. . . AND PARIS

Diana Geddes describes

the joys of travelling on the metro

`THE Paris metro? It's marvellous!' a British expatriate enthused. It's cheap and it's so easy to use. You can go anywhere you like for one flat-rate ticket. You mostly don't have to walk for miles for connections. It's modern and reasonably comfortable. The stations are frequently cleaned and fairly stylish. And you don't have to line up in long queues waiting to hand your ticket in to someone in a grubby little box at the end of your journey.

`What I mean is the French are actually interested in transport, aren't they? They put it at the heart of their life. You can see it in the quality of their motorways, their TGV trains, their bus service, their metro.

They are actually willing to spend money on public transport, whereas we grudge every penny. I suppose there's nothing really wrong with our London Under- ground, except that we should take it all out and start again.'

Those Parisians who have never experi- enced another underground train system are not always so complimentary about the metro. 'It's disgusting', a children's play- group leader moaned: 'It's dirty and badly looked after. But, yes, it is efficient and quick. From that point of view I agree, it's a dream.'

The Paris metro (which gets its name from train metropolitain) is considerably younger than its London counterpart, the first line having been opened in 1900. It was an immediate success: 15 million pas- sengers were carried in the first six months.

New tunnels, close to the surface, were rapidly dug, mainly following existing streets. By 1914, ten lines were in opera- tion and were carrying nearly 500 million passengers a year.

Work was interrupted by the war, but resumed with vigour immediately after. More lines were built and existing lines extended far into the suburbs. During the second world war, the metro was virtually the only form of transport available to Parisians due to the shortage of petrol and tyres in the Nazi-occupied city, and the number of users roses sharply. In 1946, a record 1,600 million passenger journeys were made.

But thereafter, numbers fell off to sta- balise at a little above 1,000 million annual passenger journeys throughout the past 35 years. Today, 15 lines totalling 125 miles of track serve a 72 square-mile area contain- ing just over seven million inhabitants. The metro carried 1,200 million passengers last year. However, of the estimated 19 million journeys taken daily within that area, only about 20 per cent are by metro.

Yet Paris is groaning under the weight of its motorised traffic. One million cars flood into the capital every day, swelling the ranks of the 600,000 cars owned by the city's two million inhabitants. Parking is a nightmare. Cars are left littered over the pavements, in the middle of roads, in front of private exits, double and even triple- parked. The city's narrow side streets are constantly blocked by delivery vans or buses or rubbish carts. Yet the majority of people continue to prefer to use their car rather than the metro. Why?

`Because the Frenchman is an indi- vidualist,' a Parisian businessman ex- plained. 'He dislikes being herded together with all sorts of people like that. There are a lot of foreigners on the metro, you know. Furthermore it's grubby, and at night it's not really so safe. A car is just so much more convenient. It takes you to your door and you don't have all that bother of changing line.' The time and nervous energy spent sitting in endless traffic jams or looking for a parking place seemed to have been forgotten.

In fact, the bald statistics do not really give a fair picture of the popularity of the metro because they include a wide area outside Paris, including places more than 40 miles away such as Versailles, St Ger- main en Laye, and Charles de Gaulle airport, all served by the high-speed RER underground train introduced ten years ago and interconnecting with the existing metro stations. Within Paris proper, that is to say within the limits of the `peripheri- que', the metro is much used and appreci- ated.

First and foremost, as the British ex- patriate pointed out, it is so easy to use. You can buy your tickets in advance in batches of ten, un carnet, (at almost half the price of ten singles) and thereby avoid queueing. The same ticket, costing just 26p, will take you anywhere on the 125- mile metro system, (not including the RER), while a weekly or monthly season ticket allows you unlimited use of all forms of public transport, including main-line surburban trains.

Since 1974 all metro stations have been equipped with automatic ticket barriers, which have eliminated the former queues at the access gates onto the platform. Trains are frequent — every 95-100 seconds during the peak period (five hours a day), and every 2-21/2 minutes during the daytime off-peak period. And that's genuine. After 8 p.m., the intervals get longer — up to seven minutes at the least busy times at around 11 p.m. (The metro closes at 1.15 a.m. and re-opens at 5.30 a.m.). But one never has to wait indefinite- ly as one sometimes seems to do in London.

