Create Streets and the Campaign for Better Transport are together working on a new mission ‘Tram Network’, which will support more cities to create tram lines and work with government and industry to reduce their cost. In this blog Create Streets’ Robert Kwolek brings us some lessons from France on how to build cheaper, better trams.
Trams are experiencing a renaissance around the world, yet in Britain trams are unaffordable. That seems to be the prevailing belief in council chambers and the corridors of Whitehall. Partially that’s because we have a habit in this country of gold plating our infrastructure and attempt to ‘reinvent the wheel’ on a project-by-project basis to a degree which makes them unaffordable or causes costs to skyrocket. Extensive tunnelling for HS2 is one such example. As a result, infrastructure projects either don’t get off the drawing board, or worse, are seen as merely a pipe dream. Trams tend to fall in this category.
The French often take a different, more flexible approach, opting for what they can afford rather than what may be the absolute best option. It makes for better connected towns and cities and stronger local economies. A prime example of this is the Besançon tram, which was built for about half the cost of similar projects at the time by opting for simple, proven designs to minimise complexity and keep the costs down.
Besançon is a small city in eastern France with a population of 120,000 (or about 280,000 in the metro area), equivalent in size to Lincoln and its surrounding area. It is the historical capital of watchmaking in France and today a centre for industries such as microtechnology, micromechanics and biomedical engineering. It’s also the greenest city in France. The beautiful city centre has characteristically French limestone buildings, and a UNESCO World Heritage fortress overlooking the city.
Besançon’s tram crossing a bridge in the heart of the historic city centre.
Image credit: Croustipoc on Flickr, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. Original image link.
Outside the historic centre, long sections of the tram run on a grass track
The city did originally have trams, as did most other cities in France and England at one point, but these were replaced by buses in the 1950s. Inevitably, the bus network got stretched to capacity, so the city embarked on a tram project in the early 2000s. The new tram was approved in 2008 and construction began in 2010. Construction was completed in 2014 and service launched that same year, 8 months ahead of schedule. Yes, you read that correctly, ahead of schedule.
The project cost 254 million Euros for 14.5 kilometres, or about 17.5 million Euros per kilometre, nearly half the cost of other trams at the time. Despite its relatively modest cost, it’s still a modern, low-floor tram which travels at speeds up to 70 km/h (~44 mph). In comparison, the new tram in Tours, at 14.3km about the same length as Besançon’s, was inaugurated a year before yet ended up costing 433 million Euros. The difference in cost is in part because Tours had architecturally distinctive stations and trams and uses Alstom’s expensive third rail APS system in order to avoid overheard wires in the historical core.
How did Besançon keep costs down?
- Wherever possible, it used simple, standard designs which were proven to work elsewhere
- The entire system has overhead wires, as wireless technologies at the time (such as batteries, powered rails, or supercapacitors) would have been much more expensive
- It used a standardised station design across the network
- It used basic, short (23 metre) trams from Spanish manufacturer CAF to start (though extendable with additional sections)
- Seven companies bid for the rolling stock contract rather than the usual three
- To avoid costly street redesigns, to maintain reliability and to ensure safety, cars are banned from the streets the tram runs along and elsewhere there is strict segregation
- In France utility companies bear the cost of moving and upgrading their assets, this results in far fewer utilities being moved unnecessarily
Design and operation facts
- 31 stations along primarily one line, plus a small branch line
- They chose standard gauge to allow the possibility of operating a tram-train suburban service in the future
- In most locations, the track sits within stone paving, particularly in the city centre, while grass tracks are common in suburban areas
- The public was involved in the selection of the design of the catenary wire poles and the colour of the trams
- The tram operates 5AM to 1AM, every 5 minutes during peak hours, down to every 40 minutes on Sundays
The tram has proved very successful, is used by about 40,000 passengers per day and works in tandem with the city’s bus network. To alleviate capacity issues, a few years ago the city bought new longer trams from Alstom, sourced in a joint bid with Toulouse and Brest (again to save costs). If you want to learn more about the Besançon tram, there’s an excellent video I recommend with some great shots of the tram in operation.
If you want to get involved with the Tram Network drop us a line at contact@createstreets.com to help us get 15 tram lines under construction within 5 years
Robert Kwolek
Senior Architectural Designer, Create Streets