Dangerous Styling

A Close Call with Zurich’s New Trams

By Niko Kitsakis, January 2025

I almost got run over by one of Zurich’s new trams a few weeks back, and the reason is bad industrial design. I was walking with a friend, and we were crossing the street at a zebra crossing that I use often. There’s a tram stop a few metres down from that zebra crossing. We looked left and right and saw no cars or other traffic, just the back of a tram that stood at the stop. No problem, we thought. As we were crossing, how­ever, that tram suddenly started moving towards us!

What happened?

It turned out that the “back” of that tram wasn’t the back at all but the front. A combi­nation of different factors made it effectively impossible for us to see that, however. Why is that so? Take a look at the following pictures:

Spot the difference: The front and back of the new tram models in Zurich.

As you can see, the new trams, called “Flexity Zurich”, are sym­met­ri­cal: The front and the back look exactly the same. The differences that do exist are rather marginal: The logo between the lights, the wind­shield wiper, the color of the lights, and the cockpit. I don’t remember noticing the lights of the tram when we were crossing the road, and the windshield wiper is just as hard to make out in real life as it is in the picture.

As for not being able to see the driver in the cockpit: The surrounding light must have hit the front of the tram in a similar way to what you can see in the image on the left. Note how the win­dow is reflecting the scenery and hardly allows you to see inside the vehicle.

But why did we think that we saw the back of the tram and not the front? Well, the spot where we were crossing the street merges four tram tracks into two. That means that it’s harder to tell which direction a tram is going to take. It would be too compli­cated to describe the exact layout of the street we were on that day, but in summary, we had every reason to believe that the tram was facing away from us.

The combination of unfortunate cir­cum­stan­ces like the unclear tram tracks and the light re­flect­ing from the tram cockpit would have been bad enough. But it is the fact that the tram looks exactly the same from the front as it does from the back what made the situation so treach­er­ous.

Deliberate Deception

What was unintentional with the tram design re­mind­ed me of some­thing that some operators of fighter jets do deliberately: They paint a false canopy on the underside of their jets to con­fuse enemies that are in visible range. It is the sort of thing where the hope is that a split-second con­fu­sion might be enough to get the upper hand in a battle. This is what this looks like:

The underside of a CF-18 Hornet (a variant of the F/A-18 Hornet) from the Royal Canadian Air Force with a false canopy painted on the belly. The image is from Wikipedia.

It’s surprisingly convincing, don’t you think? Even looking at the picture for a while it still seems relatively plausible that you’re looking at the real canopy. Imagine seeing this only from the corner of your eye for half a second or so.

Now, while it is of course prudent to confuse your enemy whenever you can in times of war, I am relatively certain that methods like this don’t have any place in the design of a vehicle made for public transport.

To be fair, the Flexity trams have quite a light show going on with their tail lights: There is an LED-band surrounding the round lamps on the left and right that can light up red (though, for some rea­son, it’s not always lit and sometimes blinks). This would theo­reti­cally alleviate some of the confusion caused by the vehicle’s symmetry. The problem is, however, that you cannot know that the tram actually has red tail lights if you stand in front of the tram, thinking that it might be the back. Take a look at the light band when it is on:

The light show might be a nice gimmick, but it’s not much use when you’re on the other side of the vehicle and it has no discernable front.

So again, while normally you can see and – because of the tracks – reasonably assume where a tram is coming from, there can be traffic situations where it is not so clear. In such mo­ments, it would be of great value to un­am­big­uous­ly know which part of a large and fast-accelerating object is actually the front. It almost sounds like too obvious a com­ment to have to make but here we are. If you’re still not con­vinced, take a look at one of the predecessors of the Flexity, the “Tram 2000”¹:

With the Tram 2000, it’s very clear which part is the front and which is the back.

As you can see, there is no way you could mix up the front with the back on the Tram 2000: The window on the front is slightly angled versus the back of the car which is completely straight. The line num­ber is bigger in the front than it is in the back, and the red tail light is smaller and much higher up than the front light. In short: the form is asymmetrical.

The biggest difference, however, is the large, round headlight. Mind you that, on all trams, wherever they are old or new, the headlight was never meant to light the street in front of the vehicle. It was always meant to make the tram more visible to pedestrians. That implicitly means that it not only works by being lit but also by giving the front of the vehicle – the dangerous part – an unmistakable char­ac­ter.

So yet again, it seems that a problem we face today was actually solved in the past – the Tram 2000 was, after all, built between 1976 and 1992. What’s really interesting, though, is the fact that this old model was designed by engi­neers, while the new one was designed by designers. Or at least by people who call themselves that. Why so harsh? Well, a designer, by my definition, should be a problem solver, not a problem creator. But there’s another reason for me to be annoyed about the situation.

