On the paper of the candidacy file, it was a rolling business: trains, buses, trams and applications to guide travelers were planned and therefore should not pose any problem for the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Paris in 2024.

However, the difficulties currently encountered in public transport in Île-de-France portends the worst.

The Parisian public transport operator has been put to the test since the summer, victim of a shortage of personnel, difficulties in recruiting, worrying absenteeism and sporadic strikes.

Buses and metros have become rarer, which has exasperated users … and raises questions for the Olympic Games.

"We will do everything to be there," promised Jean Castex, former Prime Minister and current CEO of RATP, announcing thousands of hires.

Île-de-France Mobilités aims to be reassuring

The transport organizing authority of the capital region, Île-de-France Mobilités (IDFM), therefore unveiled its plan on Sunday March 12 to ensure the smoothest possible traffic between July 26 and September 8, 2024, dates of the Games. Olympic and Paralympic.

The challenge is sizeable: the company will have to be able to transport as many passengers as on a peak day in Île-de-France, but on a few sites concentrated in Paris and Seine-Saint-Denis, and the all in the middle of summer.

The plan "is not trivial because there is not just one site to serve, but 25 operating at the same time", asked the general manager of IDFM, Laurent Probst, at a press conference. .

The Games (July 26-August 11, 2024) are divided into 750 "sessions", with 7 million spectators expected.

On average, this represents 50 sessions per day and "for each, there is a transport plan. It's as if we had 50 matches per day for two weeks", explained Laurent Probst.

For the Paralympics (August 28-September 8), with around 3 million spectators, it will be an average of 18 sessions per day but "with the particularity that the second week will also be the back-to-school week".

The Olympics will bring together up to 500,000 spectators per day – with peaks scheduled for July 28 and August 2 – not counting open events such as cycling or the marathon, for which hundreds of thousands of spectators are expected along the routes.

In Saint-Denis, around the Stade de France, peaks of 1,000 people per minute are expected "but for several hours, it's quite unprecedented to manage", according to Laurent Probst.

Distribute to better manage

Even if the number of trains will be increased by 15%, the main issue lies in the distribution of passengers between the existing lines.

To do this, IDFM is also working on an application dedicated to transport during the Olympics and will have 5,000 agents in the stations to guide travelers.

“We are on a target of 100% of people coming to the Stade de France by public transport” against 60% on average usually, recalled Laurence Debrincat, director of studies and Olympic Games at IDFM.

Paris-2024 will therefore recommend to spectators holding tickets a preferred route to "encourage them to seek" other lines than those taken in normal times, the Stade de France being for example served by the RER but also the metro.

"To go to a site, forget how you usually go there and go there as you are told to do", explained Laurence Debrincat.

Red alert on the social climate

However, one element could still derail the plans drawn up on paper: a potentially explosive social climate, the Olympics being organized six months before the opening to competition of the bus network currently operated as a monopoly by the RATP.

The unions of the Régie are very hostile to it, the regional left, in the opposition, is agitated... To avoid a strike which would cause disorder, the Minister Delegate for Transport, Clément Beaune, even says he is ready to extend the monopoly of the RATP.

On the political side, the LR president of the region, Valérie Pécresse, is trying to capitalize on the urgency to complete her 2024 budget, arguing that the additional offer for the Olympics, in particular, must cost 200 million euros, threatening to don't open newlines if it gets nothing.

New lines on which the Paris 2024 candidacy file published seven years ago relied a lot.

For example, he promised travel times of “22 minutes to the media village and 30 minutes to the Olympic village from (the airport of) Roissy by line 17” of the future Grand Paris metro.

But this will not be completed before 2030... The CDG Express, a fast train to connect Roissy to the center of Paris, and line 16 will not be there either.

Only one infrastructure will be ready just in time: line 14, which must be extended north to Saint-Denis Pleyel, near the Olympic village, and south to Orly airport.

In June 2024.

“The solutions announced do not seem either sufficient or operationally feasible”, judges Iona Lefebvre, of the Institut Montaigne, a center for reflection on public policies in France.

The subject is followed with attention.

The scenes of chaos around the Stade de France during the final of the Football Champions League at the end of May are still in everyone's memory when the French authorities had been singled out.

With AFP

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