The date has been set. On June 24, one month before the start of the Olympic Games, French President Emmanuel Macron will inaugurate the double extension – to both the north and south – of line 14 of the Paris metro system. This "new backbone of the Ile-de-France region," as Valérie Pécresse, the Paris region's president, called it, will link the new Saint-Denis-Pleyel station to Orly Airport. And it's already doing so, just without any passengers.
On Friday, May 31, public transport operator RATP received authorization for the extensions to go into service and invited Pécresse and the press to take part in a "white run" to the new Orly Airport terminus in Paray-Vieille-Poste on Monday, June 3. "It's not just the airport we're serving, but also [the département of] Essonne," Pécresse pointed out. Until now, the line stopped in Paris's 13th arrondissement, at Olympiades station. Its extension will add seven new stations, making the Grand Paris Express, a project launched in 2009 by former prefect Christian Blanc and former president Nicolas Sarkozy, a reality for the people of Ile-de-France.
In 2025, it will eventually be connected to the new lines 15, 16, 17 and 18. This will double the length of the historic network and line 14 could carry up to a million passengers a day, said Pécresse.
For the Olympic Games, line 14 will transport visitors arriving at Orly Airport directly into the heart of Paris and to Olympic locations. "When the Grand Paris Express was launched, this stage was planned for 2027. Everything has been accelerated by the Olympics," explained Stéphane Garreau, project director for RATP, echoing the favorite phrase of Jean Castex, its CEO: "Line 14 will serve the Olympics, but the Olympics have served line 14 well." Work on the tunnel boring machines was halted for just one week during the lockdowns imposed to contain the Covid-19 epidemic. RATP, the Region and the government put pressure on French multinational rolling stock company Alstom to deliver the new trains on time. Siemens and RATP succeeded in reconfiguring the IT and signaling system to keep everything running smoothly.
"There's only one station left to be approved out of the six scheduled to open at the end of June: Maison-Blanche. The Safety Commission is due to meet on June 12," said a delighted Garreau. The seventh, Villejuif-Gustave-Roussy, where lines 14 and 15 connect, will open at the end of 2024. The most impressive, the Saint-Denis-Pleyel station – the only one on the northern extension – is already ready. It will be the largest of the 68 stations of the Grand Paris Express. It was designed by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, whose signature use of wood soothes spaces. 200,000 passengers should pass through the Saint-Denis-Pleyel station each day.
"I hope we'll keep the impetus of the Games, the benevolence of the State and the energy of everyone involved for all the other lines," said Pécresse, sending out a message at a time when Standard & Poor's is downgrading France's credit rating: "The double extension of the 14 has been entirely financed by the people of Ile-de-France." Ile-de-France Mobilités invested €1.3 billion in rolling stock and Société du Grand Paris €2.8 billion in infrastructure.
Translation of an original article published in French on lemonde.fr; the publisher may only be liable for the French version.