This Monday, June 24, Emmanuel Macron inaugurates the extension of line 14 of the Paris metro to connect the Olympic athletes’ village to Orly airport.
A race against time
After months of racing against time, the extension of line 14 welcomes its first passengers this Monday, June 24, to connect Saint-Denis, north of Paris, to Orly airport, a month before the opening of the Olympic Games.
Very involved in the preparations for this global meeting, Emmanuel Macron plans to attend the inauguration, six days before the first round of very indecisive legislative elections caused by his surprise dissolution of the Assembly. Like Jacques Chirac in his time during the opening of the first section of the 14, a few months after the 1998 Football World Cup.
The work is on time
This time, the work is on time to welcome the millions of spectators of the Olympic Games organized in the capital from July 26 to August 11.
“It’s a major success” for RATP, main project manager of the project, welcomed the spokesperson for the public group Jimmy Brun. “It was ultra-complex, with an extension, a modernization of the operating automation system and the renewal of the rolling stock,” he explains.
One million travelers per day in 2025
With 28 km long, eight new stations and 11 communities crossed, line 14 will transport one million passengers per day by mid-2025, thus becoming the first “supermetro” in the Paris region.
During a visit at the beginning of June, project director Stéphane Garreau mentioned a “link between the historic network and the future Grand Paris Express network” thanks to its connections with lines 15, 16, 17 and 18 in construction phase.
Unique in the world
It is also and above all a crucial line for the smooth running of the Games since it will serve the athletes’ village, the Stade de France and the aquatic center to the north, unloading lines B and D of the RER and line 13 of the metro. To the south, it will reach Orly airport in 25 minutes from Châtelet, in the center of Paris.
To deliver on time, RATP had to work extra hard. The construction site was almost never interrupted during the Covid-19 pandemic and was able to be completed at the cost of numerous line closures on weekends, during school holidays or in the evening.
It closed two weeks during the winter holidays to definitively migrate to the new automatic pilot system, then one week in April and five days in May to connect the extensions to the historic line and start the dry run.
These “traffic interruptions” were often misunderstood by users, according to Jimmy Brun, increasing the pressure on the teams.
Edgar Sée, former director of the project and now “Mr. JO” of the RATP, puts it into perspective: “modernizing and extending a line in operation, with so little impact on the service provided, is unique in the world.”
260 000 habitants
To respond to the foreseeable explosion in attendance, Ile-de-France Mobilités (IDFM) spent 1.1 billion euros to purchase 72 new trains currently being deployed, around fifty of which will be in service by the Olympics .
The extension will have cost 3.5 billion euros, entirely financed by the Société des Grands Projets (SGP).
The extension will benefit 260,000 inhabitants south of Paris, in Val-de-Marne and in Essonne, according to IDFM.
On the Orly side, “10% of employees and travelers will immediately abandon their car in favor of the metro” while until now “90% of the platform’s 28,000 employees and 70% of passengers come by individual vehicle”, estimates its manager, Groupe ADP, which expects to see “nearly 100,000 passengers per day” pass through the new station.
The 14 “will simplify the journeys of millions of travelers and will add a mobility option to our Orly employees”, rejoiced Bertrand Godinot, general manager for France of easyJet, who is launching a summer advertising campaign on the theme… of the metro.
Eight years of work
The line will make it possible to reach other emblematic places in the south of Ile-de-France such as the Rungis market, the future Cité de la gastronomy which is due to open in 2028 or the Bièvre scientific valley.
After eight years of work, this is one of RATP’s major projects which is coming to an end, before the inauguration of the southern section of future line 15 expected at the end of 2025. RATP is also turning its attention to another program important: the automation of line 13, the eternally ill and overloaded network, supposed to be completed in 2035.
