MrGoose
Active Member
Other major cities are not using trams as lines in the urban core. Your first link is for a city of population 500k
Your second link contains two tram lines. One in Guangzhou's suburbs, Huangpu Tram, the thin red line in the top right corner of the image is roughly 20-25km from Guangzhou's city center, an equivalent transit line would be a LRT along Major Mackenzie or Erin Mills.
The second line mentioned is the Yizhuang Tram in Beijing. That is also way out in the suburbs, nowhere near the city center. It's the thinner red line, hiding in the bottom right quadrant of the image below.
Additionally, talking about trams in the UK and France, those cities do not use trams as key backbones of their public transit systems. London has trams, the Croydon trams, but they are suburban.
Paris also has trams, but its not running those trams under the Champes Elysee. They're all peripheral lines.
Calling the Overground an LRT is doing a disservice to the Overground. The trainsets they use are high-floor, full width and run completely grade separated. These are mainline passenger rail trains, with some of the same ones (the Bombardier Aventras) being run on Crossrail.This is objectively false. London has the Overground - a high speed LRT - and it's popular, as an example.
LRT was bad in the political context it was used for in Toronto, but the technology itself is fine.
Again, if Crosstown was HRT, there would have been no debate and both Scarborough LRTs would have been in operation for 5 plus years now.
And it's not as if HRT doesn't have it's issues as well.
These are not "light rail"