Houston is also in the process of building a "new-style" tram network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/METRORail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/METRORail I'm pers

Houston is also in the process of building a "new-style" tram network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/METRORail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/METRORail I'm personally a bit lukewarm on them. I think many of these systems, especially the longer ones intended as major backbone/commuter routes are mainly "backup" plans forced by cost issues. The city has identified a backbone route that would be well served by a rapid-transit line, but the capital costs to build one are impossible to come up with in the current transit-funding climate, so a light-rail/tram line is built as Plan B. Besides Houston, another example that imo is clearly a case of "should have been rapid transit, but we couldn't afford it" is the Expo line in L.A., to Santa Monica. Santa Monica is becoming a major tech hub and has huge commute problems, but the system being built simply doesn't have the capacity to offload more than a small portion of the current car traffic. An in-between approach, sometimes called a "light metro", better serves in the commute-backbone role imo: light-rail-like vehicles, but at very high frequency (e.g. every 2-3 minutes) in order to enable the line to provide significant throughput. The Copenhagen Metro is an example of such a system. But running at those headways reliably almost requires a grade-separated right-of-way, which negates a lot of the capital-cost savings of putting in a street-level tram (though it's still somewhat cheaper, because the shorter trains mean smaller stations and a tighter max turning radius).