June, the eve of the Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games (OPG), remains the season for inaugurations on the Ile-de-France regional transport network. The season even got underway at the beginning of May, with the extension of the RER E, or Eole as it is known, to the west, as far as Nanterre-La Folie. Due to delays in the delivery of trainsets, only four trains per hour will run on the new route this summer but two of the three new stations, at Porte Maillot and La Défense, will improve service to the competition venues.
Since the beginning of April, the Maréchaux tramway has also been stopping at Porte Maillot, an ex-highway roundabout spectacularly transformed into a square with a green space.
On June 24, the extension of line 14 – the "backbone of the Olympic Games," the "mainstay of the Paris region," as it has already been dubbed – will link the new Saint-Denis-Pleyel station in the north to Orly airport in the south, in just 40 minutes. For the first time in its history, the capital region's second-largest airport will have a direct link to Paris.
An extension planned since 1937
And then there's what's happening to the east of the capital this Thursday, June 13. Less spectacular, less in the media, because it doesn't directly concern the Olympic Games and the construction site has suffered fewer setbacks, the event will not be honored by the Elysée Palace. The extension of line 11 from Mairie-des-Lilas to Rosny-Bois-Perrier, which passes through Romainville, Noisy-le-Sec and Montreuil, is no less strategic – indeed, the line's director said it is a "revolution" – for the inhabitants of the Parisian suburb area it serves, Seine-Saint-Denis. This is the most densely populated department in the Ile-de-France region, with many densely populated towns and districts and hospitals, such as André Grégoire in Montreuil, which is accessible only by bus or car.
This extension is Paris's main transport operator RATP's second most ambitious project in recent years: €1.3 billion for infrastructure alone, to which must be added the 380 million for the trains, financed by Ile-de-France Mobilités. This push toward the suburbs has been planned – at least as far as Romainville – since 1937, as project director Pierre Florent recalled at the end of May during a visit organized by the public company. At that time, line 11 stopped at Mairie des Lilas. World War II broke out. It took more than 60 years before new studies were launched, in 2009.
"In the 2000s, local councilors, feeling forgotten by the state and the region at a time when their area was being transformed, set up an association and put pressure on to relaunch the project," said Paul Lecroart, urban planner at the Institut Paris Region.
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