The first metro of the Grand Paris Express, a massive 15-year project that is set to revolutionize transport in the region around the French capital, rolled out in Paris on Tuesday. The new rapid transit lines should connect the periphery, or the Île-de-France region, to the capital and are expected to serve 2 million passengers daily.

The Grand Paris Express, considered Europe’s biggest transport and urban planning project, will add four fully automated lines to the current Paris metro network and extend existing lines 11 and 14. A total of 200 km of tracks will be added, plus 68 new stations. They are planned to be opened in phases, from spring 2024, not coincidentally just before the opening of the Olympic Games, until 2030.

Cost of €35 billion

You can compare the Grand Paris Express, a super metro project that saw the light of day in 2009 under then-president Nicolas Sarkozy, to the new Metro 3 line that Brussels plans to build, but on a much larger and ambitious scale.

The aim of the new metro lines is to connect the periphery around the capital to the center much better and faster. The cost of the works was estimated at 19 billion euros in 2010 but would rise to around 35 billion euros according to the latest figures.

The four new lines will be named Lines 15, 16, 17, and 18. The circular Line 15, with a length of 75 km, is expected to open in part before the Olympic Games (the southern part will follow at the end of 2025), as is the extension of Line 14, connecting Orly airport to the new Saint-Denis-Pleyel metro station in the northern suburbs of Paris. The final sections of Lines 16, 17, and 18 should be delivered by 2030.

In fact, of the 68 new stations, 40 are already in operation, and these new high-capacity metros will be able to travel at up to 110 km/hour in automatic driverless mode.

‘The 20-minute region’

Those new lines should connect the suburbs not only to Paris but also to each other. After all, the Frenchman living in a suburb must cross Paris whenever he wants to move to another suburb. Hence, terms like “a great project for territorial equality” are not shunned, or even “transport revolution” because of the concept of “the 20-minute region”, referring to the 15-minute city, providing access to all essential services for citizens within a quarter of an hour.

At the same time, Paris hopes that the GPE will reduce the gap between the suburbs and the city and that commuters who currently use cars will switch en masse to public transport. This would, of course, drastically reduce CO2 emissions over the capital region and allow the car to be banned from the city even more.

Yet there are also opponents of the project, especially for the introduction of Line 18, which will cross the Plateau de Saclay, an agricultural area with exceptionally fertile soil. The fear is that the metro project will inevitably lead to the urbanization of the plateau through expansion with housing projects and industrial projects, among other things, and thus the end of the biodiversity and agriculture of the plateau.

On Tuesday, it also became known that Paris metro ticket prices will almost double during the 2024 Olympics. Residents with passes would be shielded from the temporary rise, and visitors would be charged “a fair price”.