Trams were popular worldwide back in the days where automobiles were far too expensive for most people and buses hadn't taken off yet, and since they were the only practical means of transport for medium distances, even small cities had massive ridership. They also ran right on the road, sharing space with cars, which was OK because there were a lot less cars and cars were not meaningful competition.
These days cars are affordable, and light rail has to be better than cars to be competitive, and do so well enough to entice a significant portion of the population out of their cars to be affordable. In practice this means dedicated right of way, which is far more expensive to purchase and fit out as a rail line than just laying some rails on an existing street. And of course modern safety, environmental and just plain bureaucratic regulations also inflate the prices of public works considerably compared to the good/bad old days, particularly in the US.
I'm aware of those factors, but I still think we took a wrong turn. Maybe not in the US due to the population sparsity and sprawl, but in Spain and many other European countries, if we could connect every town or city of more than 10K people by either rail, light rail or tram (instead of having spent billions on highways), that would cover 80% of the population. A large majority wouldn't need a car, and could instead use Uber-like services for the last mile. Pollution and emissions would be much less of a problem, and quality of life in cities much better.
But that's what happens with gradient descent, it can lead you to a local minimum...
There is an element of busywork too: local officials are always elected by promising change, they have to be seen doing something. So on odd years they put in something, and in even years they take it out...
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/72/NY...
It's more like the area from New York to Boston
I'm sensing a bit of a Catch-22 in this hypothetical: How would the success of Uber-like services been impacted if 80% of the population no longer needed cars?
They wouldn't need it, but I bet that majority would still want it.
* car sales do not drop, they oscillate depending on various governments subventions;
* vehicle fleet keeps rising (albeit slowly because the market is saturated);
* car owning per household has always been and is still on the rise (despite household size constantly decreasing);
* the distance travelled with cars keeps rising as well.
And visually, the amount of cars parked in the streets and along roadsides becomes insane. You already thought it was full 30 years ago, but now it is fuller.
Oh, and the cars become bigger every year. Not American-big, but still, on the way to it. For example, pickup trucks never took off in the French countryside in the last 50 years, not a single bit; but for a couple of years, it has started :-/
1) "suburbia" is now a thing in Europe too. Regular people cannot afford to live in city centres, they are the preserve of the wealthy. As population grows, more and more people are pushed further out, and they adopt suburbanization: big malls that cannot be reached if not by car, semi-detached houses in gated communities, etc etc. That's a lifestyle built for cars.
2) People will buy what manufacturers will sell. In a global market, car models are increasingly built with more than one country in mind. Inevitably, US tastes loom large.
3) The Hollywood influence cannot be underestimated.
That's a convoluted, backwards and very funny way of saying "taxi". :-D
Sidenote: so do many modern tram systems.
That disadvantage is actually a good thing when you're buying real estate, a bus route can change but my tram stop has much more permanence.
It also doesn't have to be an either/or thing, my local trams are dedicated in large parts but on road where congestion is lighter.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_and_Old_Dominion_Ra...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr-gridlock/wp/2016/02/1...
Relatively modern cities, especially north american ones, would have grown along with the tram network, adding on "streetcar suburbs" as the city grew.
For example if a neighbourhood comprises of one major street lined with commercial with residential everywhere else, that was likely once a streetcar line.
At some point these cities threw out the trams and replaced them with buses and cars, but these cities weren't designed for that infrastructure.
Newer cities that are designed around cars are unwalkable stripmall deserts. It will be much more difficult to turn these into walkable transit oriented communities.
1) Communities were more local and relevant than today. This also means travel was more local and relevant.
2) Trams didn't have as much competition with other viable, automated means of transport.
In my city (random Spanish mid-sized city, around 250K population) there is often debate about building a light rail or tram public transport line. But it is always dismissed by the administration for being too expensive, pharaonic, disproportionate for a city of this size, etc.
Doing some research on the history of the city, I discovered that not only there were several tram lines in the early 20th century, but there was even a tram line that went all the way to a nearby town of population around 15K, 22 km away. If anyone proposed a tram line like that today, I think they would be dismissed as being kidding for proposing such extravagant spending.
This, in a context where Spain is a much richer country than it was back then. I often wonder what went wrong.