The seating density efficiency on the trams is really poor, Wikipedia says there are about
80 seats per 40 meter tram, and you get about
40 seats in a 10-meter single-deck urban bus (I've used the GB Hawk here just because it was the first one I found on Wikipedia). So if the tram had the same seating density as your standard single-deck bus it would have double the number of seats it has currently.
This is disingenuous to the utmost.
It has a pushchair spot, a wheelchair spot, and a luggage rack, same as a double decker bus. A tram has built-in level boarding, no worrying about ramps.
It has about twice the capacity, seated and standing, as a double decker bus (250 vs120)
It has six sets of doors. That's a lot more than a bus. A crush loaded tram can unload and load in under a minute. That's significantly less than a bus.
All this means you're serving more people, stopping for less time, and you have more level boarding than a bus.
Trams aren't about comfort. If you want comfort, take a taxi. They're about getting the largest number of people from A to B as possible, as quickly as possible, with as much capacity as possible.
They're good for getting people with heavy luggage to the city centre and, soon, to Leith. That's much better than a bus, as each person with heavy luggage takes 30 seconds at least to stow or retrieve their luggage, at each end.
They have their own route which actually serves a lot of quite busy traffic pulls. Edinburgh Park, the Airport and Murrayfield all have a lot of passengers for different reasons. If you go on a tram at rush hour, they soak up passengers in a way that busses simply don't. Everyone on the same tram, no faffing around waiting for 'your' bus.
When they go to Leith, it will be the same.
It's actually a lot better to have trams once you have more than 20 busses per hour in each direction on a single corridor, as you lose capacity by shoving more busses down a road. They clog up eachother and they start to slow down waiting for eachother and other road users.
At peak times now, there's a tram every 6 minutes. In peak times after the Leith extension opens, that frequency is going up.
The trams, as I said, are not for comfort. They were built for a purpose, and they have, and will continue to, serve that purpose very well: improving capacity on incredibly busy bus routes.
While I'm posting anyway, was any consideration given during initial planning into making the off-street section automated à la the DLR? It would have reduced the staffing requirement from two to one on the Airport to Haymarket Yards section.
Not worth it with trams. It's not like the DLR, which has precisely 0 grade crossings with any other traffic, passenger or otherwise. It crosses roads and footpaths, and it's actually an incredibly difficult thing to have an automated system at one end, and manual at the other.
You'd still need a driver in the cab anyway, unless you wanted to build a completely new, completely grade separated from all other vehicles and pedestrians, tube line.
I'm not a fan of them, and combined with the "strangling with cycle lanes" policy the council seems to be applying to the buses I think we're going to be in a really bad place in 5 years or so. The lack of seats combined with the lack of resilience when the line is closed, and a fundamentally smaller number of stops means that the trams can't even begin to compete on a quality of service level. People who don't have to use them regularly are absolute suckers for them through, so I guess it's just the way the world is going.
The cycle lanes thing is a bit difficult. The city is building new segregated cycleways on most main routes, or parallel routes, anyway. I'd prefer to cycle in a segregated route, even if it's longer.
I use the trams pretty regularly, and I'll continue to do so. Sure, the trams don't serve all of Edinburgh, but they're not busses, and they're not meant to. They serve a specific purpose, on a specific route.
Additionally, I cannot recall a problem lasting longer than a few hours that was caused by the trams or tram infrastructure. Most problems have been caused by road traffic getting in the way. This is admittedly a problem with street running, and tramways in general vs things like metro, but it's a problem yet to be solved.
I think the problem is Edinburgh’s trams are for some reason much longer individual units than other cities, thus less stops are possible.
In my opinion they need a mid life refurb pretty soon, ideally before the extension opens.
The trams, as I said, are about serving big flows of traffic to specific locations, along already busy bus corridors. They have stops in the city about half as often as busses; stops are about twice as far apart.
Stopping a tram as frequently as you would a bus is madness, as you'd lose out capacity and journey times. If your distance between stops is set by infrastructure and capacity, then having longer vehicles just means you get to serve more people at each stop.
