>>1170203It was the early 60s, and what had happened in America a few decades earlier, was now happening here. Everyone started to buy cars, also refrigerators. Transit ridership and viability was decreasing. Street and road upgrades ate the infrastructure development money. "White flight" / urban degradation kind of development didn't quite happen here, so the valuation of the downtown areas stayed high, though sprawl did take place.
The need for some kind of above the buses transit core core was still seen, so many cities wanted to build metros at the time, even ones that objectively weren't big enough and never would be. Here is where the Germans were the practical ones and took their existing tramway systems and started to convert them into more metro like direction. After all, the tramways already went where most people lived. So many more places dismantled them and built one or two white elephant metro lines to tie all the transit development funds for decades. Even in some German cases the stadtbahn tunnels turned out to be such as Ludwigshafen here
>>1169556 . Notice, you can't see the tunnel on the map anymore.
You know, it's not an overnight thing to convert a system that has been built to about 6 m wheelbase lenght to accept even small metro cars and the ideals of the era certainly didn't support the Paris Metro / London tube / Berlin "klein profile" kind of small trains where one barely could stand, no. 3 meters wide and minimum curve radius of 250 m. This time it would be modern and future proof!
>>1170207I can only think of Hamburg, that got to the goal. Didn't they use parts of the old tram system in their S-bahn? Maybe also Dortmund counts.
Cities that even got their stadtbahns into the full intended premetro state are kind of minority, like Bielefield (that's part of the conspiracy!), Stuttgart, Cologne and Hannover.
