Theatre of Opera and Ballet, Lviv
May 30, 2008
The Ukrainian transportation network is generally slow, unreliable, and not well maintained. For example, the country has over 14,000 miles of railway tracks, but no high speed lines. Many of the trams in operation in various cities date to the Soviet era, and modern, low floor equipment has only been procured for the first time in recent years.
Lviv has a tramway system that currently (as of February 2022) has 8 lines operating on approximately 75 miles of tracks. Trams have been used in Lviv since the first horse drawn tram in the city was started in 1880, and they have been fully electrified since 1908. From the time of Ukraine’s independence in 1991 until the mid 2010s, the rolling stock was a mix of Tatra KT4 trams and T4 trams. Low floor trams, built through a Ukranian-German joint venture, entered service in 2014 and in 2020, the first low floor tram to be assembled in its entirety in Ukraine, the Electron T5L64, entered service. The Tatra T4 trams have since been retired. Lviv’s tram is one of few in the former Soviet Union to have been built with grooved rail, due to the fact that when the rails were laid, Lviv was part of Galicia in Austria-Hungary. In addition to the trams, Lviv also has a fleet over 100 trolleybuses serving 11 routes. About 200,000 people use the trams and trolleybuses each day.
