The French Way of Building Rapid Transit
It’s been a while since I last wrote this series, where I covered the American, Soviet, and British traditions of building urban rail. I’d like to return by focusing attention on the French tradition, which has been influential not just within France itself but also to some extent former French colonies, especially Quebec.
An issue I hope to return to soon is the extent to which France has not truly decolonized; former French colonies in Africa, especially the Maghreb, rely on French technical expertise for construction, and often outsource their monetary policy (as with the CFA franc, but Morocco too has a peg to a dollar and euro mix). This matters, because this means the French way of building urban transit is influential in former French colonies in Africa, whereas the British tradition’s impact on India, Nigeria, and so on is limited.
The history of Paris
Like Britain, the USSR, and the US, France has a dominant financial center that its smaller cities aim to imitate. This imitation has been much more extensive than in the US and UK – to the extent that secondary French cities diverge in design principles from the capital, they do things that were fashionable in Paris at the time they built out their rail networks rather than things that were fashionable in Paris when Paris built the Métro. Thus, it is especially valuable to look at the history of urban rail in Paris.
The Paris Métro opened in 1900, as the world’s fifth metro system. Already then, it had a critical feature that the previous four (London, Budapest, Chicago, Glasgow) lacked: it was a centrally planned multi-line system. The city planned a coordinated system of what would become Lines 1-6, in the shape of a # in a circle: Lines 1 and 3 would run east-west, Lines 4 and 5 would run north-south, and Line 2, eventually split into Lines 2 and 6, would run the trace of the wall that delineated the city’s pre-1860 boundary.
The Métro was a municipal effort run by the municipal CMP, designed around the city’s needs, which included not just good transportation but also separation from the working-class suburbs. Whereas the London Underground was mostly technologically compatible with the mainline system, the Métro was deliberately designed not to be, to protect the urban middle class from transport integration with the suburban poor. This led to the following features:
- The trains are extremely narrow, 2.4-2.44 meters wide, compared with about 2.9 m on the mainline; the deep Tube trains in London, held to have the narrowest loading gauge on a standard-gauge railway, are 2.68 m wide.
- The interstation distance is very short, 562 meters on average. Paris is compact and dense and the short interstations are only a real problem in the suburbs.
- The trains run on the right, like French road traffic, whereas French trains run on the left.
- No legacy lines were incorporated into the system, unlike in New York and London, and thus the shape of the network looks much more like how one would design a metro network from scratch and less like how old West London branches or Brooklyn excursion lines looked.
Like New York and Berlin and unlike London, Paris built the Métro cut-and-cover. The lines built before the 1990s all closely follow streets except when they cross the river – and in the 1900s the Line 4 river crossing was the hardest part of the system to build, opening in 1908 whereas the rest of the network had opened by 1906. This was done entirely by hand, forcing the lines to curve where the streets did, which led to two notable warts. First, while most of the system had a design standard of 60 meter curve radii, Line 1 goes down to 40 at Bastille. And second, Line 5, which crosses the Seine on a bridge, cannot serve Gare de Lyon; the engineers could not get it to curve that way while still running through to Gare d’Austerlitz and the Left Bank, so instead the transfer point between Lines 1 and 5 is Bastille, and more recently the RER A and Line 14 both cross Line 5 without a transfer as they run express from Gare de Lyon to Châtelet.
That said, the missed connection between Lines 5 and 14 is the only one in the system, though two more are under construction on Line 14 extensions. Only one among the major metro systems of the world runs entirely without missed connections, the Mexico City Metro, which has unusually low line density in the core and unusually many tangential lines.
The suburbs and the RER
The Métro’s deliberate exclusion of the suburbs made sense from the point of view of a middle-class Parisian in 1900 who was mortally afraid of the working class. But by the 1930s, it was leading to serious design constraints. Further Métro extensions both densified the network and extended it outward, and in the 1930s, lines began to extend past city limits, to such suburbs as Lilas, Issy, Neuilly, and Montreuil. The short interstations made longer extensions infeasible, and some solution involving regional rail was needed.
