Prague Writes Down What a Tram Line Should Look Like

The magistrate presented a new part of its Catalogue of Recommended Elements of Public Spaces on 5 October: a Tram Track Standard, drawn up by the Prague Institute of Planning and Development (IPR) with the transport company DPP. It sets out how the surface of a tram line and its stops should look. IPR announced it the same day; Zdopravy.cz carried it the following morning.

The document's own stated purpose is modest and worth quoting accurately, because it explains the timing: to stabilise good practice for what a fast-growing network should look like. Prague is building tram lines faster than it has in decades, and until now each one settled its own surfaces and furniture.

The number that justifies it

Ondřej Boháč, the director of IPR, made the case by area rather than by line.

The Prague tram network is spread over nearly a million and a quarter square metres, so its appearance is fundamental. The recently reopened line behind the National Museum shows that the appropriate use of quality materials can significantly transform a previously inhospitable place into a cultivated public space.

— Ondřej Boháč, director of the Prague Institute of Planning and Development

That is the argument the whole standard rests on. A tram line is not read by the city as a piece of railway with a city around it; it is read as roughly 1.25 square kilometres of ground surface, which makes it one of the larger single categories of public space Prague owns. Writing down how it is finished is therefore a public-space decision that happens to be about track.

What is in it

The chapters give designers recommendations for track covers, stops, crossings and other typical situations, including street furniture and information systems. Two registers are described. One is the urban form, as newly visible at the Muzeum stop brought into service in September. The other is less conventional: drought-tolerant stonecrops and succulents planted between the rails, a solution both sources say has proved itself near the Ládví stop. The alternative being displaced, in the framing Zdopravy uses, is dried-out grass on one side and bare concrete on the other.

DPP's contribution was operational rather than visual, which is the part most likely to decide whether the standard survives contact with a site. Miroslav Penc, who heads DPP's Objekty unit, described it:

DPP applied in preparing the document its detailed experience with the speed of assembly and disassembly of the individual components of tram tracks, with operating costs, and also with an awareness of the need to reuse materials that have to be removed when rails are replaced or a tram line is reconstructed.

— Miroslav Penc, head of the Objekty unit, DPP

A recommendation, not a rule

The standard is addressed primarily to designers and will be publicly available on IPR's site. IPR describes it as an agreement between city actors, so that everybody knows what to expect of a tram line, and says it is meant to prevent unpleasant surprises, make it easier to choose a proven solution, and help plan material consumption. Because it is divided into chapters, each can be updated separately as experience accumulates — IPR calls it a living document.

That is also its limit. Nothing in either source says the standard binds anyone. It recommends, and it describes practice already built; the test will be the first line where a cheaper surface is available and the standard is the only argument against it.

The politics around it are frankly about momentum. Jaromír Beránek, the deputy mayor for transport, said the city is living through a tram boom and wants trams to be not only transport provision but a flagship for improving public space in the places they run through. Petr Hlaváček, the deputy mayor for territorial development, argued from completed work: the new lines to Dědina, to Pankrác and at Muzeum, and major reconstructions such as the track at Výstaviště and in Dukelských hrdinů, show that Prague can build tram lines to world standard and can turn a formerly inhospitable place into cultivated public space. Both are arguing that the standard codifies something Prague already does well. Read the other way, a document issued at the peak of a building programme is being written slightly late.