20 ms·
The new Paris métro
- johncoltrane 3y agoThe exhibition mentioned in the article [1] is well worth a visit. [1] https://www.societedugrandparis.fr/fabrique-du-metro https://www.societedugrandparis.fr/fabrique-du-metro
- ggm 3y agoI mainly know the older, shallow line inner city routes. I've used the existing ?SNCF? Hookups to Orly, CDG and the Thalys North into Amsterdam, it works well. Paris was always an exemplar for modernisation in a time where the O.G. London underground was a bit moribund (rubber wheels) but retention of the carnet system beyond its life and a surge in London transport investment rather upended things. This is a huge expansion. Being brave enough to build rings is great: most capital cities obsess with spokes to existing hubs, or like the Elizabeth line do a single slash across. New York should read and weep.
- thriftwy 3y agoWeird that it does not have the route map of the expansions - see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Paris_Express https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Paris_Express Speaking about rings, Moscow metro now has three of these.
- mananaysiempre 3y agoMoscow’s situation is funny in part because a number of diagonal slashes is closer to what the city needs (the central parts are probably an order of magnitude over design capacity during rush hour and essentially never under it), but the plan for those got turned into a ring because apparently the infrastructure to turn trains around at the ends was too difficult to build. The other new ring is a fairly old preexisting train line that used to be cargo-only; it had the potential to be great, but unfortunately the ridiculously long connection times have made the real thing somewhat niche—if both your origin and your destination aren’t on it, the ten to fifteen minutes’ walk will likely make the result worse than just going through the center. And two connections are just never worth it. (There’s a whole story behind how building stupid useless connections came to be viewed as a virtue in Moscow transport planning—look up “Vykhino effect”. Doesn’t make the result any less shit, though.)
- thriftwy 3y agoI guess you've not experienced the Metro (and Vykhino effect) around 2003 if you think it is over capacity now. It is a cakewalk now. I, too, dislike the new connections, and the lack thereof, but the speed with which the new lines sprung up is a marvel.
- mananaysiempre 3y agoI was too young to remember clearly at the time, but I think I experienced the Vykhino railway-metro connection a few times in the early 2000s. I don’t seem to remember the original connection that’s said to have given the name to the “Vykhino effect” (wherein the suburban rail arrived at and the metro departed from the opposite sides of the platform, and you could cross it unimpeded, leading to the metro trains being completely full straight from the first stop—the “effect”) was still in operation then. I think the fence was already there on the platform and you had to use the disgusting, stinky, cramped tunnel? (That before the railway started fencing away everything in the name of better ticket controls.)
- thriftwy 3y agoYes, the Metro trains were chock full (think Tokyo), and you could only board a train if it skipped Vykhino if you needed to do so on some later station. I don't think it is possible to be physically unable to enter the train in 2023 (unless football fans return from thei match). In 2003 it was expected.
- unflxw 3y agoAren't the diagonals also being built? Primarily, if I recall correctly, by reusing existing passenger rails corridors and connecting their services instead of terminating them at the main stations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Central_Diameters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Central_Diameters
- mananaysiempre 3y agoFair point, though those are not the ones that people were talking about since the 90s—but then nobody could imagine you could wrangle the railway (a national service with a peculiar culture) into cooperating with the metro (a municipal one), that’s unironically an achievement of the current city administration. That these are being “built” is once again a bit too strong a statement—the rail lines were already there and in use for cargo and the occasional suburban train. (The veeery slooow speeds at which the latter went between the big stations had relegated them to the sole use of urban arcanists and the occasional exhausted hiker disembarking from his long-distance train.) There’s some renewal of the aging rails, to be fair, and the stations are new. Two problems with these: First, the stations are too few and once again too far away from anything else. (Nobody’s fault—the rails are sometimes a century older than the metro and the outward creep of the city limits.) Second, unlike on the ring, the trains on the chordal lines (I refuse to call them “diameters”) are operated according to the railway rules, meaning there are too few of them to be able to disregard the schedule, the schedule itself is at best a suggestion (and woe is you if you don’t keep track of train cancellations), and the stupid multi-hour midday “maintenance breaks” are still in place. I’ve used these lines for weekly commutes, and if they fit your problem well, they can be very useful. But overall I’d say they are even more situational than the ring, and it’s frustrating compared to my utopian headcanon of how well they could work. Or hell, to the RER lines in Paris, even if those connections are no joke either—nevermind the Barcelona Rodalies, which are (or were, two decades ago) the platonic ideal of suburban/urban rail transport interconnection.