In 1938, CMP bought and electrified the Ligne de Sceaux, which alone among the Paris commuter lines had reached close to city center, terminating at Jardin du Luxembourg rather than at the farther away rail stations, which are located at or just inside the M2/M6 ring. Then after the war, as suburbanization intensified and commuter traffic at Gare Saint-Lazare grew increasingly congested, CMP’s successor RATP collaborated with SNCF on connecting regional rail branches to form an express system, that is the RER; the Ligne de Sceaux became the southern half of the RER B, while a similar branch going east paired with one of the Saint-Lazare lines to form the RER A. Through-service opened in 1977, roughly at the same time as the German S-Bahn through-tunnels, but the system grew much larger as Paris was and remains far larger than any German city.
But it is not exactly correct to view the RER as identical to a German S-Bahn, or to one of the RER’s inspirations, the Tokyo through-running system. A number of features characterize it, some shared with other urban regional rail systems, some not:
- There are multiple trunk lines through the city, which form something like a coherent network among themselves, and do not share rolling stock. The biggest warts are that the RER B and D share tracks (but no platforms) on one interstation, and that the RER C mostly stays on the Left Bank, legacy of when planning in Paris conceived of the area around Saint-Michel as a central area to be served, where in reality it is decidedly secondary to the CBD stretching from Les Halles to Champs-Elysées.
- It runs largely, though not entirely, on separate tracks from non-RER lines.
- It is locally viewed as deficient to Métro service – researchers who use the RER B to get to IHES think of it as lower-quality, lower-class service than the Métro in the city and its immediate suburbs. I suspect that this is why Grand Paris Express is designed around Métro standards rather than as intensification of RER service, while RER expansion has fallen to the wayside.
- RER-Métro integration is imperfect: the fares are integrated but there are still barriers between RER and Métro platforms, and there are many missed RER-Métro connections, whereas in Berlin the S-Bahn and U-Bahn have only one missed connection between them.
- The interstation is around 2-3 km, but it’s actually slightly longer on the new urban tunnels build for the RER A, B, D, and E than on the legacy lines in the inner suburbs; this feature also exists in a much more extreme form in the United States, but in Berlin and Tokyo it is completely absent.
Exporting Parisian ideas
Parisian metro planning influenced Montreal, Mexico City, and the smaller French cities, in chronological order. We see any of the following features in those cities:
- Rubber-tired metros. This technology was in vogue in postwar Paris, which converted Lines 1, 4, and 11 to it figuring this was just better than steel wheels, and also Line 6, figuring that an elevated line would benefit from a quieter propulsion system.
- Non-radial network design. London and the systems inspired by it, including all Eastern bloc systems, have radial design, with nearly all lines entering a relatively small city center. Paris expanded its #-in-a-circle system to a combination of a radial network and a grid, with a large number of pairs of parallel lines. Mexico City, the largest system inspired by Paris, is rich in tangential lines but has only three lines serving city center, which are by far the three busiest.
- Short interstations, though this is truer domestically than in Montreal and Mexico City.
- Driverless operations. This technology became popular in the 1980s, starting with the Lille Metro, and France has used it on new lines in Paris (M14) and elsewhere (Lyon Line D, both lines in Toulouse), also innovating in converting manual lines to automatic on Paris M1 and now M4. While the Parisian lines are full-size metro lines, the other ones are light metro running shorter vehicles, often with extensive elevated service.
- Separation between regional rail and metro service. Montreal is sufficiently North American to have given up on regional rail entirely, but Lyon and Marseille are investing in better regional rail, run separately from the local urban transit system but with some degree of integration.
- Light rail. France’s modern light rail systems do not originate in Paris – Nantes opened its system in 1985, suburban Paris only in 1992 – but Paris has a notable feature that isn’t common elsewhere in Western Europe: it is a mixed system with some Métro lines and some tram lines filling in the gaps. This mixed system is also present in Lyon, Marseille, and Toulouse, whereas Bordeaux, Strasbourg, and Nice have entirely tram-centric systems. But in no case is there any subway-surface running as in the United States or Germany: lines are either clearly trams or clearly metros, rather than mixtures, and it is the system that is mixed, not the individual line.
