David Bradley wrote:

Hi,

LB Hammersmith and Fulham have now come out fully against the West London
Tram,...

It's worth taking a good look at the TfL website ...
devastating new permanent layout proposals for West Ealing Lido junction,
Hanwell Broadway and Southall Broadway main junction. Many small shops and
other businesses will be wiped out, and old but perfectly serviceable and in
some degree townscape-valuable buildings, will be demolished.

If the tram doesn't go ahead, some of this demolition may happen
anyway, to increase capacity for cars and buses. The basic premise
behind the tram is to increase the capacity of the Uxbridge Road to
move people, in exchange for a reduction in its capacity to move cars.

It is worth stressing that a trolleybus scheme would require far more
minimalist (and much shorter-lived) construction compound facilities, and no
such destructive road widening in town centres. Presumably substation
requirements would be similar to tram although why roadside cabinets using
local electricity supplies can't be used is a mystery to me.

The reasons for choosing tram over trolleybus were never, in my view,
very good. They were mainly: trams are better at attracting people out
of cars, and will make it politically easier to achieve the necessary
demolitions and reductions in capacity for other motor vehicles.

But I'm not sure there's any actual UK evidence that trams attract
more people out of cars than trolleybuses - how would you obtain it?
Asking people to predict what they'd do is not very accurate,
especially if you don't explain very carefully what a tolleybus is.

Cyclists may like to know that at present they can get from one end to
the other faster than the tram is projected to be able to. There is a
real danger that changes to get the tram in will delay cyclists enough
to make them slower than the tram.

Colin McKenzie