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Comment by Fifer82 | Hacker News Reader

I always found it also strange that in the UK, and in my small town in Scotland (and pretty much all towns around here) had electric trams installed. They were all ripped out.

Now Edinburgh has them and spent god knows how many billions on it.

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Trams in Milan (such as the orange ones that you can see in San Francisco, built between 1928 and 1932) have been electric since 1901. Until then they were using steam engines outside the city, where they were basically a light railway, and animals inside.

Same in Prague, except that they used to be horse-carried before they went electric.

UK: Also milk floats

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_float

Very characteristic motor sound early in the morning.

Fortunately the Edinburgh trams were "only" £776 million... :-|

Presumably in the future, with blockchain-style transactions, we'll be able to see where exactly the money went in such situations.

What makes you think contractors on public works won't use tumblers?

They wouldn't just need tumblers, they'd also need secret wallets. Public funds pay in to contractor wallet, ..., contractor wallet pays tumbler ... that should be enough to demonstrate corruption?

I seriously believe that is pure corruption. HighSpeed2 should cost a fraction of the price being quoted as well. It shouldn't take a country decades to pay back the cost of laying down rails in such a small country as ours. I estimate 10% goes to the project, 90% goes into peoples pockets without doing a days work.

They trams where seen as old fashioned and local government decided that the new bus technology was better.

And as you say towns are now putting trams back in - though places like Blackpool did keep theirs.

Kansas City has seen a resurrection of their streetcar. And people love it. It's been operational for a year and a half and has only 16 stops at this point, but has already logged 3 million riders [1].

There's a major push to expand it throughout downtown/suburbs. It's definitely a cool factor still at this point, but plenty of people who wouldn't ride the bus are going out of their way to ride that.

As a local, I'm excited to see it expand. They've made public transportation sexy, efficient (100% electric), and convenient in a city where the average household has two cars and everyone drives themselves.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KC_Streetcar

The Virginia/DC corridor used to be served by an electric passenger rail service (the Washington & Old Dominion) but it was shut down 60s when everybody switched to cars. We are now spending billions basically rebuilding half of it as the Silver Line.

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