Has France decolonized?
Like Britain, France did not take its geopolitical disempowerment at the end of World War Two easily. Both countries have maintained superpower pretensions, decolonizing but trying to treat their former colonies as their spheres of influence as much as possible. In Britain, this relationship broke down – the ex-colonies were being too loud in the Commonwealth, leading the country to seek to join the EU instead. In France, this relationship remains in Africa, and notable not in Southeast Asia, where Vietnam is buildings its urban rail networks with Chinese and Japanese financing.
But France is not just providing financing to infrastructure projects in its former (or current?) African colonies. It has a permanent presence. In researching Arab rail infrastructure, Anan Maalouf has noted that Alstom has had a subsidiary operating in Algeria since 2002, which does not exist elsewhere in the Arab world. This way, French firms maintain close knowledge of the situation in the Maghreb, where incomes and productivity levels are much lower than in France, so that different methods are optimal from those common in rich countries.
Nonetheless, what they build remains noticeably French. For example, the Sfax tramway does not look too different from what Bordeaux or Nice has. The Tunis Métro looks rather like a French tramway system too, despite the name; of note, even though the Tunis Métro branches, and has some underground segments, those segments are not on line trunks and thus the system does not form a subway-surface or Stadtbahn network.
I haven’t gone too much into intercity rail, but it is worth mentioning that Morocco has a high-speed rail system, built with French technical assistance and running TGV equipment.
Does this work?
Yes and no.
The Paris system works. It is not perfect, and in particular the integration between the Métro and the RER could be better; at least one tram line should be a full metro line (a completed T3 ring), and suburban extensions should generally use the RER, with more investment in RER capacity within the city as well. That said, public transport usage is higher in Paris than in its closest comparison, that is London; Paris’s system is also superior in both overall usage and future prospects to that of another megacity in Europe, Moscow. Only Istanbul could potentially do better in the future, in the context of extremely low construction costs.
That said, Paris is a giant that casts a long shadow, which doesn’t always work well for secondary cities. Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, and the other secondary French cities aren’t too different in modal split from similar-size British cities, and are behind Vancouver, a North American city with extensive postwar growth. German cities in the Lyon size class do a lot better. See for example data here and here.
The weird features of France, like the love for rubber tires, are not that relevant overall, but do point out that France is relatively insular, and mostly adopts domestic ideas developed in Paris rather than ideas from elsewhere in Europe, let alone Asia. (Yes, I know about Japanese influence on the initial RER; however, there have been 50 years of divergence since, same as with German tram-trains and American light rail.) This has been especially problematic with regional rail. France does not have frequent takts anywhere – even Paris only has takt timetables off-peak, running a separate schedule at rush hour, whereas the German takt plan is repeated throughout the day and the peak can only have supplemental service.
The issue is that Paris does not need to think in terms of repeating schedules, because it is so big that the RER trunks run every 5 minutes off-peak. It thinks of the RER as mostly separate trunk lines with dedicated fleets, because the primary problem is train capacity through city center. In Lyon, let alone smaller cities, this is not the main issue. There do exist a handful of individual lines running an off-peak takt elsewhere in France, but integration with urban rail remains imperfect and a comparison with Vienna, Copenhagen, Zurich, Stuttgart, and Hamburg would not be favorable. It matters that, like Britain, France has such a dominant capital that it doesn’t know how to scale down to provide rail service in a metropolitan area where if the transfers aren’t perfectly timed, people won’t ride.
Pedestrian Observations 
AGAIN: T-O-N-E D-E-A-F
What is tone deaf about this article?
Nice.
Only a few minor points about the rubber-tired system. First, I’m not sure I’ve ever read an authoritative account for why it was developed and what advantages it might have. I recall the main thing being speed of acceleration in an older era when electric traction motors were less nimble/powerful as today. With very short interstation distances this would have been an advantage in a way not so apparent in most other big city Metro systems. It may have been “in vogue” in the postwar period but the fully-automated driverless VAL (a world first?) system deployed first in Lille (1983) and later (1998) on Paris-M14, and this suggests some perceived advantages regardless of advances in electric traction. Then, when M1 was converted in 2011 to driverless with platform doors, it retained the rubber tyres, which of course may have been purely pragmatic in that it came with the train used on M14. Second, the rubber tyres are additional to steel wheels; ie. they have both. Which perhaps is especially weird since it must add cost and complications for both train and track. Though equally, it may reduce wear on both, and do share axels. Third, it may be weird but there is some Asian weirdness too, in that Japan independently developed them and have deployed them in several cities including Tokyo.
