I've essayed a piece or two in the past year over a city project in Wiesbaden....the city-tram. For most who've spent time in Wiesbaden in their military career.....you'd probably remark that it's one of the few larger cities in existence in Germany....without a subway or tram network. It's just buses, and a train station network service leading to towns resting in the shadow of Wiesbaden.
In the last two years, there's been this Mayor-led project to bring a city tram to Wiesbaden. The general idea? It would go from the 'tent' over at the Theodor Heuss Bridge (which crosses the Rhine and leads to mid-town Mainz) over to Mainz-Kastel, and then toward the Wiesbaden train station....curving around by mid-town Wiesbaden, and ending at the Hochschule building (their college campus).
A lot of this story is told today in HR's morning news (our regional public TV network).
There would be some relationship to the already existing Mainz tram network (a four-star operation).
In the beginning of this chatter, they talked a good bit about a 4th bridge to cross the Rhine, and this tram would be connected to Mainz as well. The bridge idea? Gone....no one talks about that today, and I think the money and environmental fight would have made this impossible.
So you'd think.....this is 'green-light' and without any opposition....right? No.
There is an active anti-tram group and it's begun to worry the SPD political party. No one is sure about the numbers in this anti-tram situation.
So the Mayor has called to arrange a referendum on this....in the May EU-election. It'll be a question posed to locals and they will vote on this.
The hype against the tram? It centers around three things. First, based on this route, there is a suggestion of a limited number of riders. The city suggests that 100,000 a day would ride it (out of 285,000 residents). They are mostly using the #6 bus results to arrive at the 100,000. Would the #6 bus end it's service? No one says that for sure.
The second negative is 'noise'. You see when Mainz increased it's big network last year, this immediately came up as a problem and various neighborhoods got upset that noise had increased. Some things about the Wiesbaden route have been done to ensure it avoids various high-profile neighborhoods.
The third negative is often talk about this transformation of Wiesbaden coming (within ten years, it'll be a 300,000 population city). Some people are thinking that it'll reach 325,000 by 2040. This leads to the topic of how this tram will serve the city, and if it's just a band-aid approach to a growing problem.
The odds here? I think the tram deal will pass in this referendum but it'll be some marginal number like 55 percent to 45 percent. The mayor and town council? They'd probably like to see a 70-percent situation so criticisms die off.
Is the city dealing with urbanization with marginal answers? If you'd packed up and left in the 1980s, and returned today....you'd look at growth, and the way that towns on the edge of Wiesbaden have grown. A fair number of people who work in the city....don't live in the city, and that urbanization issue has made traffic a big problem.
One of the changes coming shortly....is the Aartalbahn track which was turned OFF between Wiesbaden and Bad Schwalbach twenty-five years ago....is going to be put back into order. The track will actually connect to both Mainz and Wiesbaden. Number of trams to run from Bad Schwalbach? Unknown. My guess is that it'd be two an hour in the rush-hour periods, and one per hour throughout the rest of the day. All of this, in the minds of some, would lead to less traffic congestion, and cut bus traffic entirely out (so one would think).
Another issue is that between Mainz, Wiesbaden and the 5-mile circle around both....the population is now approaching near 650,000 to 700,000. Most of the traffick concepts in place just don't match up with a high-density situation that has developed. You can find dozens of bottlenecks around both Mainz and Wiesbaden between 7 and 9 AM each morning.
Even if the vote goes in support of the tram, it doesn't mean the problems lessen in any major way.
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