There's a direct comparison here: Birmingham is a small city
If you want to have a large city comparison, look at Berlin.
Berlin was divided after WW2 until 1989. West-Berlin, like most of West-Germany, removed all of their trams and replaced them for individual car use and buses. East-Berlin largely kept their trams.
The difference between trams and buses are huge. The „schedule“ of the major West-Berlin bus routes have become a running joke among Berliners: „You’ll wait and wait and suddenly there’s a herd of them!“. It’s bad. Really bad.
Trams are the reason I live in East-Berlin and would never, ever move to West-Berlin.
Ugh, that is definitely annoying and dangerous. I used to live in Erfurt, Germany for a while. Quaint medieval old-town, huge cathedral, very popular with tourists, some major attraction happening roughly every weekend.
So they have that really narrow alley running from the cathedral to the central square where all the tourists and citizens are squeezing through, and yeah, lo and behold, they run a tram through it as well… 🤪
I gotta assume the majority of Germany’s ~30 tram deaths per year are drunken tourists in Erfurt.