Transport Investment: What Are the French Are up To?
An illustration of what ambition looks like - Part one
I remember going to Paris for the first time as a teenager and being staggered that it was so small.
Paris barely covers zones 1 and 2 of London. If Paris was London, Canary Wharf would be outside - as would Stratford, Hackney, Hampstead Heath and Brixton.
“Wow”, I thought to myself, “I’d imagined Paris as one of the biggest cities in Europe. What do I know?”
Then, on the Eurostar journey home, I started to get puzzled. Gare Du Nord is enormous. How can a city smaller than Bristol require a mainline station with 36 platforms - and it’s not even the only terminal?
And, looking out of the window of the train, I could see that Paris didn’t (as the guidebook seemed to imply) just… stop, shortly after the ends of the platform. Like London, the suburbs went on for about 20 minutes.
But, reopening the guidebook, there was no doubt that Paris had a very defined boundary. You could walk in any direction through densely packed Hausmann tenements and then reach the eight-lane Périphérique “Boulevard” (if you’re expecting something like the Grands Boulevards, forget it) and that’s the end. The tenements stop. There are few bridges across the road. The Metro stops. And Paris stops.
But the urban area does not. Paris is surrounded by suburbs with the wider region known as the Ile de France, and containing a population of 12 million. The Ile de France has no British equivalent. It’s 12,000 square km: roughly ten times Greater London. If you created an administrative area out of London and the counties bordering London (Surrey, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, inner Kent, inner Essex), you’d have something not a million miles from the Ile de France.
But, back when I first visited Paris, the attitude of Paris (and, I suspect, Parisiens) to the wider Ile de France was rather like that of ancient Britains to the uncharted territories of the map: there be dragons.
Grand Paris
The problem with the Ile de France as an administrative area is that it is just too big. The inner part is as densely populated as Paris but the outer part is open countryside.
What Paris needed to bind together the urban core was something equivalent to Greater London: a political designation that reflects the whole of the built-up urban area.
And that is what they got in 2016.
The idea was Nicolas Sarkozy’s (remember him? He’s the former French president who’s now on trial for taking bribes from Colonel Gadaffi). He first proposed it in 2007, it was defined by law in 2014 and came into existence in 2016. It is very much the equivalent of Greater London: it covers 6% of the area of Ile de France but includes 60% of the population. The population is slightly smaller than London and the density slightly larger but this is an accurate reflection of the core urban fabric.
The creation of Grand Paris really is transformational: it is the first time that historic Paris has had to acknowledge that the suburbs really are part of the same urban entity. And Grand Paris is a proper, legal “métropole”, with the ability to raise its own taxes.
Paris and its banlieue (suburbs) are, for the first time, one place.
Build it, they have come
Look at a transport map of Grand Paris and something immediately becomes obvious. The Metro stops at the border of historic Paris. This is the equivalent of the London Underground stopping somewhere in the middle of zone 2 (maybe Highbury & Islington, Belsize Park, Holland Park, etc). The vast majority of the rest of Greater Paris is completely unserved.
Paris does have an extensive suburban network, in the form of the RER (Réseau Express Régional), which was launched back in 1977 and now consists of five lines. The RER is very similar to Thameslink or the Elizabeth line, and is designed for regional connectivity. The early lines, A and B, are more like the Elizabeth line and are focussed on the area now designated as Grand Paris. But lines C and D are more like Thameslink and spread their tentacles far into the wider Ile de France. In addition, Grand Paris has a dense rail network but these lines tend to stop at the city centre termini. There’s also a good network of orbital trams. The nearest British equivalent to a Paris suburb is probably somewhere like Croydon: suburban trains, Thameslink and trams. But no tube.
It’s that lack of tube that the Grand Paris Express project intends to fix.
Grand Paris Express
The Grand Paris Express is one of those ambitious mega-projects that a country like France, with its history of state planning and a willingness to consider a tax take of 45% of GDP as normal, is able to just get on and do.
The goal is to knit together the outer suburbs of the new Grand Paris. This is something that London desperately needs to do as well.
Grand Paris, like London, has good interconnectivity in the historic centre and, like London, has recently completed a rail ring at about zone 2 distance.
(London did it through upgrading and connecting existing railways as the London Overground; Paris did it with newbuild trams).
But both cities have outer suburbs that are well-connected to the city centre but not to each other.
London’s answer to this problem was the Superloop: a single suburban ring of ever-so-slightly faster buses running largely on roads without bus priority.
Paris’s answer is 120 miles of brand new Metro serving 68 brand new stations.
Being honest, it’s not the same.
What is happening?
One of many large holes behind hoardings…
Line 15
Their Superloop equivalent is a brand new orbital Metro line to be numbered line 15.
This will do a complete 75km loop of the suburbs incorporating La Defense (Paris’s equivalent of Canary Wharf) plus inner suburbs including Nanterre (which became globally notorious for riots a couple of years ago), St Denis (known for one of France’s most historic cathedrals nestled amongst deprived housing blocks), new media hub Issy as well as endless residential suburbs. It will serve 36 stations and be the longest metro tunnel in the world when it opens and will transform connectivity. Being a brand-new orbital line, it is designed for seamless interchange with virtually every one of the existing radial routes it crosses.
This makes a huge difference.
The orbital lines of the London Overground were cobbled together from existing railway lines that had been primarily built with freight in mind. As it goes round London, the Overground has the opportunity to connect with the Underground 18 times. Of these, it misses 11 and hits seven.
