Sir –One could scarcely fail to notice on these pages in recent weeks that there is a passionate voice for the introduction of trams in Oxford, the latest being the letter from Dr Roger Higgs (Letters, April 16).

Dr Higgs asserts that Calgary, Salt Lake City and Geneva, three cities that have re-introduced trams, are of comparable population to Oxford. The population of the city of Oxford is about 150,000; a reasonable estimate for the population of “Greater Oxford” might be 200,000.

Calgary, by comparison has a population of just over a million; the cities of Salt Lake and Geneva are part of metropolitan areas with populations of 1.1 million and 800,000 respectively. While size is not everything it does have a major role to play in whether a city could ever be able to justify the considerable cost of introducing trams.

It is true, as Hugh Jaeger said the previous week, that in Germany trams are to be found in cities smaller than Oxford.

Some of these are systems which have hung on from the heyday of the tram, but it is also true that some have benefited from a friendlier attitude to transport investment there than is the case here.

In this country, the funding for tram systems can only come from central Government which has, at best, a cool attitude to light rail — partly because some of the schemes which have gone ahead recently have failed to achieve their forecast patronage. The simple reality is that in this country, at this time, trams are never going to get the go-ahead in a city as small as Oxford. Your correspondents’ efforts would be better directed either at changing central government’s attitudes or at ways that we can make our current system work better.

William Richter, Oxford