The Tram Story

My local German town....Wiesbaden....has reached a stage where they are fairly serious about adding a tram to the city. 

The city has survived since WW II with no trams (unlike Mainz).  Public transportation in Wiesbaden is mostly tied to buses, and a few trains that leave the train station for major suburbs that surround the city.

The current plan?  There is this connecting point between the cities of Wiesbaden and Mainz....the Kaiser Brucke 'tent'.  This bridge area connects Mainz-Kastel (on the north side of the river) to Mainz (on the south side of the river).

The city planners say the tram (being the only one planned right now) would run from the 'tent' over to Bebrich (a suburb of Wiesbaden) and head north to the train-station, and onto the Marktplatz area, and then head further north.

Various arguments come up via folks around town.  Some question the necessity of this tram.  Some question the price-tag....300 million Euro (probably escalating to 400 million very easily). Some question the usage by the general public.  Some even suggest that this is only phase one and that there might be four of these routes around the city within fifteen years.

A public magnet for the city....to attract more people as residents?  Well, that factor comes into play as well.  One of the proposed routes is through all Mainz-Kastel where a old Army installation is in some period of planning for more apartments and condos.  Where the tram heads on the north side of Wiesbaden?  Well, I'm guessing real estate speculation is at play here and more neighborhoods might be planned. 

The need to connect Wiesbaden to Mainz?  Well....it already exists.  Almost every hour between the two cities (about a 12 minute ride by train), there's four trains making a trip.  By bus?  There's three to four buses that cross between two cities and there's probably eight trips per hour made.  You can ride a bike from the Mainz city-center to the Wiesbaden city-center in twenty-five minutes.  I would take a guess that forty-thousand Mainz folks work somewhere on the north side of the river, and probably forty-thousand Wiesbaden folks work on the south side of the river (my wife is one of those).

The big negative for most folks about this whole topic?  There's a two to three year construction period discussed, and traffic would be fairly screwed-up during this period for various parts of Wiesbaden.  Things are already fairly stressed already....this only adds more 'pain'. 

At this point, it's going to happen.  Nothing can stop it.