I can't comment on the trams in Manchester, but down here in London there are lots of bus drivers who often travel at excessive speed. As for the ludicrous comments on here about people not looking when they cross roads, how absurd can you get! Some pedestrians who get knocked down MAY not have looked PROPERLY, but then again they were'nt expecting a vehicle - some speedfreak motormoron - to be travelling at 40mph plus in a town centre.

   Obviously this accident was just that, an accident, and I can empathise with some of the previous commentors who think the media have overblown this. I have no problem with the trams or their drivers, (I use the service to commute to work in the city centre), but one thing we could probably do with is some pedestrian crossings across tram tracks in certain places. For example, I often cross the double tracks at the end of Aytoun Street, where it meets Portland Street. There are pedestrian crossings for getting across the roadways there, but I have to make a point of reading the tram drivers signals to see if it is safe to cross (for the record a horizontal line is stop and a vertical line is go). If a tram is stopped there, waiting for the road traffic lights to change, you cannot accurately tell if it is safe to cross in front of it, or if it is about to move off.