Trams return to central Paris after 69 years

[Mark Dowling]

Speaking of Red Ken - the increases in the congestion charge and the expansion of the zone are a warning that betting on a tax on something you want to reduce in order to fund its alternative means you'll have less money in the event it works better than you thought. Linking transit funding to gas tax is dangerous because if people do start giving up cars there is less money for more riders.

Livingstone originally said no increases in the CC would be needed for 10 years. I'm not against a CC per se but we have to be aware of the problems to avoid if we go there.

 

[ummagumma66]

its the C-Train! o...wait....Trams are good, but I wish ours was buried, because when done wrong they create more problems than they fix.

 

[unimaginative2]

The grass ROW thing seems to be a distinctly French thing. In Paris, a vast underclass of immigrant labourers ride in 50km from appalling suburban ghettos every morning to don humiliating jumpsuits and make sure the capital is squeaky clean. Some of them might, conceivably, be involved in cutting the grass in the median of a streetcar ROW to PGA standards.

I've seen grass ROWs all over Europe, including in Germany, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia.

 

[officedweller]

Apparently the opposition is more along the lines of the SRT/subway arguments - the suburbs get dissed with slow surface LRT, while the City gets full metro. Forumers on the SSC thread indicate that they is an unused heavy rail ROW that practically parallels the route of the tram but was not used for an exclusive ROW. Photos posted show similar built densities in the suburbs and the City - the boundary just being administrative.