- oldpersonintx 3y ago[dead]
- xkekjrktllss 3y ago>New York should read and weep an understatement
- colordrops 3y agoLA should read and jump off a bridge
- jseliger 3y agoL.A. has actually been much better than NYC at building new transit infrastructure over the last 40 years: https://archive.ph/sbTkC https://archive.ph/sbTkC. NYC, though, is obviously starting from a much higher base. L.A. should also be working harder to build more faster, but it's not the laughing stock it once was.
- ohdeegee 3y agoYou're very generous with LA. The few lines it's built recently (eg Exhibition Line) are so slow that no one in their right mind would take it unless they have absolutely no better option. In Paris, public transport is always the first option.
- hifromLA 3y agoThe speed yes it’s not ideal and at a minimum there should be signal priority or just remove at grade crossings entirely, but land use in LA is really really not good for transit. The built environment is designed to support automobile use and that will hopefully change through TOD. My point is the distances regularly covered in LA would be absolutely unthinkable in Manhattan and the more urban parts of the outer boroughs, let alone Paris which is a smaller city than San Francisco. So on the one hand we need better land use to reduce distance traveled and on the other improvements to overall speed. By contrast New York has a built environment that is absolutely fantastic for transit but cannot build enough to fully capitalize on it. Their costs are astronomical and going up.
- inferiorhuman 3y ago
- rob74 3y agoThe rubber wheel metros are mostly a result of lobbying by Michelin. They're an interesting curiosity, but I think there is a reason why they haven't really caught on outside of France...
- uxp8u61q 3y agoThey cost more to maintain, but they allow greater acceleration and deceleration and produce less noise/vibration than metal wheels. And Michelin must have a phenomenal lobbying team if they managed this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber-tyred_metro#List_of_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber-tyred_metro#List_of_sys... (In particular, "didn't catch on outside France" is, well, just plain wrong.)
- bobthepanda 3y agoA lot of those are people movers in airports and whatever <2km long. The list once you exclude that basically consists of * France, which wanted a niche technology to export and maintain supply domination over * China, Japan, and Korea, trying to replicate it * Quebec, which often looks to France for planning inspiration * Mexico and Chile, which were recipients of French development assistance that included using French suppliers
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoRings kind of suck. You have to go around to get anywhere, and so you spend a lot more time on your subway getting home.
- johannes1234321 3y agoA well positioned ring on a big enough city can provide the right tangential connections, which avoids leading through center with diameter lines. However if it is too close to the center the cost of extra transfer is likely too high.
- thriftwy 3y agoA ring is an important traffic egress/ingress source. More often than not, your destination is directly on the ring and you're not using it to make two connections, just one is sufficient. Moscow inner ring has around the same number of stations than all the ones inside it (counting connections as one each)
- hifromLA 3y agoI disagree. Look at something like the Chicago el which is a true hub and spoke system. The el needs a ring line since any trip that doesn’t start or end in the loop generally requires taking the bus which is fine but not rapid transit. By contrast look at the Yamanote line in Tokyo for a great ring that provides tons of connections and gets tons of ridership.
- angled 3y agoBeijing has two rings for its metro, and has 5+ ring roads. I could never live there but as a tourist the metro works well!
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoBeijing has 6 official ring roads. There is also a 7th but it isn't considered part of urban Beijing. It really does suck. I lived between 3rd and 4th ring road in the eastern mid section (around san yuan qiao), and my work was on 4th ring in the northwest section in zhongguancun. So...around the loop I went, it makes the trip 20-30% longer. Line 10 (a loop line between 3rd and 4th ring, line 2 would be the inner loop around 2nd ring) theoretically takes me straight to work from near my house, but I almost never took it because it was just too long (and it was just easier to sit in a taxi on 4th ring if I timed my to work and from work time right).