Rubber tyres provide quick acceleration/deceleration, while steel wheels keep the train going in a straight line. So it can be advantageous to have booth.
Wikipedia seems to have a good summary of the topic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber-tyred_metro
Yes, but there are horizontal small rubber guide wheels too (4 per bogie), so it looks like it could steer without the steel wheels. My guess is that it is related to the ride. Without the steel wheels it would be more like a bus, and despite being very flat track/guideway, it would bounce around.
The flanged steel wheels are a safety backup, should the rubber tires deflate. They also help guide trains through the switches (this is a problem/disadvantage otherwise with non-flanged wheel/rubber tire/AGT systems- they have to traverse crossovers relatively slowly compared to conventional rail). Also, the conventional rail on the guideway serves as a current return path.
Sapporo uses a rubber tire system for its metro. The aforementioned acceleration characteristic has been touted. Also, the first line built for the ’72 winter Olympics had its southern section above ground, which involved a rather steep grade from the underground portion past HIragishi Station. Contemporary steel wheel traction motors were not capable of handling that grade. Lower above ground noise levels were also touted, as the elevated portion was built through residential areas on the former roadbed of the abandoned Jozankei Railway.
I remember reading something about powerful interests in the road tyre industry influencing Sapporo’s choice…
Mexico city metro is ridiculously loud, so I don’t quite get the idea of noise advantages…
As far as I know, Madrid planners tend to look at Paris at their main model in many ways, and the metro does look fairly similar in its initial design (single operator, fairly non-radial, stations very close to each other, 100% new ROW/Tunnels). Cercanías is also modeled as a RER-like system, although it has VERY few stations within the city proper in Comparison (Atocha, Sol, Nuevos Ministerios, Principe Pio, Chamartin being the only relevant stops – Recoletos does not even have a metro connection!).
Barcelona is a bit of a weird hybrid – the metro and Rodalies are very French, the FGC lines were designed by brits and are operated more like an S-Bahn than a RER (and they have a lot of stops within the city). Then you have quite a few mid-sized cities with fairly decent transit (Bilbao, Asturias, Valencia, all with their peculiar influences) and some big ones that are still trying to figure things out (Seville, Malaga, Zaragoza…).
The Madrid metro was started with “private money” from king Alfonso XIII. Idk whether he was a francophile, but many crowned heads were…
Je sais que c’est un petit système mais à Rouen ils ont construit un système de tramway dans les années 90 (appeler un métro!) qui est souterrain et à la surface.
Cet système, est-il comme un Stadtbahn allemand/américain? C’est-à-dire, une ligne souterrain qui bifurque à la surface, comme à Boston, Philadelphie, San Francisco, Cologne, Francfort, Dortmund, etc.?
Ligne T2 à Nice c’est la même chose (avec deux terminus banlieusards).
Marseille historical line 68 has a section in tunnel which is probably the reason why it was among the last active tramway lines in the 70s, the tunnel could not be easily converted.
Lille Tramway, another one of last the 3 systems that were not dismantled after WWII (with Saint-Etienne) has also a short final underground section, built in 1994 to reach the main station of Lille Flandre.
I’d count Rouen as a (U-)Stadtbahn. Quite a few tunnel stops in the centre. The rest of the infrastructure is pretty heavy too with under- and overpasses. I also believe it was designed for running double units of TFS-2. The platforms are about 52 m, but TFS-2 doesn’t have doors close to the ends and could overhang the platforms. Isn’t Paris T2 the only other French line with multiple traction? And Rouen has switched to 40 m single units, so no multiples there anymore.
I wouln’d count Marseille as Stadtbahn. The tunnel is more of an oddity. Nice T2 might count. It does have a long tunnel, but I’m not familiar with the details.
