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Many European cities have rail networks while similar-sized UK and Irish cities remain bus-dependent
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this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2026
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In the EU there are currently six cities with a population over 350k, which lack an urban rail system. Bologna is supposed to open a tram system this year, so it is probably five soon. One of those is Sintra, which technically has a tram line, but it is used with historic cars as a museum service, so I count it as lacking one. Also Vilnius, Plovdiv, Bologna and Varna have trolleybuses. The sixth one is Las Palma, which has only buses and due to being on an island not even a train station.
Heavy rail is for transport between municpalities and everybody has a bus system at least in Europe. For a city of a certain size (200k or so) a well designed public transport system is going to have such high ridership, that a tram or other urban rail system is needed. So a lack of one is a pretty bad sign.
Well London for example has a lot of suburban heavy rail, it's not on this list of course because of the tube, but conventional rail fills in a lot of gaps that the tube doesn't cover and actually works well. You could sort of say the same for Leeds/Bradford, though probably not as good, it's in an area with a dense rail network which probably explains why light rail never took off there - I'm not from the area so I can't really say how well it works. I'm a big advocate for trams and light rail but there's no one-size-fits-all solution for all cities, cities with different geography, density, etc need different transport. That's why I said about quality in my other post, the overall quality of a city's public transport network should be judged, not just the modes of transport.
Bradford has two railway stations and those are pretty close together. They are also 700m apart and do not have track connecting them. In other words you can not use heavy rail for any reasonable journey within Bradford. Leeds is better, but we are still talking trains coming every 30min and six stations within the city and some massive gaps in the network. Similar story for Belfast.
British cities do have high enough density for light rail and the geography is mostly pretty flat. It is honestly the most obvious way to improve the public transport in cities like Leeds and Bradford in a big way. To be fair Leeds might want to think about a light automated metro as well.
I'm not disagreeing with you there.