Se déplacer dans Paris: le métro

Station Saint-Jacques - ligne 6

The London Underground is 150 years old (hurrah!), so the least I can do is to undertake a grand tour of the famous métro system to see how the Parisians answered!  This answer took a full thirty-eight years to appear (in 1900), but was no less vigorous.  Ask for a map (try not to despair when handed the tourist version, five months into my Year Abroad) and you will see this vigour by the sheer density of the lines.  

Cité - line 4 runs beneath the Seine.

The Parisian métro was constructed with a different philosophy from the London Underground's. In the British capital, the Metropolitan and District lines behaved like main-line railways : they carried freight, ran far out into the London suburbs and Buckinghamshire, and bickered with each other of course.  The visionary eccentric Sir Edward Watkin,  Metropolitan chairman, even wanted to run direct services from Manchester to Paris via the Great Central railway, the Circle line and a Channel Tunnel for which preparatory excavations were actually undertaken.  Imagine the Eurostar setting off from Sloane Square!  Even the subsequent 'Tube' lines (built by tunnelling deep underground) cover significant distances between stations.

Ligne 6 - above the street on steel viaduct (métro aérien).

The métro behaves rather more like a bus or tram.  The rapidity of transport is achieved not so much by the speed of the trains in the tunnels, but by the high frequency of stations.  The idea has been to reduce the distance on foot required between origin and destination; the result is that the network can be reached within five minutes from most of central Paris, and that stations can also be seen from each other along the tunnels.  Most of the lines were built not by the deep-level tunnelling of  later London lines (here I tread carefully in case any engineers are reading), but by the 'cut-and-cover' method of the Metropolitan and District: the digging of an enormous trenches, and their subsequent covering-over to form a tunnel. Occasionally they leap out of the ground and into the air on steel viaducts (métro aérien). This means that most lines follow the streets, and also that the passenger need drop or climb only two or three flights of stairs to reach the platforms.  It also has the consequence that the trains can be heard and felt above ground: through innocuous vents in the pavements, for example, or with particular resonance by the congregation of the church of Notre-Dame-des-Champs near Montparnasse...

From Denfert-Rochereau station on ligne 4, two stations (Mouton Duvernet and Alésia) are visible down the line.

The R.A.T.P. Logo (obtained from Wikimedia Commons).

Responsible for the infrastructure and operation of the métro, along with the buses and two R.E.R. lines, is the equivalent to Transport for London: the R.A.T.P. (Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens).  (The R.A.T.P. incidentally owns the London United bus company - so the logo of a company owned by the French state is displayed proudly on buses all over London!).  It is easy to see how the R.A.T.P. views the métro's job by its numbering system (there are no names; could you imagine a French Jubilee line?).  The underground lines are numbered from 1 to 14, numbers which are taken up again at number 20 by the hundred or so bus routes which thread the city and which deserve their own blog-post.

Um... have I boarded the wrong train?

Another peculiarity of the Parisian métro is that the station names take quite brief forms of the place-names they serve.  They normally take the name alone of a street, a junction between two streets, a main-line station, a square, a church or an important building, with exotic results: "Raspail", "Cardinal Lemoine" or "Maubert-Mutualité".  It is as if stations in London were called "Baker", "Warren" or "Sloane".  "Monument" or "Bank" have a similar air.  The result is that you can travel to Crimea, Stalingrad, Strasbourg, Liège, Luxembourg and Rome for 1,30 euros one way.  Other stations are named after battles, monuments public figures and writers (of course!).  And there are also stations called "Temple" and "St-Paul" where, sadly, there are no connections with the London Underground.  

The famous Art Nouveau style at Cité.

Being French, the system has effortless style, particularly the well-known art nouveau iron-work and typography which indicate the stations, or the glazed white tiles of earthenware lining the walls and ceilings.  Also, being French, it works: the R.A.T.P. has five hundred trains in service at rush-hour and carries four million passengers a day; thanks in part to lines 2 and 6 which effectively form a 'Circle line'  most journeys can be made with only one change.

The ten-year-old film below, from the series 'C'est pas sorcier', is good fun to watch: if not for useless facts such as line 4 being the warmest because it is all underground, has the greatest number of trains and uses rubber tyres, then for the colloquial high-speed French!

Finally, the Parisians know how to have fun with the métro:

As one of the comments pointed out ("Pas mal... mais bon, c'est pas très difficile de doubler le métro de la ligne 10 ;)"), they have picked two stations very close to each other on one of  the quietest and slowest lines on the network... but still more than I could do, given my croissant consumption! 

Pont du Bir-Hakeim (Ligne 6)