Nor does one have to walk miles. Within Paris, the stations are close, 500 yards apart on average and only 300 yards apart in central Paris, though in the suburbs they could be up to a mile apart. The trains mostly operate close to the surface (aver- age depth of stations 13-39 feet), so you do not have to spend hours descending into the gloomy bowels of the earth. There are few lifts because the distances don't war- rant them (though that does not make life easy for the handicapped), and the escala- tors (most installed since 1960) hardly ever seem to break down.

Parisians may complain about the dirti- ness of the metro, but they have remark- ably high standards of cleanliness. (Paris must be the only city in the world where the dustbins are emptied every day, includ- ing Sundays.) To English eyes, the metro is surprisingly well kept. It is certainly not spotless, but all the stations are cleaned, and disinfected, at least once a day several times for the busiest stations, and the trains are spring-cleaned inside and out once a fortnight, as well as being swept out daily.

The whole feel is lighter and brighter than in London, thanks partly to the original white tiles of the walls and vaulted roofs of most stations, and to the wide double track in almost all stations. The advertising posters on the platform are gay and neatly framed. The modern, indi- vidually moulded, plastic seats add a not unpleasant splash of colour. The neon lighting is bright without being glaring. Even the station names, printed in the traditional French white on a blue back- ground, are so much more attractive than in the London tube.

In an effort to attract more passengers, shops, temporary exhibitions and even licensed buskers have been encouraged to come into the metro over the past decade. A metro television service, coincidentally called the 'Tube', providing news flashes, pop music clips, and information about sporting and cultural events, has been introduced on many station platforms (though in fact it has proved such a financial disaster that it is about to be withdrawn). And ten stations have been equipped with a wall of television screens providing live coverage of major sporting events such as the Rolland Garros tennis championships and the Tour de France; and that has proved an enormous success. The metro trains seem much roomier and quieter than the London tube. Each carriage has 24-28 fixed seats, grouped in facing pairs, interspersed by four standing areas equipped with vertical poles for hanging Onto (there are no overhead straps in the metro) and 24-30 folding seats. The arrangements somehow seems to allow one more easily to avoid unwelcome eyeball to eyeball contact or having a bottom shoved into one's face when sitting.

Although some Parisians complain that the metro is unsafe, it is a lot safer than most big city underground services. Pick- pocketing is the most common crime 8,000 cases (more than 20 a day) were reported last year, but that was half the level of four years ago before the police cleared up the main culprits — roving gangs of pre-teen gypsy children who were being manipulated by rich Fagin-type char- acters, often after being kidnapped from their homes in Yugoslavia. Reported armed attacks in the metro totalled 2,686 last year. That may sound high, but it needs to be seen in the perspective of the nearly 5 million metro Passengers carried every day. It also repre- sents a cut of over a third in comparison with 1984.

Serious accidents, such as train crashes or fires, are rare. Special safety measures were incorporated into the design of the metro from the outset following a catas- trophic fire in 1903, caused by an electrical short-circuit, in which 84 people were killed. The next fatal failure of the metro did not occur until nearly 80 years later, in 1981, when two trains collided, killing one person and injuring 71 others, at the Auber station. Another collision a few months later at the National station left one dead and five injured. There have been no serious accidents since.

The Paris metro is one of the cheapest for the user — in the developed world, beaten only, so it is claimed, by Moscow and Madrid. It is also one of the most highly subsidised. The normal 2.83 franc (26p) ticket represents only half the real cost of the average journey. The bus is the same price for short journeys, but double or triple for longer journeys. The esti- mated cost of the average car journey in Paris is three times as much. Overall, taking into account cut-price season tick- ets, student and old-age pensioner fares, the passenger pays only just over one third of the metro's costs.

The organisation which runs the com- bined Paris bus and metro service is called the Regie Autonome des Transports Pari- siens (RATP), but is in fact anything but autonomous. The government appoints not only the managing director and presi- dent of the board of directors (a graduate of the elite post-graduate civil service training institute, ENA), but also all the other members of the board, including the supposed users' representative.

The government also decides all fare increases. As these are included in the price index on which the inflation rate is based, politicians facing elections (which occur almost every year in France) often prefer to leave the fares untouched and to contribute a higher subsidy from the public coffers instead. As a result, the proportion of the real costs born by the passengers has fallen by a half over the past 20 years. No one outside Paris complains that they contribute through their taxes to making life even easier for the Parisians, largely because they simply do not know.