My city (Liège, Belgium) is slowly coming out of > 5 years of badly planned tram building. Our first, small-ish line started being built before plans were finalized, due to political pressures.

So they kept hitting utilities when digging. They kept running into scheduling issues. And now it's taken over twice as long as it should have, is tens of millions over budget, and has caused numerous bankruptcies in downtown shops. The economic damage to the city from constant city-wide road closures is immeasurable.

We also have like 500 m of metro buried under one of our boulevards (I wanna say from the '90s). We do not have a metro, and never will. It's just a project that was "started" because there was a budget for it, then there wasn't a budget anymore and that was that.

So, please learn from our mistakes and do not start building trams or metros without having a fully planned out route. A half done line is insanely expensive and disruptive but absolutely no use to anyone.

[–] Ilovethebomb 1 points 9 months ago

Tens of millions over budget would be an absolute bargain by our standards.