What I think this tells us is that the first new generation French systems had various design inspirations and experiments. Most of the development in tramway design also happened outside Paris. This doesn’t preclude similar network planning in larger cities though.
As for network design with mostly radial metro and orbital / feeder light rail, wouldn’t Stockholm (Tvärbanan, Lidingöbanan) count? London (Croydon) in a sense as well. And our (Helsinki) upcoming Jokeri Light Rail, although we have a classic system as well. Not that these would make this a common model.
And here is a map and photos for Rouen as well http://www.urbanrail.net/eu/fr/rouen/rouen-tram.htm .
I wouldn’t count Stockholm – it’s radial and highly branched, whereas Paris is definitely not radial and I don’t think Lyon is either, and in general metro branching is uncommon in France.
The metro network shapes are certainly different in Paris and Stockholm. I was referring specifically to trams providing separate links from the heavy rail network as opposed to covering (the central part of) the same geographic area just for shorter trips.
oui, tout à fait
A side note on the way ideas are conveyed between systems: Nantes contacted us in Edmonton for information and photos of our 1978 LRT line and we supplied them with an envelope of technical and marketing info.
I’m unsure as to whether you consider Santiago’s metro system to be one of the world’s major ones (I do), but I wanted to point out the missed connection between Lines 4A and 5 that requires double-connecting at Vicente Valdés and Vicuña Mackenna. Another example of a missed connection that easily could have been rectified with a rerouting out of the freeway median of Line 4A to terminate at Vicente Valdés for a double-connect with both Lines 4 and 5. 🙂
Yeah that missed connection is one that’s so glaring. I agree that line 4A should have exited . My issue with that whole setup is why was line 5 not extended the additional 9.5km from Vincente Valdes to Plaza de Puente Alto and Line 4 continue from Vicuña Mackenna into the current line 4A alignment with the line exiting the freeway median to make connect with Line 5 at Bellavista de La Florida. A 1.7km tunnel with line 4A starting under Sta Raquel and continuing under Dr. Luis Calvo Mckenna before making a right turn to go under line 5 and meet at Bellavista de La Florida and proceed under the mall parking lot finally reconnecting with the freeway at Froilán Roa.
The fact that line 5 uses rubber tired trains and both line 4 and 4A use steel wheels makes realignment prohibitive. So your proposed option might be the best bet of fixing that situation.
Montréal does have regional rail, “train de banlieue”, with 6 lines (one of which is under the process of getting converted into automated light rail through the REM project). https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trains_de_banlieue_de_Montréal
It does, but frequencies are rather woeful: Only the Deux Montagnes line (which is the one that’s being converted) had at least hourly (!) service off-peak as well as service late at night and at weekends (although with the latter dropping two mostly two-hourly on Saturdays and even worse on Sundays). From there it’s only downhill – Vaudreuil-Hudson and Saint-Jérôme run something approaching two- to three-hourly off-peak on weekdays and at least *some* sort of service on weekends, while the remaining three lines are basically Mo – Fr peak-direction-only affairs.
On French transit exports, you could also mention Cairo Metro and Dakar “TER” which is being built and should have been called “RER” since it will be mostly urban linking Dakar to the new airport and planned capital Diamniadio at 30km from Dakar. I can’t find when it will open. https://www.lepoint.fr/economie/senegal-le-train-regional-express-sur-les-rails-15-01-2019-2286005_28.php
French speaking Swiss cities have also followed the French trend by dismantling most of their tramway systems (unlike Swiss German cities) and again by rebuilding a new system first in Geneva since the 90s and soon in Lausanne.
And a small French city has now its RER… it’s Annemasse linked every 15 min all day to Geneva. Let’s hope it can influence other French cities.
Throw in the under construction 37km long Abidjan metro https://www.railwaygazette.com/projects-and-planning/abidjan-metro-package-approved/55432.article
Also the weird Lausanne metro which is arguably the smallest town with a subway – if one doesn’t count Serfaus
Yes, M2 was built with Paris’ M14 as a model. On the other hand, M1 is more similar to a stadtbahn with a mostly single track with some level crossings and a tramway like material.
