Depending on your definition, this actually is not peak performance.
Subways are.
Obviously, the tunnels are absurdly expensive, but nothing moves as many people as quickly around a city as a subway.
They’re also extremely reliable, meaning people are even more likely to actually use them, and their above-ground footprint is essentially zero.
Subways are for mobility (moving large numbers of people rapidly); trams are for access (getting you close to your destination). They complement each other and a well-designed city would have both.
STOP I can only get so erect
You’re going to make me write a cute green-urbania fiction of my self-insert walking around a beautiful city with parks everywhere and using the sub-rails to go far distances and then get on cute retro san francisco style over land trams to make my way to walk-only brick roads and then walk to some book store, the corners piled high with books, with books stacked outside the store under a cloth awning, owned by a wise old man of unclear nationality who spends his days reading the books he sells, who knows me well enough to offer a glass of tea.
😩
Skytrains my dude, similar footprint, same tech, and I assume it costs significantly less, and is able to dip underground when there absolutely ISNT the footprint for it above ground
Monorail!
While monorails are cool, skytrains are literally just trains and thus insanely hard to beat for cost vs efficiency