The tourist tram, and what to ride instead

The options around lisbon trams are set out side by side below, with the conditions that genuinely favour one over the other.

Why it is crowded

One historic route climbs through the oldest neighbourhoods and appears in every guide, which produces continuous queues. The vintage carriages are small, which makes the crowding worse than the passenger numbers suggest. It is a genuinely pleasant ride and is difficult to enjoy at the busiest times.

The service cannot simply be scaled up either, because the fleet of small cars is finite and the single-track sections with passing loops cap how many can be on the line at once, however long the queue gets.

The alternatives

Other tram routes use similar vehicles across comparable terrain with far fewer passengers. Some cover longer distances along the river and through neighbourhoods most visitors never reach.

Put simply, riding one of these gives the same experience without the queue. One of the long riverside services runs modern articulated cars instead, which are much more comfortable and far less interesting to photograph, and they are the sensible choice when the point is to arrive somewhere rather than to ride something.

Timing changes everything

Early morning and late evening are substantially quieter on every route. Boarding at an intermediate stop rather than the terminus is sometimes possible, though not when full.

Off-season the problem largely disappears. Direction matters as much as hour, since the queue builds at the terminus where everybody starts, and boarding at the far end to ride the route backwards is frequently the same journey with a fraction of the wait.

Pickpocketing is real and specific

Crowded tourist trams are the single most reported location for theft in the city. It is opportunistic rather than confrontational, and ordinary precautions are effective. Bags in front, nothing in back pockets, and awareness at boarding and alighting cover most of the risk.

Where it helps most, the mechanism is almost always the crush at the door: someone stalls in front of you as you board, and the person behind then has a reason to be pressed against your bag and a few unobserved seconds in which to use it.

It is transport, not a ride

The trams are part of the network and are used by residents to get places. Treating them as such — boarding with a card, getting off where you need to — is both cheaper and less stressful.

The lifts and funiculars are similarly useful and similarly overlooked. The people it costs most are the residents of the steepest streets, for whom a full car means waiting out several more with shopping in both hands, which is worth knowing before deciding that a seat is owed to you.

The photograph that puts you in the road

The narrow streets that make the route photogenic are exactly the ones where the car fills the whole width, and a tram cannot steer around anything at all. Braking distance on a wet gradient is far longer than the low speed suggests, and the bell is a warning rather than a greeting.

In practice, residents step into a doorway the moment they hear one coming, which is the local reflex worth copying, particularly on a blind corner where you will hear the car well before you see it. The better frames come from a side street or a flight of steps above the line in any case, where you get the car, the hill and the overhead wires without standing where the car needs to be.

Side by side

The takeaway

Ride a different tram. Same carriages, same hills, no queue.

The version you keep doing is the version that works.