By contrast, line 15 will interchange directly with - wait for it…. - Metro lines 1, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17 and 18, plus all five RER lines, four suburban rail routes and no fewer than eight suburban trams.
Both through its own services and as a connector, line 15 alone would revolutionise travel between Paris’s suburbs. It’s hard to visualise the scale of the Grand Paris Express, so let’s help visualise it like this: Line 15 will be longer than every single London Underground line, despite being an entirely new-build tunnel when most tube lines consist of a central tunnelled core connecting repurposed, previously existing surface rail routes in the suburbs. As a project, it’s jaw-dropping in its own right.
But it very much is not alone.
Grand Paris is also getting…
Line 16
Line 16 is a further orbital line connecting two new line 15 stations via a separate 28km crescent that sweeps further out into the more deprived parts of Grand Paris. Whereas line 15 is all about interchange, line 16 is about direct connectivity. It will bring Clichy into the rail network: one of the least well-connected parts of Grand Paris and one of the most deprived. Clichy-sous-Bois became notorious in 2005 when it was the spark that triggered that year’s bout of nationwide rioting.
Line 16 will also provide an orbital connection for the deprived suburb of Sevran, to complement its existing radial RER service.
At its Western end, line 16 will meet…
Line 17
If line 15 is about connectivity, line 16 is about deprivation, line 17 is a 25km join-the-dots of economic opportunity. Meeting line 16 at Le Bourget (notorious as the start of a very different kind of rail journey for thousands of Jews during the horrors of the holocaust), line 17 will service both the Parc des Expositions exhibition centre and Charles du Gaulle airport; providing Paris’s main airport with a Metro connection in addition to its RER service. Kensington Olympia, eat your heart out…
Line 18
Line 18 is a mirror image of line 16. Instead of forming an outer-suburban crescent connecting heavily deprived northeast Grand Paris, line 18 is a 50km outer-suburban crescent connecting affluent southwest Grand Paris.
It will connect Paris’s second airport of Orly with the city of Versailles (yes, that one - the place where they negotiated the treaty that ended world war one, and catalysed world war two). On the way, it will pass through the economically successful new town Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, the Plateau de Saclay (inappropriately, given it is a plateau, also known as Paris’s Silicon Valley) and a new eco-district at Palaiseau.
Line 18 will connect at its end with…
Line 14
At last, an existing line!
Line 14 is, architecturally, reminiscent of the Jubilee line Extension, with which it is contemporary.
It was the first new Metro line built since the 1930s when it opened in 1998. It runs north-south through historic Paris but is now to be extended out into the wider Grand Paris region in both directions. In the north it will terminate at Saint-Denis Pleyel, currently a simple stop on RER line D but shortly to become a Metro megahub as lines 14, 15, 16 and 17 of the new Grand Paris Express will all meet there.
If, like me, you’re getting somewhat exhausted and feel this must be it, then I’m afraid I have bad news, we still have to cover…
Line 11
This is one of the newest lines of the ‘original’ Metro, having opened in 1935. It’s also the shortest of the historic lines and one of the quietest. It’s a bit like the Bakerloo line, in that regard. Like line 14, it is being extended out to connect with the new Grand Paris Express lines 15 and 16. It will also provide a series of new stations in Neuilly-sur-Seine, one of Grand Paris’s most affluent cities and home to many of France’s top corporate HQs.
This isn’t the map of the whole network. Just the new stuff…
Visualise the scale
It’s so hard to visualise the scale of the Grand Paris Express.
The new lines total 200km. 200km. To put it into context, the new Elizabeth line tunnels were 21 km and the Jubilee line extension was 16km. If you add in the extension to the East London line, the original Jubilee line, the Northern line extension, the Victoria line, the Piccadilly line extension and the entire DLR (i.e. every significant addition to the tube map since the second world war!!)… you still don’t even get close.
We Londoners used to describe Crossrail as the largest building site in Europe. Well, I don’t think there’s much doubt that the Grand Paris Express has taken that title.
The lines will open in stages over the next ten years. I know I sound hyperbolic, but I can’t even begin to describe the impact the Grand Paris Express will have on the Paris metropolis. Transport schemes in the UK tend to be small. Some focus on economic development, some on reducing deprivation, some on stimulating housing. The extraordinary thing about the Grand Paris Express is that it can be designed to achieve every objective at once, and it’s of a scale that it can achieve them.
Paris future
Transport isn’t everything.
But it’s a big part of what makes a city succeed.
New York and London would not have become rivals to be ‘capital of the world’ in the 20th century if they’d had the transport connectivity of, say, Washington or Manchester. Londoners coast on the coat-tails of Victorian investment.
Similarly, Paris had one of the world’s great transport networks of the twentieth century - and was one of the twentieth century’s great cities.
New York and London have both, largely, rested on their laurels, preferring to rely on their Edwardian underground networks and keep taxes low. All the while, Metros in the Far East have been expanding rapidly. Nine of the ten biggest Metro networks on earth are now in China. Paris is now about to almost double the length of its Metro.
I suspect it will also cause Paris to become to become the capital of Europe for the 21st century. I feel sorry about that, as a proud Londoner, but I suspect it’s true.
What this means for us
I’m not stupid: we’re not going to run before we can walk.
But we can’t carry on as we are.
Last week, I talked about the need for consistent, long-term funding for transport. More than ever, it’s what we need. Please read that post, and share it if you agree with it.
This isn’t all
And, by the way, this isn’t all the French are up to. In my next post, there’s more to come…
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