On the eve of the Paralympic Games, the president of the Île-de-France region, Valérie Pécresse, promises to make the metro accessible to all with a 20 billion euro plan. Because the observation is that today, we are far from the mark in terms of accessibility in public transport.
The Paralympic Games begin this Wednesday in Paris, with the opening ceremony. Several hundred thousand people with reduced mobility and visual impairments are expected in the capital.
For the occasion, the president of the Île-de-France region and Île-de-France Mobilités Valérie Pécresse promises a plan to make the metro accessible to all. An investment of 15 to 20 billion euros to modernize the 13 historic lines of the Paris metro in the years to come.
Because despite the promises, transporting people with disabilities is still a path of suffering. Only line 14 is fully accessible, with one elevator per station.
At Porte de Clichy, Dominique gets off his bus thanks to a ramp that unfolds. “Here, we have a journey that went very well, but that is not always the case,” he says. He has been paraplegic for eight years.
And if this is not always the case, it is because some ramps are not necessarily at the right level with the sidewalk…
“Until you’re in a wheelchair, you don’t realize it. You don’t realize the tilt. Sometimes, there are also strollers,” he explains.
The need to anticipate everything
So he sometimes has to let several buses pass before he can get on. “You have to know that for us, people in wheelchairs, it takes us one and a half times longer, sometimes even double, to get around,” he says.
A journey time that he will have to anticipate even more in order to be able to follow the Paralympic events.
“I go to the Grand Palais for fencing, to Bercy for wheelchair basketball. I’m worried about transport, for example when I have two activities in the day. Plus, schools are going to start again so there will be a lot of people again. It’s going to be sport,” he says.
Dominique acknowledges that the Games have helped improve transport accessibility. But for him, there is still a long way to go.
Anna Jaujard with Guillaume Descours
