The construction of a tramway in Limassol could cost as much as €95 million per kilometre, the city’s mayor Yiannis Armeftis said on Thursday, as he evaluated the prospects for a tramway to be built in Cyprus’ second city.

“Preliminary estimates vary significantly depending on the technology to be used, with the cost ranging from €25m to €95m per kilometre,” he told television channel Sigma, though he did stress that “such an investment should not be evaluated solely based on construction costs”.

Instead, he said, “the equation should take into account the benefits which could arise from upgrading transit areas, increasing the value of land and real estate, and improving people’s quality of life”.

On this front, he made reference to “the economic cost caused by traffic delays through lost working hours and people’s travel time”, with Limassol frequently subject to long rush-hour tailbacks on its road network.

He said that Cyprus is “excessively dependent on the private car”, and that that makes his own city’s traffic issue “particularly difficult to deal with”.

“No city has solved its traffic problem when dependence on the private car reaches around 90 per cent. Traffic can be managed properly when public transport is also used,” he said.

Govt currently spends €100m per year on public transport

At present, he said, the government spends around €100m per year on public transport, of which around a quarter is spent on Limassol.

However, he added, “despite these significant expenditures, the use of buses remains limited”. To this end, he pointed out that only three to five per cent of journeys undertaken across Cyprus involve a bus, and said that “long delays and time-consuming routes discourage people” from using the bus to travel.

“It is not convenient because it has also lost its credibility,” he said, though he did stress that on the other hand, when a bus route is both reliable and useful, the public may take to it.

He gave the example of Limassol’s number 30 bus route, which runs along its coastal road, and said that “frequent and fast routes are a basic requirement for people to choose the bus instead of the car”.

On the matter of the possibility of constructing a tramway, he said that he had attended a meeting at the transport ministry on Monday, during which “the first steps of the studies were presented, as well as preliminary data on the possibility of installing a tram in Limassol”.

“The aim of the process is to examine whether this is a realistic and sustainable option, which could function complementarily to other means of public transport,” he said.

Availability of space ‘one of the main challenges’

Asked how a tramway could be installed in a city where “available road space is already limited”, he said that “this is one of the main challenges of the project”.

Nonetheless, he pointed out that bus lanes have already been installed in Limassol, and that they could be “used as tram corridors”.

He also pointed out that “other European cities” with “even smaller populations or dense construction” have also managed to build tramways.

“Behaviour changes when there are appropriate routes and when there is appropriate infrastructure,” he said.

Prountzos had called for tramway in Nicosia

His comments come after Nicosia mayor Charalambos Prountzos had last month renewed his call for a tramway to be built in the capital, saying that the Nicosia municipality had initially prepared a study for a 14-kilometre tram line, and that after he took office in 2024, the length of the planned line grew to 20km.

Regarding how the plans could be financed, pointed out that the European Union’s next multiannual financial framework – the bloc’s budget for the period covering the years between 2028 and 2034 – enters force “in about a year”, and said that as such, discussions about a tramway “should have already started” with a view to securing EU funding.

“What exactly are we waiting for to intervene?”.