- redandblack 3y agoNY metro is very fare friendly to working class ~$3 flat for anywhere in the network, and not considering subsidies, monthly etc. Willing to give up art and deco for keeping the fares where they are - agree modern tech upgrades is necessary and is being made now with Biden's admin help. I hope they keep the low fares
- karim 3y agoA single ticket in the Paris metro is €1.90 (about $2) flat for anywhere in the network, and not considering subsidies, monthly etc.
- acchow 3y agoI wanted to check their respective median household incomes and am shocked to discover that they are about the same. NYC at $70k and Paris at $72k. I had no idea parisians were making yankee money.
- laurencerowe 3y ago> This is a huge expansion. Being brave enough to build rings is great: most capital cities obsess with spokes to existing hubs, or like the Elizabeth line do a single slash across. The equivalent in London would be the Overground which while largely cobbled together from existing tracks was a huge improvement. If you change you can even go in a ring. The projected ridership for these new lines in Paris looks to be about triple that of the Overground. The Elizabeth line (along with Thameslink) is more like Paris' RER.
- hamilyon2 3y agoI was quite surprised to know there will be new major line and apparently minor hub station very near from where I live.
- op00to 3y agoSweet! When do you think it will be ready by you?
- rayiner 3y agoIt’s sad to realize that such a project would be completely impossible in America now. We’ve become the Microsoft of countries.
- colordrops 3y agoDue to the cost of foreign policy and lobbying, both by domestic corporations and foreign nations.
- rayiner 3y agoOur foreign policy experiments are a relatively small percentage of our GDP. It’s not like the money isn’t there for these projects. Even with the foreign wars, the US still spends significantly less of GDP on public services than other developed countries.
- candiddevmike 3y agoThink of how much rail Afghanistan and Iraq could've bought us. Amtrak gets something like 4 billion/year, think of what 2 trillion could've done...
- contingencies 3y agoGreat analogy. Haven't seen a successful acquisition, only lots of failed ones.
- 3y ago
- jnwatson 3y ago68 new stations in the Paris area and it took forty years to get a Metro stop at DC's biggest airport.
- quasse 3y agoMeanwhile Seattle is planning to maybe-kinda-sorta begrudgingly start building one single light rail line to the west side of the city in the next few decades. Maybe it'll be ready by the time I retire.
- wombat-man 3y agoAs someone who visits Seattle regularly it is painful seeing this roll out gradually.
- throwaheyy 3y agoAs a Seattle resident I don’t mind it being gradual, but it is painful seeing its compromised again and again. For example, using slow light-rail vehicles on a regional length line, abandoning a centralised transfer hub, and monumental station designs that are either hundreds of feet underground or hundreds of feet in the air with escalator after escalator adding minutes to every trip.
- Rebelgecko 3y agoUntil a few years ago there were some dumb limitations for federal infrastructure funding that connected trains to airports
- ClimaxGravely 3y agoIn 1993 I remember thinking that the skytrain line to UBC in the Vancouver west side would be complete by the time I needed to go to university. They started building it a couple years ago, it's in progress now and last I checked due to people in the neighborhood complaining it won't make it all the way to the university. You have to complete the trip on a bus. I guess Seattle and Vancouver really do have a lot in common.
- 3y ago
- bambax 3y ago> five years after then-President Nicholas Sarkozy... "Nicolas".
- lol768 3y agoThis is a cool infrastructure project, but they really need to sort out ticketing.. Everyone else has adopted contactless EMV with capping, but in Paris they're only introducing the equivalent to London's Oyster (which frankly is a legacy ticketing system in itself and was introduced back in June 2003; over twenty years ago) now in the form of Navigo Easy for tourists. When I last visited, the t+ tickets were paper magstripe tickets that I could only buy using a terminal which required chip+pin and didn't have a proper touch screen but some weird roller you had to use..
- totololo 3y agoIn Singapore, tap your Visa/Mastercard to get in, tap it to get out, they do the Math and charge you. So simple and effective!
- paganel 3y agoThose paper tickets are great for anonymity. In most of the cases those contactless thingies give your identity away each time you use them.
