Paris debates plans for new subway

Slides
Photos

(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-11-24 01:34

For French leaders with famously large egos, they are hard to resist: grand urban projects meant to secure their legacy in the popular imagination.

Napoleon III had Paris torn down and rebuilt along neat boulevards. Late president Francois Mitterrand commissioned, in typical pharaonic fashion, the Louvre's glass pyramid. Now President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to dig 130 kilometers (80 miles) of tunnels for an entire new subway system.

Paris already has a subway, of course the fabled "Metro." But Sarkozy's contribution to Parisian city planning would focus on the capital's outskirts, with trains making a figure-8-shaped route between suburban business hotspots, research centers and the airports.

The euro21 billion ($31.4 billion) project, a subject of intense debate, goes before the lower house of parliament on Tuesday. It's designed to respond to the global economic crisis and boost greater Paris as a 21st century business powerhouse.

It's also the first concrete step in conservative Sarkozy's long-term plans to reinvent Paris as greener and more livable - a project he dubbed "Le Grand Paris," an apparent dream to compete with the grandeur of his predecessors' city projects.

There is wide agreement on the need for better public transport in the suburbs, often hard to reach without a car. Many low-income neighborhoods with large immigrant populations are especially isolated, a problem that became obvious when suburban youths rioted for three weeks in 2005.

At the heart of debate over the new subway is the question: Whose interests should be No. 1, those of businesses or those of depressed suburbs?

Christian Blanc, the junior minister who conceived the subway, has put the focus on making the Paris region attractive to international investment and heading off competition from Shanghai and Mumbai. "Letting our guard down even slightly would be fatal," he has said.

Critics say his subway plan may not do much for ordinary suburbanites.

"I'm not sure it's a response to the question millions of people in the Paris area are asking, which is, 'How can I get to work easily every day?" Francois Bellanger, a French consultant on transport and mobility, told The AP.

Beyond that, and with a shortage of fossil fuels looming, the real problem is that the government should be asking how to increase population density, not spread it out with a suburban transport line, Bellanger said.

Blanc, a former boss at Air France and Paris' RATP transit system, has plowed ahead on the project with unusual speed. Critics, including the Socialists who control Paris City Hall and the regional council, and who are preparing for March regional elections say he came up with the plan too quickly, without enough outside help.

"These are very complicated questions," said Marie-Pierre de la Gontrie, the Socialist first vice president on the council of the Ile-de-France region that includes Paris. "And here we have Christian Blanc sitting down in his office, taking out a map of the region, drawing a big figure-8 on it and saying 'Voila!'"

Besides the existing Metro subway inside Paris, the suburbs already have a train system, called the RER. But it's not always practical, and a trip from one suburb to another often involves a ride into central Paris to catch a connecting train.

The new subway would link to the existing systems. Work is expected to start in 2012 or 2013, and the subway would go into a service a decade later, with a projected 3 million passengers a day. Questions remain about whether some portions might be elevated, not underground, and the exact route is still being worked out.

One site it is sure to serve is the Saclay area, west of Paris, home to prestigious universities such as the Ecole Polytechnique engineering school and HEC business school. Sarkozy wants to turn it into a French Silicon Valley.

Overall, the government hopes the subway will create 1 million jobs over 15 years in Ile-de-France, which has a population of 11 million.

Financing hasn't been worked out, but much of the euro21 billion is expected to be borrowed, despite concerns among France's European Union neighbors about its finances. The French budget deficit will hit a record 8.2 percent this year, up from 3.4 percent last year, because the recession caused tax receipts to shrink and a government stimulus package increased spending.

Sarkozy is already thinking beyond the subway to bigger plans. He asked 10 multidisciplinary teams including leading architects to come up with proposals for Paris' future. Soon the teams are expected to launch a government-funded panel to reflect on improving transport and housing, said Antoine Grumbach, one architect involved.

"A city is never completed, it is perpetually unfinished," Grumbach said and even Paris is a work in progress.