Tram, trolleybus and bus services in Eastern-European socialist urban planning: Case studies of Magdeburg, Ostrava and Oryol (1950s and 1960s)

This study examines urban collective transport policy in the city planning of three European countries under the Socialist Bloc in the 1950s and 1960s. The main aim is to account for the success of the private car in approaches to urban infrastructure and to understand how this affected tramway system planning. This then leads to a new perspective in understanding the conflict between the adoption of transport vehicles: The diversity of argument in tramway planning has been analysed using official publications, professional literature, and the urban and transport plans of the three case study cities. It results that planning solutions prioritised more national and local conditions, their logic and the singularity of their characteristics over the specific principles related to the ideology of the communist regimes.