On a bright February morning in 2026, a tram slides into the new terminus at La Doua–Gaston Berger, on the northern edge of Villeurbanne, and disgorges a carriage-full of students into a campus that, for the first time, has a rail line running to its door. The vehicle is a low-floor T6, white and grey, almost silent over the welded track. Ten new stations behind it, the extension that opened this month threads through the eastern hospitals and the university quarter on rails that, seventy years ago, the city had decided it would never lay again. Lyon spent the middle of the twentieth century convincing itself that the future had no room for trams. It is now spending the twenty-first persuading itself of the opposite, one line at a time.
This is, in the unglamorous vocabulary of SYTRAL Mobilités — the public authority that owns and plans the network — an “extension of the existing offer”. In the longer view it is something stranger: a city methodically rebuilding a thing it tore out, and discovering that the rebuilding changes far more than the route map.
The city that unbuilt its trams
Lyon was an early tram city. A network of horse-drawn lines appeared in the 1880s; electrification followed, and by the early twentieth century the tramway was the ordinary way a Lyonnais crossed the two rivers and climbed towards the Croix-Rousse. Then came the motor car, the bus, and the conviction — near-universal across post-war western Europe — that rails embedded in the road were a relic. Lyon dismantled its system in stages across the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, with the last lines lifted by the end of the 1950s. The tracks were paved over. The overhead wires came down. For four decades the word tramway in Lyon described something that no longer existed.
The metro, opened in 1978, was the replacement bet, and a good one. But a metro is expensive, slow to build and blind to the street above it. By the mid-1990s the authority then known as SYTRAL had concluded that the surface needed its own rail mode again — cheaper than tunnelling, visible, and capable of restructuring the public space it ran through rather than hiding beneath it. The decision to build a modern tramway was taken in 1996. On 2 January 2001, two lines opened: T1, from Perrache through Part-Dieu towards the university campus, and T2, from Perrache out to Porte des Alpes. The trams were back, forty years after the city had sworn them off.
One line at a time
What followed was not a grand unveiling but a slow accretion, which is the honest texture of most successful urban infrastructure. T3 opened along a former railway alignment in December 2006. T4 followed in 2009. A dedicated airport link, the Rhônexpress, opened in 2010; T5 in 2012. T6, running north–south across the eastern districts and deliberately skirting the centre to connect hospitals, the stadium and the university without forcing every journey through Part-Dieu, opened in 2019. T7 followed in 2021. The extension that reached La Doua this February lengthened T6 by those ten stations — a small line on a press release, a transformed commute for the people who now live along it.
Two larger projects are under construction as this is written. T9 is to link the multimodal node at Vaulx-en-Velin–La Soie with Charpennes; T10 is to run from Gerland, in the seventh arrondissement, south through Saint-Fons to Vénissieux — a corridor that stitches together some of the metropolis’s less-served working districts rather than its showcase ones. Both are slated to enter service around 2027. By the city’s own account the network will then carry more lines than the eight-line system most riders picture today, and the map will have crept decisively outward, away from the historic core and into the suburbs where the daily mobility problem actually lives.
A tram is never only a tram. It is a decision about who the street belongs to, made in steel and renewed every time a line is added.
Programme-cadre des Voies Lyonnaises, Métropole de Lyon
The street, redrawn
A surface tram has a quality the metro lacks: it cannot be ignored from the pavement. Where it runs, it takes width. A two-track alignment, a platform, the safety margin either side — that geometry has to come from somewhere, and in a dense city it comes from the car. Every new Lyon tram line is therefore also, quietly, a road diet. The lawns and tree-lines that increasingly run between the rails are not decoration; they are the visible argument that the carriageway it replaced was never the only legitimate use of the space.
