Plus la Change, plus la Même Chose

Adelaide has a long association with trams as public transport, and the tram line between the centre of town and the beachside suburb of Glenelg has been something of a tourist attraction, with its old timber-panelled slab-sided tramcar classics such as those shown on the Tramways Museum Society of Victoria website.
Everything changes and replacement of these with new trams in a sleek, bright-coloured, but characterless and plasticy style began last year.
A plan in the 1970s proposed extending the Adelaide-Glenelg line out into the northern suburbs. The advent of the Adelaide O-bahn guided busway made the project a little redundant, but it has been revived.


A few weeks ago tramlines were laid along the west side of North Terrace (you can see the railway station on the right in the photo above). This week, work began on lines north from Victoria Square along King William Street, to connect with the work already under way.
The great irony is that in the 1950s the old trams ran down King William Street in the same place, out through North Adelaide and along Prospect and Main North Roads to what is now Regency Road. They were removed and the roads were left for conventional traffic. Nowadays those routes get very congested. King William Street is quite busy in peak traffic, and not terribly wide, and I am one who can't see the benefit of having buses slowing the left lane and trams in the right lane with only one remaining exclusive to vehicles.
Tram and train travellers already have access to free city bus travel between the train station and tram terminus, and to me it seems a retrograde step to reintroduce trams where once, presumably for reasons of traffic flow well before modern congestion, they were removed.
(EDIT - I originally wrote the tramlines were to be "each side of the median strip". The median strip has been torn up. That horrible biological green stuff has made way for nice clean steel rails.)
You can go here for a forum discussion of the progress of the project.

FOOTNOTE: It's four years since I posted the above. I recently heard that the original tramlines were torn up not to improve traffic flow, but because Holdens, who manufactured cars in Adelaide, wanted to make more sales. So they lobbied for removal of public transport! And now, of course, the pressure is on to get cars out of the city and more people onto public transport.