With a tramway, speed of loading is particularly important because it enables the vehicle to achieve the rapid service which its acceleration allows, rather than spending a high proportion of its time standing still.
The system proposed for Bath includes a conductor on each vehicle, this permits ticket checking and issuing during the journey which makes multiple doors less necessary. (With a conductor on board, a tram can do more than twice the work of a bus, which justifies the economics of using a crew of two)
The proposed design has only a single central door each side and this gives it a particular advantage in the streets of Bath where it would avoid the difficulty of providing every stop with a long tram platform for level loading at all doors.
Long articulated trams have many doors along their length which makes for fast loading and unloading of passengers at stops. Where ticket checking is performed during boarding, the use of multiple entrances helps to relieve a potential bottleneck.
