As with all things related to public transit, never assume the modern absence is for a good reason. Big car and big oil have spent a century shaping cities for their own benefit.
Freight doesn’t move on its own, unlike passengers. For a freight tram to work, it would need to be extremely rapidly loaded and unloaded and not clog up the tracks while loading/unloading or have dedicated sidings which greatly increases infrastructure complexity. Freight trucks & vans have the benefit of being able to park kind of out of the way while a person unloads pallets and dollys of stuff.
Rail freight really makes the most sense for hub-hub movements or for pickup/dropoff of larger quantities of goods, its just too slow to load and unload to make much sense for last mile pickup/delivery in most cases with LCL loads unless its a large enough amount of stuff to warrant a siding, at which point you’re at an electric engine picking up and dropping off freight cars so that they can be loaded/unloaded without tying up the engine from moving other freight cars.
I’m sure there’s specific usecases where a freight tram would actually make sense, but I imagine most of those usecases would also be better served by a combine tram that does both passenger and freight
Freight trams “only” require a restructuring of how we handle cargo: the way i see it working is using trams to bring goods from the train terminal to small neighbourhood warehouses where it can there be brought to its destination via stuff like cargo bikes.
And of course in some situations (at least in the cities i’ve seen) you can just add a spur to the back of a store and treat it like a more efficient truck.
As with all things related to public transit, never assume the modern absence is for a good reason. Big car and big oil have spent a century shaping cities for their own benefit.
Freight doesn’t move on its own, unlike passengers. For a freight tram to work, it would need to be extremely rapidly loaded and unloaded and not clog up the tracks while loading/unloading or have dedicated sidings which greatly increases infrastructure complexity. Freight trucks & vans have the benefit of being able to park kind of out of the way while a person unloads pallets and dollys of stuff.
Rail freight really makes the most sense for hub-hub movements or for pickup/dropoff of larger quantities of goods, its just too slow to load and unload to make much sense for last mile pickup/delivery in most cases with LCL loads unless its a large enough amount of stuff to warrant a siding, at which point you’re at an electric engine picking up and dropping off freight cars so that they can be loaded/unloaded without tying up the engine from moving other freight cars.
I’m sure there’s specific usecases where a freight tram would actually make sense, but I imagine most of those usecases would also be better served by a combine tram that does both passenger and freight
Freight trams “only” require a restructuring of how we handle cargo: the way i see it working is using trams to bring goods from the train terminal to small neighbourhood warehouses where it can there be brought to its destination via stuff like cargo bikes.
And of course in some situations (at least in the cities i’ve seen) you can just add a spur to the back of a store and treat it like a more efficient truck.