What makes for a more pleasant experience is not necessarily the optimal choice for commuters as subway wins over trams by close to an order of magnitude in terms of throughput.

In the city I grew up in during rush hour subway trains leave less than every two and a half minutes and pack well over a thousand commuters each. That is an impossible feat for even the best tram system, as they're limited both in vehicle and station length, not to mention speed, as you can't have 40 tonnes of metal hurtling at 80km/h through intersections.

Why can't you have trams travelling at 80km/h? That's around the max speed of some of the trams used in Europe.

Because at that speed its braking distance is close to 200 metres, so you need to separate such a vehicle from the rest of the traffic.

There exist implementations of this, but it's essentially a train with extra steps.

Because pedestrians and drivers are idiots (or if you want to be nice, have lapses in judgement).

Whereas it is possible to have a subway where it’s completely impossible to get on the tracks without heavy equipment or the right keys.

I disagree. Trams are too slow. They are not good for long tracks, like sub ways.

And also they have much less capacity than mass transit systems like a subway, so they are bad for most commuters who tend to travel at rush hour[1]. I guess they are great in tourist areas though.

[1] In my experience, at least in the cities where I have lived

Worse in the outskirts, but better in the town center if you can hop off every couple 100m without 2 escalators/staircases

You could argue trams are more romantic. That is probably the major advantage.

I'd argue there are some limited places where classical trams on the road make sense, like some down town district. But you get almost the same utility with busses, passenger flow per lane is lower with busses, for a lot less money.

> * trams are generally preferable to subways. In places with both, I tend to use the trams almost exclusively*

In towns with trams I've found Ubers almost always faster. That said, most American trams are at grade, so you get a bus that can't change lanes.

If I’m going one, maybe two stops, a tram can be optimal if it’s already in front of me[1]. Otherwise the subway tends to win the curb to curb speed contest for me. It’s a little more traversing through the subway’s infrastructure and getting to the right platform and the right part of the platform, but I’ll get to my destination in less time and it’s not even close.

[1] Otherwise I have to check the Transit app on my phone and do some math factoring in the wait time and the time it takes me to get to the platform. The subway usually wins this contest too.

Trams are super slow. They take space on the road or need their own full lanes. It's much worse than a subway.

Trams do need dedicated lanes.

Depends on the city, but in most places the lanes are wide enough that a tram-designated area isn’t really an issue. Even then, it wouldn’t be a horrible idea if an avenue (running north-south) or two in Manhattan had one less lane for cars and one more for trams.

Not necessarily. Unless I am misunderstanding what specifically is being referred to as a tram. In Portland, Oregon for example, we have small trains that run at street level and share lanes with automobile traffic.

Portland's trams don't move anywhere close to 35mph as the OP mentioned. Portland's trams are quite capacity constrained due to needing to navigate the short blocks and many intersections of downtown Portland. Dedicated travel cooridors where these trams could move at closer to 35mph would allow trips _through_ downtown to become competitive which currently are often not ideal.

The streetcars in Portland OR are useful on some routes but they're pretty much painfully slow around downtown.