Paris stands on the brink of constructing the biggest underground project in the history of the French nation. With about 170km of new underground infrastructure in total, the 205km Grand Paris Express will expand the city’s metro system to one of the largest in the world. This project is of epic proportions and will provide a multi-metro route solution to serve the rapid growth and increasing urban density of the city. Armand van Wijck reports for TunnelTalk.
In 2030 Paris expects 10.5 million passengers to use the city’s metro every day, initiating the need to expand the current system as used by 8.5 million travellers per day. To deal with the expected 2 million growth increase, the city has chosen to construct a 205km orbital network which will connect the city suburbs to each other.
While the €25.9 billion (US$29 billion) orbital network will relieve the enormous pressure and congestion on the existing radial lines, the key driving factor behind the Grand Paris Express is urbanisation. “The suburbs surrounding Paris city centre are densely populated and growing rapidly, with more and more people needing to travel between the suburbs only,” explained Vincent Baumont, Deputy Director of the Mission of Project Management Consulting of engineering company Arcadis. “It would therefore make most sense to connect all these suburbs with each other by a ring line and thus avoid crossing Paris.”
The most telling line, and *so* applicable to the choices London has made, is
“By just adding a line, for example, every 10 years, we cannot cope anymore with the future,” explained Bas Bollinger, Global Leader Rail & Urban Transport at Arcadis.
This is like building Crossrails 2,3 and 4 together. If only …
@ Alison W – yep, as you say so telling for London. You can argue that the scale of Paris’s undertaking is breathtaking but really, for them, this is only a bit of a ramp up from what they normally do. Paris has had a policy of modal improvement for many years with regular investment over and above what they need to do to keep things in decent nick.
London is still dealing with asset health backlogs from the 1990s. A recent TfL report said as much which is really quite ridiculous when you think about it. You can perhaps understand a backlog stretching to a decade but when it’s twenty plus years it’s daft. And we won’t mention the Bakerloo line with 60 year old trains in a few years time.
What Paris has done and is doing is what London should have on its forward plan. This is why I regularly bemoan the lack of tube network expansion and extension. Yes we have a couple of piddling little schemes – one in build and one in the financial pending tray. However there’s no real ambition and commitment. CR2 and the Lewisham extension are “in the headlines” but there’s no money. The only areas where London could claim to have been a bit ahead of Paris is bus network expansion and what we’ve done with the original Overground. Paris has been improving its buses for years, we are now cutting our network. Paris went with trams for inner area orbital travel but has now started on some main line rail schemes with the first bit of Tangentielle Nord now open. We have a phobia about trams unless they remain in the boroughs of Croydon and Merton.
My only “concern” about the Paris scheme is whether it will all be built. If they can keep things within budget and broadly on time they may be OK. However if they end up with delayed projects / increasing costs this may raise questions. We have been here in the past with the westward extension of RER Line E and also extensions to Metro line 14. However these schemes seem to be back in favour but suffered years of delay.