited hearing, where a bus operator with a request for properly policed bus lanes is ignored.
I repeat: the key to the tram's success is its dedicated way. In a city this must be confiscated from the private motorist. That is politically difficult. A whizzbang tramway scheme can punch a hole through the resistance, and attract the public funds and positive newspaper headlines which a new bus scheme would struggle to do. It's fashionable.
But the cost of fashionability is staggering. Here is a wild assertion. For the final cost of Mr Livingstone's two new tram projects, two comparable free bus services offering the same speed, frequency and capacity, along two comparable dedicated ways, could be endowed in perpetuity. If in ten years' time that assertion, along with my prediction that a tram system will cost double the estimate, can be shown to have been wrong, then I won't just crawl over Waterloo bridge on hands and knees; I'll crawl back, too.
Matthew Paris is a political columnist of the Times.
Previous page
