| Comment | As u/lordanubis12 says, it's partly down to the dominant mindset of the time that cars and the idyllic, problem free, individual freedoms they would afford were the future and that's where the investment went.
The other connected reason is a practical one: cars simply overran everything.
Trams couldn't get moving for congestion caused by motor traffic by the 1950s. It led to a vicious cycle: Trams became slow and unreliable, and completely unprofitable with ridership plummeting. The poor tram service made cars all the more appealing, making trams all the more unreliable.
Even Edinburgh's newly opened Leith tram is experiencing these very issues nearly every day now, with services delays caused by them having to share road space with cars. Or in extreme, but all too frequent cases, of cars and other vehicles being illegally parked in their path.
Glasgow Corporation switched from trams to trolley buses in the 1960s as a way of mitigating this congestion issue (trolley buses being capable of weaving amongst traffic to a certain extent).
But fundamentally the issue was never fixed. We live today with buses that are cripplingly slow and unreliable because the city was redesigned in the 50s-60s to cater for cars over and above public transport. |
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