That argument is now being made on a metropolitan scale, and not only by the trams. Since 2020 the Métropole de Lyon has been building the Voies Lyonnaises — a planned network of thirteen segregated cycle routes intended to total roughly 350 kilometres by 2030. By the metropolis’s own figures the network stood at around 200 kilometres in 2025 and is meant to pass 250 the following year. Like the tramway, it is a redistribution of public space dressed as a transport project: protected cycle tracks carved, lane by lane, out of road that used to be given over wholly to driving. Trams and bike routes are not competitors here. They are two halves of the same wager — that a city can move more people through the same streets by giving the car less of them.
The harder lever
Building rail and cycle track is the constructive half of the shift. The restrictive half is the low-emission zone — the Zone à Faibles Émissions, or ZFE — which since the start of 2025 has barred the most polluting cars from a core covering Lyon, Villeurbanne, Caluire-et-Cuire and parts of Bron and Vénissieux inside the ring road. The rule works through the national Crit’Air sticker system, which grades vehicles by emissions; from January 2025 the more heavily polluting classes — broadly, older diesel and petrol cars — lost the right to circulate or park within the zone.
This is where the honest version of the story diverges from the brochure. Low-emission zones have become one of the most contested instruments in French urban politics, attacked as a tax on people who cannot afford a newer car and defended as a public-health necessity. At national level the legal foundation has been openly fought over: a parliamentary move to abolish the zones was struck down on procedural grounds by the Constitutional Council, then revived and carried in further votes into 2026. The legal status of the ZFE is, at the time of writing, genuinely unsettled, and Lyon’s own enforcement sits inside that uncertainty. The point is not that the restriction is secure. It is that the tramway and the cycle network are what make the restriction defensible at all: you can credibly tell a household it may no longer drive an old diesel into the centre only if there is, in fact, a tram that goes where they need to go.
Who runs it now
The institutional plumbing matters more than it looks. The network trades under the familiar TCL brand and is owned and planned by SYTRAL Mobilités, but the daily operation changed hands in a way regular passengers barely registered. For three decades the network was run under contract by Keolis. From 1 January 2025 the tram, metro and funicular concession passed, after competitive tender, to RATP Dev, a subsidiary of the Paris transport operator, on a contract of around a decade, while Keolis kept the buses and trolleybuses on a shorter contract. The vehicles did not change colour; the company driving them did. It is a reminder that a European transport network of this kind is not one thing but a layered arrangement — a public authority that decides, a brand the public sees, and an operator that can be replaced without the city skipping a beat.
That separation is, in its undramatic way, the whole point. Lyon learned the hard lesson of the 1950s — that a transport mode can be abolished by a city that has temporarily stopped believing in it. The modern arrangement makes the trams harder to un-build. The rails belong to the public authority; the routes are written into long-range plans; the operator is merely a tenant. A future council that wanted to tear the network out again would have to argue against a generation of dependence and a metropolis-wide plan, not merely sign a demolition order.
What the return actually taught
Stand at La Doua as the afternoon trams come in and the lesson is less about engineering than about memory. Lyon already knew how to run trams; it had simply chosen to forget, and then spent twenty-five years and a great deal of money relearning what it had thrown away. The cities now sending delegations — and there are many, across France and beyond — tend to ask about rolling stock and track-bed costs. The more useful question is the one Lyon answered the slow way: whether a city can hold a single direction of travel across decades, through changes of operator, swings of national politics and the permanent unpopularity of taking space from the car.
The trams that vanished from Lyon went quietly, lifted line by line by a city that thought it was modernising. The trams that came back are arriving the same way — one line, one extension, one redrawn street at a time. The difference is that this generation appears to understand what the last one did not: that the network is not finished when the last rail is welded, and that the surest way to keep a tram is to keep building the next one.
Sources: SYTRAL Mobilités and TCL (network history, line openings, operator concession); Métropole de Lyon (Voies Lyonnaises programme-cadre, ZFE / Zone à Faibles Émissions); Lyon tramway opening dates 2001–2026 (T1–T7, T6 extension, T9/T10 projects); French national Crit’Air scheme and parliamentary / Constitutional Council proceedings on low-emission zones, 2025–2026; RATP Dev and Keolis concession records.
