Metro
From Paris Hotels Reviews
Metro
As soon as you set foot below ground, greater Paris’s through ethnic and social mix is instantly apparent. The center of the city may be flush with the white and wealthy and in their expensive cars, but the franciliens who lived beyond the périphérique ring road – women in West African dress, streetwise kids from the banlieue, and working men in overalls – tend to use the métro. Predictably, there’s a certain style about the way Parisian’s travel, notably the casual upward flick of the wrist that turns the doot handle just before the train has stopped moving. There’s also an associated courtesy culture – when it gets crowded you’re not supposed to use the strapontins, the folding seats by the door, and it’s tacitly understood that only someone really pushy walks up or down an escalator.
Internationally, however, the métro is best known not for its social niceties but for its beautiful Art Deco signs and entrances, designed by Hector Guimard in 1990. As with most of their city’s cutting-edge design icons, Parisians were, at first, than impressed, Guimard’s sinewy green railings and lantern holders being compared to threatening insect’s tentacles. The last three complete Guimard stations, with their glazed roofs intact, can be found at Abesses, below Montmartre; at the Porte Dauphine, on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne; and, since 2000, at Châtelet’s place St-Opportune entrance. Some stations have distinct characters below ground, too: check out the funky multi-colored lamps at Bonnes Nouvelles station, for example, the cabinets of treasured and jeweled entrance at Palais Royal-Musée du Louvre, the extraordinary all-copper décor of Arts-et-Méitlers, Varennes’ massive version of Rodin’s The Thinker and St-Germain-des-Prés’ sleek comic-book projections.
Technologically, the métro is one of the finest in the world, though the famous rubber tyres are actually restricted to lines 1, 4, 6, 11 and 14. Quieter and quicker of the blocks than steel they may be, but behind every tyre – except the horizontal pneus de guidage (guidance tyres), of course – there’s a steel wheel, just as backup. It’s classic French design – superior and relatively uneconomic. Line 1 now has the very latest in air-conditioned, articulated, compartmentless carriages, while the new and extremely swanky line 14 goes one better with driverless trains, which offer exciting views down the tunnels. There are more elevated métro pastimes than tyre-spotting and playing train drivers, too. The writer Jacques Jouet and the avant-garde literary group, Oulipo, invented a system for composing métro poems; you have to write a single line every time the train is still, and think up the next while the train is moving. For something a little less cerebral, you could ride the ultra-high-speed travelator at Montparnasse-Bienvenüe station.
Perhaps the métro’s most amazing features are its reliability – most of the four and a half million journeys a day pass without event , except when there’s a strike – and its cost, with roughly two-thirds of the ticket price subsidized by the French taxpayer.
