>>2057440Simple: HIGHER CAPACITY.
Higher capacity per vehicle and consequently per corridor or per occupied area. Also cheaper in proportion to the capacity offered than the same capacity with buses.
Modern trams of largest size can carry over 400 pax, biarticulated buses only get to 180. And those are very cumbersome.
Not everywhere will use such large trams, but usually in all scenarios trams will be larger than the largest buses you can realistically use. A tight european downtown with 1st gen tram will have smaller trams, but still smaller buses. In practice, trams have *at least* 2:1 capacity advantage over buses, usually more.
Means: You run a tram every 5 minutes gets you same capacity as 2 or 3 buses every 5 minutes. If you run 2 or 3 buses every 5 minutes you can't give them good signal priority (because it wouldn't give enough time to other traffic signal phases, for dumb people: the crossing street doesn't get enough green light). Also difficult to have a bus arrive every 1-2 minutes at the stop, because it may take up to a minute for boarding. Buses won't be perfectly spaced so they bunch up which means they lose time. Plus you have more vehicles, more drivers, etc.
Getting similar capacity on one corridor with buses as with a tram is very impractical. You get slower and less regular service, probably double stops (where two buses stop at the same time and people have to run to their bus).
On a secondary level trams tend to be more comfortable and attractive for people, they generally are always built with private ROW or other priority (bus could have that but often doesn't because due to low capacity it's not seen as economical), and they give an impression of commitment to higher quality service which attracts riders.
>tl;dr tram gets higher capacity on any single corridor than bus line(s) ever could.>>2057444>>2057445Retards who don't get it, a bus can do all of that too.