Four years after it was announced with great pomp and circumstance, the Grand Paris project remains precisely that : a much-hyped announcement, a grand pipe dream. More and more households are devoting an increasingly large share of their budgets to homes that are smaller and smaller or further and further away from their place of work. As for transportation, the situation has gone from bad in to worse now, especially on the main suburban trains and inner-city subway lines.
Travel conditions, reliability and rapidity are steadily declining. According to the current planning horizons for Grand Paris, we will have to wait a good ten years for the first sections of the new driverless subway lines to go on stream. Now that ought to reassure all those cramped commuters agonizing through the daily ordeal of an overloaded system! Then there is the Grand Paris team itself : a strong body of armchair planners with no clear-cut status who have been charting the roadmap since Even though it benefits from supplementary tax revenue, there is tremendous concern about its ability to carry out projects that look more like Rube-Goldberg-machine partnerships than a bona fide regional development plan.
But the worst is yet to come. The problem is that the solutions developed for the GPE amount to yet another bottomless pit. Paris is the only big city in the world to plan such a budget-guzzler of a subway system : all other cities reserve this mode of transport for crossing old high-density areas, with elevated lines over major thoroughfares and developable brownfield sites or recycled overground infrastructures in lower-density suburban areas.
This tendency to underestimate the price tag remains a widespread practice that will probably plague these new projects as well. In addition, there is the cost of running the new system, for which only one real estimate has been made β in the report by National Assembly deputy Gilles Carrez September Providing services to areas that are far less dense will generate diminishing returns : lower passenger traffic levels means a higher cost per passenger than on the existing RER and metro lines.
This fact, combined with the initial cost plus the budget overruns, makes the financing and realization of the system in its entirety rather doubtful, if not impossible.
