Se déplacer dans Paris: l'autobus

Further to my post a while ago about the métro, I thought I would write about the best way to displace oneself in Paris, apart from on foot: on the hundreds of smart green single-decker buses which ply the streets.  The bus is certainly slower than the métro, but (as might be expected) allows more to be seen of the city.  The buses are also run by the R.A.T.P., but the network is denser still. The routes wend their winding way from arrondissement to arrondissement;  often they pass through unexpected places, and spark the surprise of recognition when they emerge at a familiar corner or before a mighty land-mark.

It has become clear to me that the R.A.T.P. sees the bus routes as the continuation of the métro, since the sequence of underground lines, 1-14, is taken up again by bus number 20 (providing for the possible creation of six new underground lines).  The digits of the bus route numbers also corresponded generally to their starting points and destinations. Routes 91, 92, 94, 95 and 96 all start at Montparnasse, for instance; routes 30, 31, 35, 38 and 39 from the Gare du Nord.  Ingeniously, every route has its own colour.  Dark yellow means that I need to run!

The R.A.T.P. does its bit to help with the traffic problem

Pleasant though the passengers' journey might be, the bus driver's job is not easy - harder, I imagine, than the métro driver's.  On every journey I take along route 91, the driver's deftness, even in a bendy-bus, is called into action.  Indeed, in a competition called the Bus d'Or (the 'Golden Bus'), which sifts out the crème de la crème of France's conducteurs de bus, driving route 94 counts as a phase in itself; as does passing through a mock-up of the 'guichet du Louvre' (the Louvre gatehouse, with fifteen centimetres of space on each side of the wing-mirrors!).  You can see a video about the competition here.

The 'Montmartrobus' - small enough to navigate the hill.

That said, the drivers provide another element, generally absent from the métro, and that is the good treatment of their passengers.  Always they give a courteous 'Bonjour'.  They offer good-humoured advice when stuck in hopeless traffic.  At Christmastide, at least one driver on route 47 decks his cab with yards of tinsel.  The entire journey is more life-affirming, since Parisian civilisation can be observed at leisure: pipe-smoking behatted elderly gents, calm ambling nuns, the young queing for the cinema, care-free cyclists in the bus-lane, Peugeots and Renaults inextricably entangled in embouteillages, immaculate restaurants and brasseries...  The rue assourdissant is a better view, surely, than  a tunnel wall!

Some bus routes of note:

Bus 91.

  91   Ligne 91 carries me daily to the university.  There is no direct métro line between Gare Montparnasse and Gare de Lyon, so the bendy-buses carry out this intense job instead, every five minutes, mostly along bus lanes ('couloirs de bus').  This journey is no faster by métro.

  83    Number 83 wriggles along south-east to north-west and is a good route to see inconspicuous corners fairly rapidly.

   58     Ditto, except that this bus goes north-east, from Montparnasse to Châtelet.

  67    Ligne 67 will be well-known to anybody who has encountered Agnès Varda's Cléo de 5 à 7, that puzzling film.  The journey in this film from Parc Montsouris to the Hôpital Salpetrière can still be undertaken today, on the same route, although not on the same vehicle!

Route 72 (only on special occasions!)

  72    Ligne 72 runs neatly along the Right Bank of the Seine from the Hôtel de Ville, downstream to the Eiffel Tower and thence to the Porte de Saint-Cloud.

  39   Number 39 is good for the tourist: starting at the Gare du Nord, it strikes straight out for the Louvre, and thence over the river to Saint-Germain-des Prés.

  29   Ligne 29 has recently been the subject of a collection of poems by Jacques Roubaud (like Raymond Queneau, a member of Oulipo) - 'Ode à la ligne 29 des autobus parisiens'.  This proves it all about Paris!  You can hear an extract, along with some of the sounds of the buses (including the ticket stampers!), here.  It is not terribly easy to read, still less to listen to, because Roubaud is playing with the language and throwing in many literary references, but is worth hearing just for the beauty of the intricate French and internal rhyme.

On route 89 - near Jussieu.

  89   Ligne 89 is my favourite, starting off as it does from the Bibliothèque François Mittérand, and plunging into the fifth arrondissement which I now know best, passing the Jardin des Plantes, Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, the most beautiful church in Paris, the Jardin du Luxembourg, Saint-Sulpice, the second most beautiful church in Paris, Montparnasse and the Gare de Vanves-Malakoff.  From library to railway station via a succession of churches... I might have drawn it up myself!

Route 84, place du Panthéon, in the rain, awaiting departure.

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)