- seabass-labrax 3y agoPaper tickets might be good for anonymity, but that can't be guaranteed. I haven't used the ones for Paris, but many have a unique code printed on the ticket that could be linked with the bank that you used to purchase it through. One would need to buy the ticket with cash to guarantee anonymity, and that itself only with the assumption that 'out-of-band' information isn't obtained (for example, from surveillance cameras or unique identifiers on the cash). It is possible to have fully digital ticketing with complete anonymity (again, assuming no external surveillance) using zero-knowledge proofs. As far as I'm aware, no such systems have been implemented for ticketing yet, but rapid progress is being made in implementing these for general-purpose digital identity situations. There's also the much more pedestrian^ option, used for instance in Brussels, where the transport company simply promises not to track individuals even when it would be possible for them to do just that. That said, in Brussels I personally got the impression that a large proportion of passengers did not present tickets when entering a bus or tram, and indeed the Brussels Metro trains don't require that anyway. Thus tracking of individuals' movements would be quickly thwarted by apathy on the part of passengers! ^: not the most pedestrian option, naturally.
- op00to 3y agoJealous. There were great “interurban” lines (sort of like light rail of today) all up and down the US East Coast and beyond. At one point you could ride these little local trains on a journey from Philadelphia to New York! Talk about a connected metropolis!
- thriftwy 3y agoAt one point (for quite long actually) you could ride local trains to go from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok. It would take a month, though.
- hairy_callous 3y agoYou can still easily do this to get from Philly to NYC. Septa to Trenton, get off and switch to NJT to Penn Station. Runs hourly and costs ~$1. It does take a bit longer than Amtrak, though + Amtrak can be purchased for ~$20 if you time it right
- euroderf 3y agoIt seems like interurbans were a prime source of mobility for the days after horses but before cars (and buses) came to rule the roads.
- hackandthink 3y agoA nice map: https://web.archive.org/web/20180806025050/https://media-mediatheque.societedugrandparis.fr/permalinks/domain1/2017/11/02/528-Grand_ParisExpress_2030.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20180806025050/https://media-med...
- notpushkin 3y agoLooks like Constantine Konovalov has some work to do now: https://metromap.fr/en https://metromap.fr/en
- Qiu_Zhanxuan 3y agoI live in Paris. Just got a 200€ fine coming back from a running session. Beware, RATP rule enforcers are now dressed as civilians and targets gullible individuals who breaks stupid rules, (mistook my pass with my credit card when i tried to check-in : 50€ for forgetting my pass, and 150€ for entering an quasi-empty bus by the middle door). I see why RATP resorted to racketeering after all this over-budget fiasco. Hope it's worth it.
- ThePowerOfFuet 3y agoYou didn't have your Navigo with you, but you blame them for fining you?
- moritzwarhier 3y agoAs a German, living in a car-centric city with egregious and never-finished public transport projects in rich districts, but no functioning public transport, this makes me envious. And it seems very well-thought out, focusing on connecting suburbs. Please, let this project finish successfully and inspire others to quit the madness of resource waste that is car scapes.
- hasoleju 3y agoTrain connections are a wonderful thing. They really shrink the space between two locations like no other transportation type. Just hop in, read a book or newspaper and suddenly you are somewhere else. For me it’s a one hour car ride to the next major city (in southern Germany). With the train it takes 25 minutes.
- rayiner 3y agoIn the US, train rides typically take anywhere from 1.5x-3x as long as driving.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 3y agoWhat a backward country.
- rayiner 3y agoIt’s not backwards, it’s dysfunctional. I remember my dad telling stories of how in rural Bangladesh, flood control levees would fail and have to be rebuilt each year because they were shoddily made by workers who cut corners. The US is the same way. The DC Metro was built as a fully automated system in the 1970s. That has been shut down since 2009–at the expense of ride quality and frequency—because WMATA let all the associated sensor infrastructure decay.
- thatfrenchguy 3y agoI mean, that’s what happens on lines that haven’t been upgraded since the late 19th century.
- 3475235656 3y ago[flagged]
- tomcam 3y agoThey added 120 miles of track and 68 stations in seven years. New York City couldn’t update a turnstile in seven years.
