A leaked internal memo from the Brussels public transport operator STIB has admitted, in unusually candid terms, that the city’s tram network has not, in any operational sense, been running for the past forty years, and that the presence of trams at stops across the capital has been, in the agency’s own words, “largely coincidental and not the result of scheduling.”
The memo, marked “Confidential, do not show the passengers” and dated March, was obtained by this newspaper after it was left on a seat of the number 7 tram, which had, characteristically, broken down near Montgomery.
“We have been maintaining the illusion for four decades”
The document, addressed to the STIB board, runs to twenty-three pages and is described internally as a “coming-clean exercise.” Its central finding is that the tram network, contrary to public information, has since 1986 operated “in a notional sense only,” and that the appearance of trams at stops across the city has been the product of “gravity, momentum, and hope, rather than timetabling.”
“We have been maintaining the illusion for four decades,” the memo reads. “The illusion has, on the whole, held. Passengers have, by and large, blamed themselves. We are, at this point, morally obliged to come clean, though we acknowledge that doing so will not, in any practical sense, improve the trams.”
The memo attributes the system’s survival to a combination of “low passenger expectations, the rain, and the fact that the alternative is the bus, which is worse.”
STIB: “We stand by our notional service”
Contacted for comment, a STIB spokesperson confirmed the memo’s authenticity but pushed back on the suggestion that the agency had misled the public. “We have always been clear that the trams run ‘approximately,’” the spokesperson said. “The word ‘approximately’ appears on every timetable we have ever published. We do not feel we have been deceptive. We feel we have been poetic.”
The Brussels regional government has announced a review. The review, a regional spokesperson confirmed, will be conducted by a tram, which is expected to arrive in approximately six to eighteen months.