Several French cities are now developing and building Light Rail-systems (LR) from scratch, that is LR has been absent for several decades. In France LR and urban public transport in general are very strongly connected to the city in a broad sense, to city politics and politicians, urban environment matters and urban planning. This seems to make rapid implementation of LR-projects a lot easier, in Lyon for example the two new lines were built in fours years. The proportion of urban regeneration costs of the total LR infrastructure investments is about half. Financing of LR has hitherto been exclusively public, private financing is discussed (as in Sweden) but there are at present no such schemes. The French urban transport legislation, for which there is probably no equivalent in other countries, demands a reduction of urban car traffic. This is a political objective and LR-development has become one of the means of achieving it. Like France and Sweden, England was for the most part without light rail for about 40 years. Most of the urban tramway systems were abandoned in favour of the bus in the 1950's, and street running light rail was not seen again until the early 1990's (in Manchester). In England the new light rail projects serve urban regions and sub-regions. This distinguishes them from the French schemes, which mostly tend to serve areas within the city itself. Beyond the city boundary, public transport tends to be less satisfactory, and may suffer from resources being focused on "showcase" light rail projects within the city itself. Perhaps this reveals a difference of urban culture and structure, in that English suburbs are usually of higher social status and quality than their French counterparts. In both countries LR is seen as a way of providing more priority for public transport, given the perceived difficulties of enforcing priorities for buses. However, LR development is not linked to traffic reduction policies in English cities.