Why London should convert most bus lines to tramway operation
Riding an overcrowded bus or train is part and parcel of living in a big city, but it shouldn't be this way.
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If you didn’t know, London is a big city. With a population of around 8m to 9m “people”1, London is only set to grow in size of in terms of the population only, as the green belt bans mass housing construction on the outskirts of Britain’s biggest cities, not just London as a reliable method of preserving our beautiful countryside and forcing dense, economically sustainable inland development in our towns and cities. And if you’re not from London or don’t know about our world class public transport network, then you might have missed the opening of an £18¾ billion pound new railway project linking the main commuter railway lines between London Paddington on the Great Western Mainline and London Liverpool Street on the Great Eastern Mainline with a branch line from the new railway out to the towns of Greenwich and Abbey Wood via London’s largest financial district called Canary Wharf in the former docklands area. But the biggest problem with this new railway called “Crossrail” which is a part of the new “Elizabeth Line” (formerly called “TfL Rail”) is that it doesn’t alleviate road transport overcrowding. Presently, London’s roads are clogged up by a fleet of diesel buses and many a private car or motorcycle owner with bicycle usage being <6% of total commutes during the morning and evening rush hour periods. And presently, you will only find what I think is London’s only solution to decongesting London’s streets in one of London’s largest towns called Croydon and it’s surrounding areas which has been in operation since 2000.
What is London’s current road-transport makeup?
In London, the most common modes of road transport is private cars, private vans and lorries (trucks), buses and bicycles and in the Croydon area there are some on-street running tramways but in the past things were very different.
London’s road-transport makeup in the present past
In the past, London looked very different, not just in terms of pre-mass immigration but also from the days of pre-brutalist architecture in London in the 1950s and 1960s.
Before the 1960s in London, there was a diverse method of road-based transportation. The principle forms were Buses, Trolleybuses, Bicycles, Cars & vans and before 1952, the main form was travelling by Tramway using London’s extensive tramway network but unfortunately the original tramway network was closed down in stages between the 1930s and 1952 mainly because politicians had come to the (“wrong”) conclusion that trams were the main cause of traffic jams, but you could argue that these closures were from before the times that “induced demand” was properly understood.
So why did Britain’s tramways fall out of disuse?
So from reading above, you’ll know that Britain had a diverse mix of road-transport options as compared to today which is almost exclusively private cars, buses, lorries (trucks) and very few bicycles but what is lesser-known is why other methods of road-transport fell out of use.
Starting in the 1940s, many governments around the world forsaw the decline of railways and tramways and decided that in order to make money off this changing economic landscape from the previous two decades of Keynesianism, they decided to force this economic change on the population whether they wanted it or not, so for instance, roads were widened in many places from being a simple 2-lane 2-way throughfare in the 1930s with little to no traffic to being a 4-lane in each direction expressway with constant traffic jams only 20 or so years later in the 1960s, bike lanes were demolished and replaced by parked cars or a new motor-vehicle traffic lane and so on. And this was all designed to fit the agenda of the government always getting in the way of private enterprises which is also why public transport networks across the globe were nationalised into becoming loss-making entities whether they were previously state-owned assets or not (for example, the London Underground became a state-owned asset in 1933 as a for-profit entity until it was nationalised into a massive loss-making business in 1948 along with the new “British Railways” company that was also a loss-leader in the world of railways.
And of course, it wasn’t just the British Government that planned the decline of tramways and railways, for instance in the US, starting in the 1960s, the Interstate Highway System was built out with lots of money from the Federal Government which helped to artificially prop-up the value and sales figures of America’s biggest car companies as people found it easier to drive from their new suburban home to their place of work in the city centre or nearby industrial zone avoiding alternative options altogether due to the sunk cost fallacy2 and new American road design standards which preferred wide roads and high speeds over narrow lanes at low speeds with shared spaces for pedestrians and cyclists.
So where should London’s new tramways be built to replace buses?
I would propose that tramways be built upon heavily used routes where there is little duplication on the majority of the service and the current bus depots can be upgraded for conversion to both Bus/Tram operation along with bus stations.
For example, I would recommend the upgrade of the following services to tramway:
All East London Transit services would be replaced by trams using the existing route numbers and routing
All other services that presently use the bus type Wrightbus NBfL aka Boris Bus would be converted to tramway operation plus the night service that extends over other services would also be replaced by trams, so for example route 87 and N87 would be replaced by trams but as route N87 extends from Wandsworth to Kingston-Upon-Thames, routes 156 and 131 would be replaced by trams with existing routes and numbers being used for each service; this plan would also include cross-border services i.e. routes that start/end in London terminate/start outside of London in e.g. Hertfordshire
All other Double Deck bus services inside the Zone 1 and Zone 03 Oyster fare zone aka all of central london. So this would include all services that operate solely inside Zone 1 but would also include services that terminate outside Zone 1 such as route 14 between Putney Bridge and Warren Street
What vehicles would be used on these new tramlines?
I would propose the development and manufacture of a new fleet of Articulated double-deck trams with either a single articulated point such as on the Tatra KT4dm or with 2 articulated points similar to that on the Tatra KT8D5 tram. The new trams would be standard-gauge width with level boarding and the same tram width as London’s existing tram fleet which would allow for level boarding. All the trams would be bidirectional with three doors on each side of the tram, one in the centre of each carriage and one next to the driver’s cabin so that there is only one entry point to the tram in order to help limit fare evasion as all existing bus stops would stay as “request stops” and “bus stops”.
The tram would be powered by either a Ground Power System or a Bow collector due to the ability for the electrical connector to not be required to be roof mounted like what a pantograph is meaning that the trams would not need to look like those in Alexandria, Egypt.
How would all this be funded?
For starters, this project cannot be 100% funded by the UK government due to our current economic crisis, the current CPI is around 10%-12% and there are predicitions for it to double by the end of the year reaching ~18%4 and Public-Private Partnerships have often failed in the UK, although this was mainly due to the private partnership going bankrupt (e.g. Carillion) and the global bond market isn't looking too good right now since the collapse of several Chinese property developers which was only staying afloat due to selling bonds and unpayable loans and so instead I would suggest funding the new tramway network through existing transport companies whom would own shares in the new entites building out the new tram lines and bonds can unfortunately be issued but only once the economy starts to pick up which I don't think would be anytime soon.
If you have any suggestions, please leave a comment below!
People is in “quote marks” because some people see the “unvaccinated” like myself as “not being people” aka “Untermensch”. “unvaccinated” in this case means those who chose (or were not able to due to the high risk of death) not to take a shot of the COVID-19 mRNA “vaccine” or any other type of SARS-CoV-2 “vaccine” available to said person(s)…
The definition of the Sunk Cost Fallacy can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost#Fallacy_effect, but in short means that for example I just purchased this £15,000 blazer, so in order for it to not go to waste by only wearing it once, I’m going to wear it everywhere just so that I don’t loose money even though that is already the case.
Zone 0 I believe is actually the bus/tram oyster fare zone and converting all bus services to tramway operation would be ridiculously expensive and just not worth it for the routes which only see a couple of services a day and exist solely for serving parts of London that would otherwise not see any bus service.