Lausanne has also a regional meter gauge railway, LEB, also a kind of stadtbahn.
Rennes is actually a slightly smaller urban area, 335k vs 420k inhabitants.
The metro serves a city, not suburbs…
Not true in the case of Rennes’ métro which also serves Cesson-Sévigné and Saint-Jacques-de-la-Lande.
Not true in the case of Lausanne’s métro that goes to Epalinges, Ecublens and Renens.
Both are managed by a public transportation company that serves the whole urban area.
I think the French way of building trams has been hugely successful not least in that they got an amazing amount of them built in relatively short time, creating political consensus for further expansion…
Quick comments re: Morocco. In addition to the TGV, Morocco has also built tramway lines in Casablanca and Rabat largely in cooperation with French companies (parts of the construction of the Casablanca tramway was done by a Turkish company, Yapi Merkazi). Specifically, financed with infrastructure loans via the European Investment Bank and the Agence française de développement, acquiring rolling stock from Alstom and having the lines operated and maintained by the RATP. A lot of this stems from reasons exactly as you mention, the decolonisation process in Morocco, and the entire Maghreb in fact, led to dictatorships which maintained strong relationships with France (both economic and political reliance for the purpose of holding on to power against potential democratic threats). Going forward, Tunisia will be the country to have its eye on, having true popular support enables their government to credibly engage in sourcing partnerships to fund and build transportation infrastructure from countries other than France (that said, France is not the worst country for building transportation infrastructure). Morocco has actually done a bit of that recently, but the extent that they have seriously looked at outside options based on technical and financial merit is suspect and more likely has served as a small bargaining chip to use with France. For example, Morocco has contracted out bus operations to Alsa, a Spanish company, in Marrakech, Agadir and Tangier, as well as has explored Chinese investment/financing for High Speed Rail in its plans to expand the TGV from Casablanca to Marrakech and Agadir.
One of the main features of French metros for me is ultra-high headways during rush hour and still high ones off peak. Probably mainly thanks to automatisation, but also not over building on capacity. Even the small cities enjoy frequencies other cities around the world can only dream of.
I think the issue here is not because they want to, but because they have to.
The VAL 20x in smaller French cities are absolutely tiny, and only a slight improvement over Elon Musk and his Loop. Thus, high frequency is needed to provide an acceptable level of service.
It’s not that much better with the VAL 256 and Paris Metro-derived designs, which have smaller vehicles that facilitate smaller tunnels.
I think “seb” frames this better as a choice to meet demand through vehicle frequency rather than vehicle capacity. At least in peripheral cities, demand seems unlikely to rise in the future beyond what the system can handle. So small frequent vehicles is both cost-effective and rider-friendly.
Yes, there are some French system outside of Paris which have capacity problems. But if you live in a smaller metro area, your average trip length is likely shorter, so the waiting time is a bigger part of it. So it’s important to reach high ridership levels with fast access times (so not too deep stations) and high frequencies.
Tunis metro is probably an outlier. According to urbanrail.net it was built by a Siemens-led consortium in the 80’s. So closer to the vintage of the original North American light rail systems. This is what I call the first wave of light rail revival. Systems like Tvärbanan and Manchester metrolink are also based on this thinking. The French light rail revival is decidedly more recent and the North African systems based on it even more so.
French interests seem to be involved in modernizing Tunis now though. And the general claim certainly stands.
Although French tramways don’t usually have multiple traction, the French designs for Morocco do run in multiple. So in a sense they are adaptations of the French tramway concept for heavier flows at lower cost, while back in France metro is used for heavy flows and trams for lighter flows.
Forgot the link of course http://www.urbanrail.net/af/tunis/tunis.htm . Robert Schwandl is generally a reliable source.
> Although French tramways don’t usually have multiple traction, the French designs for Morocco do run in multiple.
As do those in Jerusalem.
Have also accounted for the non RER suburban trains that are an integral part of the regional transit network of the capital ? (they do tend to be overlooked in some of the transit maps :/) but they complement the 5 RER significantly.