What are the French up to? Part 2
The French Have a Plan to transform Regional Connectivity in 24 cities
A few weeks ago, I wrote this post about the staggering French investments being made into the Paris Metro. At the time, I highlighted how this was going to leapfrog Paris into the position of the lead European city of the 21st century.
But what about regional cities?
Well, last week, I wrote this post about the gaping productivity gap in the British economy between London and all our other regional cities - and the need for transport investment in our regional cities as well.
Today - again - we’ll see what the French are up to.
And, I’m sorry. For Brits, living next door to the French and working in urban mobility is rather like having an unbelievably talented older sister.
As much as you might try to catch up, she’s always several steps ahead of you, and you worry she might always be.
The latest way in which the French are coasting towards straight As while we’re being put down a set is in the area of regional RERs.
RER
The RER, as I’m sure you know, is the Reseau Express Regional. It was created in Paris in the 1960s and the big idea is to use a mixture of new and existing infrastructure to create fast rail lines through the centre of Paris connecting the wider Paris commuter belt. Paris now has five of these lines (numbered A to E) while London has two (rather eccentrically called the Elizabeth line and Thameslink).
RER: big trains at big stations
Crossrail 2 was due to be London’s third (confusingly) but the pandemic put paid to that idea. TfL has been struggling to find money to fund day-to-day renewals: the idea of asking for a double-digit number of billions to dig a huge tunnel under central London just seemed fanciful.
Unfortunately, the French have not stayed still.
SERM
The new idea is to create “Services Express Régionaux Métropolitains”. These are, essentially, RERs for major cities. In November 2022, the French Parliament voted to create 10 of them. A year later, they voted to expand the project to 24 cities.
The 24 approved SERM projects
The idea is to connect towns outside major cities directly with the city centres. This is very relevant to the ‘levelling up’ debate in the UK.
My wife grew up in Halewood. It is not even outside Liverpool - at least, not outside the metropolitan area. It is an entirely contiguous suburb of Liverpool, yet its train service is hourly. It takes 26 minutes to do the seven-mile journey into town. Many towns in the north are even worse connected than this. Cities thrive when people can easily get to jobs: and outside London, this is not the case.
The SERMs in Paris are a recognition that, in many French metropolitan areas, the job of connecting up the city itself is making pretty good progress. Lyon (roughly equivalent to the Liverpool City Region) has four Metro lines and seven tram lines. But they all stay firmly within the core city (roughly equivalent to Liverpool city as opposed to the Liverpool City Region). Now the focus is on connecting the people outside the city to the city. i.e. places like Halewood.
Another very sensible feature of the SERMs is that they are not simply rail projects. Because they are connecting a low-density town or suburb to the city centre, connectivity to the station is key. So micromobility, bike sharing, carpooling and bike lanes are all part of the SERM projects.
Société des grands Projets
When I wrote my post about transport funding, one of my key arguments was that we inflate costs in the UK through our constant feast-famine approach to almost everything.
As funding yo-yos up and down, inexperienced teams of contractors have to learn on the job resulting in cost overruns. Just as the teams have acquired the skills, a panicked Treasury causes future similar projects to be scrapped, resulting in the newly-experienced teams being disbanded.
Then a few years later, the cycle starts all over again.
When I told you about the bonkers scale of the Grand Paris Express: a 200 km network of new Metro lines in the Paris suburbs, I highlighted that they have created a Government-owned company to build the whole thing: so lessons can be learned from the construction of one line and utilised in the next. One team: one corporate memory.
Well, one of the smart French moves has been to rename the Société du Grand Paris (this Government-owned company responsible for building the Grand Paris Express) into the Société des Grands Projets and make them responsible for delivering the SERMs.
This is wise. TfL did a great job of making the case to create a “production line” from Crossrail 1 to Crossrail 2 but couldn’t get the central Government interested. The Société des Grands Projets will build incredible institutional knowledge in tunnelling and infrastructure: with the result that French projects will be orders of magnitude cheaper than ours. The SERMs will be built by teams fresh from the job of digging 200 km of similar tunnel around Paris.
As I discussed with David Milner, CEO of Create Streets and Britain’s premier tram campaigner, the cheapest British tram scheme is more expensive than the most expensive tram scheme anywhere on the European continent. Just read that sentence again.
If we tried to do a big programme of tunnel building, we’d rapidly enter into a debate about why it costs five times more to build a train tunnel in Britain than France. Well, it is decisions like this that provide the answers.
Lessons for the BRITS
This is, of course, still early days for the SERMs. Approval was only given last year: there are 24 schemes but not all will happen, I’m sure.
But this is all highly relevant to the topics I’m talking about at the moment.
As I mentioned in my funding post, not everything is perfect in France. Local regions have funding control and many don’t invest sufficiently in public transport. But especially in the area of local transport, there are important lessons we can take around long-term funding, local control and national coordination.
That point about local control and national coordination is particularly important, and exactly what is happening with the SERMs. In next week’s post, I’ll describe the principles European countries adopt to specify their transport networks to see if there are lessons for us, especially given the creation of GBR.
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