New streetcar Liège finally on the rails

It was quite a saga, but the new streetcar in Liège went out for its first official public run this morning. After two months of testing on the new rails, the streetcar switched to its commercial speed of 20 k/h.

The streetcar, renamed “the white snake” by designer Michel Redolfi, and the new mobility network cost about 1 billion euros. In the words of Jean-Michel Soor, CEO of the Walloon public transport company TEC: “We are at the dawn of a new era of mobility in the fiery city.”

20 stations, 11,7 km long

The long-awaited streetcar in Liège, located in the heart of Belgium’s third-largest metropolitan area (600,000 inhabitants), serves 23 stations every five minutes during peak hours and every eight to 15 minutes during off-peak hours. Tickets are sold at the same fares as for bus trips.

The streetcar runs on an 11.7-kilometer route that connects Sclessin, where the Standard football stadium is located, with the Gare des Guillemins, the city center, Coronmeuse, and Liège Expo. The first streetcar of the day leaves at 5 a.m., and services continue until 1 a.m. every day of the year.

Many setbacks, raising costs

The new tramway was scheduled for completion in October 2022. Still, the construction site experienced many setbacks, such as flooding, the unexpected underground cables and pipes that the contractor encountered, and rising costs.

When it was signed, the contract for the design, construction, financing, and 27-year maintenance of the tramway was worth more than half a billion euros, but the cost eventually rose to about 1 billion euros.

“No extension is a historical mistake”

There used to be a streetcar in Liège, but the last line was closed in the 1960s in favor of an infrastructure specifically for cars. Initially, the new streetcar line was also to be extended to Herstal and Seraing, two towns near Liège located on the Meuse River, but the new Walloon majority found the project too expensive and replaced it with two priority bus lines.

In the newspaper L’Avenir, Professor Mario Cools, a specialist in transportation and mobility at the University of Liège, calls that decision a historical and strategic mistake because of the costs already spent and because “it deprives the Liège tramway precisely of part of its ‘mass transport’ advantage between different points of attraction.”

To persuade other commuters and tourists to take the streetcar, the city has also built two paying “P+R” parking garages, together accounting for 1436 spaces: Droixhe/Bressoux is 10 minutes from the city center, and Sclessin/Standard is 20 minutes away.