- kaashif 3y agoIf that's in reference to OMNY, it's worth mentioning that Paris is actually far behind e.g. New York and London in ease of use in ticketing and turnstiles since in those places you no longer have to even buy tickets or think about anything: just touch your normal payment card on the turnstile. Although that does seem like the easy part compared to actually building the stations and lines, which is why it's weird Paris hasn't caught up in that area.
- aylmao 3y agoI like the NYC subway for a lot of reasons, but man is it in a bad state. Chambers street station for example. Last time I was there it looked similar, if not worse than in this 2015 photo [1]. Comparing it to the second busiest metro in the Americas, it's crazy how Mexico City Metro, which isn't always "nice", is still so much nicer and much cheaper [2]. Even comparing it to cities with more similar economies— systems in London/Paris are cheaper per ride, but also much nicer. [1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chambers_Street_-_Nassau_Line_Platform.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chambers_Street_-_Na... [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/mexico-city-metro-review-2019-1#most-stations-had-expansive-mezzanines-with-food-vendors-shoe-shine-stands-internet-cafes-and-more-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/mexico-city-metro-review-201...
- pkd 3y agoI was in Paris in July, and was thoroughly impressed with the metro system. I always had an impression that Paris was a dirty city by western-european standards but I actually found the metro stations incredibly clean (and I travelled on multiple lines and through hub stations like Chatelet). In comparison, my city, Ottawa, has struggled to get one line functioning reliably in almost five years of trying, and the stations are filthy by comparison.
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoThat's just a Canadian problem. Canada is the most overrated of all the developed countries and once you travel you realize that even some developing countries are now better than that. The smugness and the sense of superiority they have at not being the US is delusional.
- durumu 3y agoThe US is like this too. Almost no American cities have reliable public transit, and even in those that do, like NYC or Chicago, the stations are pretty filthy in my experience. Also, I feel like this is an unusually hostile comment.
- brailsafe 3y agoNot just hostile, but an ironically delusional comment considering what you're correct in stating about the U.S, but also that Ottawa is a newsworthy exception among cities in Canada with municipal trains, save for perhaps the first week after Montreal's recent build. To anyone who's "started travelling" (how smug), they'd realize that Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal, maybe even Calgary and Edmonton to lesser extents have viable or great municipal train systems. They aren't Tokyo great, or Paris great, but they are pretty good and usually clean. Among developed countries, I can think of a few that since visiting, while novel, I've actively chose Vancouver over; other cities in Canada would probably not win out, but that's why broad statements about countries shouldn't be taken seriously.
- 3y ago
- hinkley 3y agoI always find it a bit odd when people call it the London Underground or the Paris Métro. Nobody else calls their subway either of those. If you rode the Underground (of for that matter, the Tube/chube), or the Métro, I know where you were in the world. Maybe it's trying to make Chicago, New York and Tokyo feel better? I dunno.
- andrepd 3y agoMany places call the "subway" metro, or underground.
- randywaterhouse 3y agoUnderground, perhaps (although German's U-Bahn is the equivalent). Metro, accent aside, is in common use worldwide, isn't it? (Tokyo, Washington DC, to name two Metro systems)
- aylmao 3y agoWhen people say Metro I think the Mexico City Metro. "Metro" is not only used to brand the trains, but also the BRT service ("Metrobús"). When people mention The Tube I do think London though. I haven't heard anyone else call their subway "the tube". To be fair though, the London Underground _is_ quite more tubular than other systems around the world.
- NoLinkToMe 3y agoNah plenty say Metro. We say it in Amsterdam, or Barcelona for example as well.
- pixel8account 3y agoSame in Poland. It's both a generic term ("Metro w Londynie" == London Underground) and a name for a specific system (Metro in Warsaw)
- leptons 3y agoLos Angeles does call the light rail system "Metro". The Metropolitan Transportation Authority in Los Angeles County (or "MTA"), is often shortened to "Metro". The website is even www.metro.net - which covers busses and rail, but when people around LA say "we took the Metro" they typically mean the light rail system, which is mostly above ground, but there are underground segments of it. When they say "we took the MTA" they usually mean a bus line specific to the MTA system. There are many other local bus lines in addition to MTA, like Culver City Bus, Big Blue Bus (Santa Monica), etc., and "MTA" was always used to differentiate bus lines. It's pretty much only the rail system getting called "Metro" in LA from my experience.
