Trace-driven simulation captures mobility, communication, compute contention, and deadlines in edge-server placement studies, but repeated evaluation of candidate placements is costly. This paper compares static density-based proxies and sampled-window simulation with full-horizon simulation on 990 placements across three urban tram networks. Placement generation and static evaluation use tram residence-time density, while held-out workload realisations are reserved for simulation. The covered-density proxy achieved mean Kendall rank correlation 0.943 and retained the population-best placement within its top ten in all ten city–budget cells. Its median evaluation time was 13.5 ms per placement, compared with 72 s for full simulation. However, the proxy was not a calibrated quality-of-service (QoS) estimator and did not reliably preserve feasible placements under strict deadline-miss constraints. Sampled-window simulation reduced evaluation time and absolute QoS error, but its accuracy depended on the temporal position of the window under nonstationary demand. The results distinguish candidate preselection from QoS certification: static proxies can reduce the placement population, whereas simulation remains necessary to estimate QoS and evaluate constraints.