Award-Winning Design

The Flexity tram – if you can believe it – has won a Red Dot Design Award. I for one can believe it: For a long time now, I have seen one question­ably designed product upon the other, all graced by this award. It’s not that every product they gave an award to is badly designed, but too many are. So many indeed, that the sheer ap­pear­ance of the Red Dot logo on any item makes me immediately sus­pi­cious². At the very least, it should be called an award for styling, not design. Then it might be a different story. Why do I say that? See what the Red Dot Jury wrote about choosing the Flexity tram for their award:

Flexity Zurich impresses with a successful mix of retro elements that create a direct link to the city, a friendly interior design and con­tem­po­rary technology.

And in the project’s description, it says, amongst other things, the following about the concept:

The high window front, inspired by Zurich’s tram waiting rooms of the 1930s, offers a wide view of the city. The ergo­nomi­cally shaped beech­wood seats, on the other hand, pay homage to a tram from the 1960s.

So it really is about styling, not design. Because design is about how some­thing works and what problems get solved. Styling is about the look of an object. That is the reason I called this essay “Dangerous Styling”. With very few exceptions, the styling may never be higher in priority than the actual design of an object. Especially not when the object in question is something that could be potentially dangerous.

Why did this happen?

In short: I don’t know. I haven’t been there when the decisions where made as they were. That is, incidentally, also what leads my opponents to call my style of critique unfair. But they forget the most important thing: I’m not an advocate for other designers. As a designer, I’m the advocate for the users and consumers. So I try to look at these things from their perspective. And they are not being helped by trams where you can’t tell the front from the back.

If you want to hear my hypothesis as to why this happened: Money and ineptitude. It’s simply cheaper to construct only one part that you can use in two places than it is to make two different parts. And if, in ad­di­tion, no one is competent enough to realize that this could be a prob­lem (or if everyone is too scared to loose their job if they were to speak out) then it’s no wonder such decisions get made.

I said above that the Tram 2000 – the last model to have a discernable front and back – was built between 1976 and 1992. That means that it was designed at a time when CAD, 3D printing and many other modern engineering tools didn’t yet exist and the first scientific pocket cal­cu­la­tor was still a pretty new device. Most engineers prob­ably still used slide rulers for their work. With that in mind, isn’t it sad that after almost five decades, we can’t create better products than people who we should consider tech­no­logi­cal cavemen? That – with all the tools we have today – we can’t do a better job and actually do a worse one?

As I said above, the Tram 2000 was made by en­gin­eers, not by de­sign­ers. So all the fuss that’s being made about the design pro­fes­sion these days is worth exactly nothing if your standard en­gi­neer from the 1960s and 1970s did a better job because he actu­ally had some common sense. Keep in mind that I say this as a de­sign­er myself.

What to do?

All this being said, I think it could be relatively easy to implement a quick fix. While a future redesign of the Zurich tram should, of course, avoid symmetry altogether, the current Flexity tram could be modified: Removing the six headlights and mounting a single round one in the middle of the front panel would go a long way to help pe­des­tri­ans understand the orien­tation of the vehicle. Also, the single headlight would be re­min­is­cent of the one that the Tram 2000 (and the tram models before that) had. After all, if you go by what the designers said about their inspiration, they wanted to be retro anyway.

As for the lights on the back, they would all have to go. They look way too much like headlights (because they are). I would replace those with a single horizontal LED-bar in the middle which is permanently lit up in red. But again: This is just a quick fix. The symmetrical geometry of the body will always have the potential to confuse pe­des­tri­ans. As I said earlier, the most im­por­tant thing is for the operator, VBZ, to avoid this sort of thing in the tram of the next generation.

As for the Flexity tram, if the quick fix doesn’t do the trick, it’s possible to go all the way back with the retro idea and look for inspiration in the 1890s. The trams from those days may have had many disadvantages to the ones from our time but at least you always knew exactly where the front was…

1. There has been another tram model that came out between the Flexity and the Tram 2000 which was called “Cobra”. It would be beyond the scope of this piece to write something about that particular model. Just this much: It too was sym­met­ri­cal in shape, so it more or less had the same design flaw as the Flexity tram. ↑
2. It’s not exactly helping my trust in their competence that the good people at Red Dot obviously think that “Apple entered the computer world 40 years ago with the first Macintosh.” I’m sorry, but Apple didn’t enter the computer world in 1984 with the first Macintosh, they invented the personal computer when they intro­duced the Apple II in 1977. ↑

Keep in mind that I live in the Zurich area and in the city itself for 40+ years now. In other words, I am familiar with the city and its trams. So if this sort of thing can happen to me, think about how dangerous the ambiguous tram design can be for tourists and other visitors. Even before my near-accident, I always had a weird feeling in the back of my head when I had to cross the street at a tram stop with one of these Flexity trams near me.

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