- ekianjo 3y ago> With the same ticket, passengers will be able to take the new métro, change to a bus, then hop on a train to get where they need to go. It practically eliminates the need for a car The usual bullshit by designers who never consider there are people who need to carry stuff to where they want to go. Or people who cant walk properly anymore. Or people who care about safety at night.
- saagarjha 3y agoIt sounds like you failed to consider what “practically” means. It’s all about bringing the use of cars to nearly zero, with the understanding that for the few people who truly need a car all the time, or the many people who need a car a few times, the options still mean that the cars being used go down. For what it’s worth, people who need to carry stuff generally have all sorts of choices between bags and carts, and people who can’t walk well are usually served decently well by accessible stations and trains. Safety is of course a personal preference but solving it by sitting in a two ton bubble is kind of the wrong way to go about it, no?
- ekianjo 3y agoPeople who have problems to walk tend to avoid taking public transports that long walkways, long connections, stairs (and elevators or escalators not working, which is a frequent problem in Paris), lots of people who are in a hurry to get somewhere else. It makes for a stressful and pitiful experience. They are much better served by having their own car to remove all the pain. Sure, public transport is all fine when you are a teenager or a young adult, but thinking it's a good solution for people of all ages and medical conditions is just believing in a lie. > but solving it by sitting in a two ton bubble is kind of the wrong way to go about it, no? There is safety with known risks, which is taking a car and driving somewhere, and then completely unknown and random risks when taking public transports in Paris. I prefer known risks any day.
- saagarjha 3y agoThis is definitely not universally true. As long as the transit doesn’t suck (like, miles of walks, long delays) it is commonly used by people of all walks of life. For people with certain disabilities (e.g. vision problems) driving may be completely out of the question and having public transportation can be liberating. Now, I can understand there being issues with things being broken or not wanted to be buffeted around during rush hour, but those aren’t fundamental problems with it. You can definitely improve these by, for example, providing multiple elevators, or at-grade stations. Calling an Uber or taxi once in a while in the absolute worst case is still a massive win for everyone. And, for what it’s worth, the risks are only unknown if you don’t take public transit. People who are frequent riders know all the good and bad lines and what times to take them just like you probably know which parts of the city you don’t want to drive through at night. Not to mention that a clean, safe, well-trafficked subway can often directly skip you through parts of the city you don’t want to go through.
- 1024core 3y ago$39B for all that? 120+ new miles of tracks? Here in SF it cost us $2B to lay 1.7mi of tracks and that too took many years. :cry:
- thebigman433 3y agoSan Jose NIMBYs are now going to drive costs to >2billion/mile with their rejection of cut and cover. Now VTA is spending 75million dollars on a massive tunnel boring machine, for a project that should cost less than half of what it does
- TheOtherHobbes 3y agoI can't help comparing the $36bn cost of this with the >$70bn the UK is spending on a single high speed line between Birmingham and not-quite-London.
- hyg 3y agoI understand your sentiment. I think the way the project is presented ("Let's make the trip to Birmingham 30 mins shorter") is not very helpful either. And while I lack the knowledge to assess the project, I've read some counterpoints to this in an article linked here on hn. I think it went along the lines of: the couple tracks running from the north towards London from Midlands are all at the edge of their capacity. The HS2 will take some load off those and thereby increase the capacity by X percent for all the commuter trains. edit: I haven't been following this in the past year. Now I see they scrapped the Euston hub.
- b20000 3y agoso is it going to be safe now in the metro in paris?
- mplewis 3y agoIt is safe now.
- hunters_laptop 3y ago[dead]
- Unfrozen0688 3y agoOn the talk of metros... Stockholm metro is really sublime. We love to complain about it but after being in Paris and NY... wow
- Unfrozen0688 3y agohttp://archive.today/RRodC http://archive.today/RRodC