Paris is heading towards a driverless, strike-free and super-punctual metro. So why isn’t London interested?

Andrew Gilligan
17.08.09

Earlier this summer, as Bob Crow and his RMT strikers staged their latest Tube shutdown, other transport industry professionals were unveiling a foolproof scheme to stop it ever happening again.

These professionals weren't from London, where the preferred option of the Mayor, Boris Johnson —a no-strike deal with the Tube drivers — seems about as achievable as a no-rain deal with the London weather.

They were from Paris, whose Métro is even more plagued than ours by staff unrest. Paris Métro drivers have been on strike at least six times in the past four years. In November 2007, they stayed out for nine days. In 1995, it was three weeks. The authorities thought about no-strike deals in Paris, too, but they have ended up trying something altogether more radical: a no-driver deal.

Many cities, including London's DLR, have already built driverless metro lines from scratch. But in a world first, the French capital is converting one of its existing lines to fully automatic operation. Starting next year, unstaffed trains will run up to every 85 seconds along Line 1, Paris's version of the Central line, which passes west-east under the Champs-Elysées, the rue de Rivoli, the Louvre, the Bastille and half the important sites of the Right Bank. The workers on Line 1 have demanded their last double-digit pay rise.

Publicly at least, the RATP, the Parisian equivalent of TfL, insists that taking on the unions is not its main purpose. “The reason for doing it is to make the service more regular and flexible,” says the project director, Gerald Churchill. But he admits: “It does make it less likely that it will be disrupted by strikes.” And if there is to be any battle with the forces of darkness, this particular RATP manager has the right surname.

“I think I have some English ancestry,” he says. “From Salisbury. I'm not sure I'm actually related to the Churchill.” Never in the field of human transport will so many owe so much to so few. Paris is Europe's busiest metro system and Line 1, with 250 million passengers a year, its busiest line. Once the automation project is finished in 2012, it will be operated by a staff of just six people in a central control room.

If it wanted to, Paris could use all the same excuses transport ­managers in London trot out for never getting anything done. Like most of our lines, Line 1 is very old, the oldest in the city, first opened in 1900. Like ours, it is very crowded. Like ours, it is in service for 20 of the 24 hours. But unlike in London, where months of weekend closures are needed to replace so much as a station's platform tiles, the RATP is carrying out the ­automation of this entire line with almost no disruption whatever to the normal service.

M Churchill is tactful when I ask him why we cannot do this in England. “This seems to be a question that is very interesting to people from London. Each time I talk to people from London about the project they want to know how we can do it without closing the service.” The key seems to be doing a little at a time, and carrying out as much work as possible off-site.

At the stations, automatic gates, a little like those on the Jubilee line extension, are being installed on all the platform edges, to stop people falling underneath trains with no driver to slam on the brakes. This work is being done in the four hours between the last and first trains at the rate of two gates a night, with one complete station ­finished every fortnight.

If you are a Line 1 passenger, the stealthy march of the gates along your platform is almost the only sign you'll notice of anything happening at all. Before the gates can be put in, the ­platform level has to be raised, ­necessitating the only closure, which takes place one station at a time over a single weekend with the trains still ­running through.

There are two other main tasks: to install a new signalling and control system, which is also done overnight, and to test the new automatic trains, which will be delivered from next year onwards. The RATP has opened a test track, exactly simulating the Métro, at the factory where the trains are being built. Because much of the testing has been done there, most tests on Line 1 itself will only need the overnight period, though there will be a few ­closures next year.

There will not be a big bang start for the new line. The automatic trains will come gradually into normal service, running alongside the existing driver-operated ones. All the existing systems will stay in place. This, according to Churchill, should allow any teething problems to be tackled without too much disruption.

“I saw a senior TfL manager in May,” he says. “He was interested in how we co-ordinate works. The first thing I said was that as the project manager I have the money and the power. Traditionally in the RATP you had the maintenance, operations and projects departments and nothing got decided. It was very difficult at first for [the rest of] the company to accept that there is one man who takes the decisions. “The second thing I said is that you have to check the workers. I have three staff that spend the whole night doing nothing but going round and checking all the sites.” Not everything, of course, is simple.

Like his British counterparts, Churchill moans about the “incredible bureaucracy” of “santé et securité” (not even France is safe from health'n'safety these days). They are doing the platform doors at the easy stations first, the ones with nice, straight platforms. But at Bastille, just below François Mitterrand's hideous opera house, the platforms are above ground, curve more sharply than the young Brigitte Bardot and for good measure also sit across the Canal St Martin on a bridge that visibly shakes with every passing train.

Here and elsewhere, they will need infra-red detectors, touch-sensitive pavements and TV cameras to stop passengers getting trapped in the doors, or falling between platform and train.

Yet safety, Churchill insists, will ­actually be better on the new line. The doors mean there will be no more ­people falling off crowded platforms (or throwing themselves off) — one a month at the moment. “It is also the main cause of delay and that will end,” he says.

At Bastille, with the boats moored on the canal below the tracks, I started asking passengers whether they minded not having a driver. What if there was a power failure, a fire in the tunnel, a terrorist bomb? A certain French pragmatism seemed to ­prevail. “What can a driver actually do for you in those situations?” asked Alain ­Maurois.

“No, I wouldn't mind,” said Madeleine Jospet. “Don't forget we already have an automatic line in Paris [Line 14, opened in 1998] and nobody minds using that. It is also the only one that keeps going during the strikes.”

The coming of the platform-edge door has also opened a metaphorical window into the mind of the commuter. “It is very difficult for a human driver to keep to the dwell [stopping] times at stations,” says Churchill. “Paris passengers don't respect the train doors closing signal and still try to get on. But people know they cannot argue with a machine. We have found that passengers get on quicker when there are platform doors because ­psychologically for them there are two barriers to cross.”

The increased regularity brought about by the machines will potentially allow the frequency to be raised by 20 per cent, even out intervals between trains and reduce the number needed to provide the same service. Métro chiefs will also be able to awaken, at the press of a button, as many extra trains as they need to cope with any sudden spike in demand, such as a pop concert or a breakdown on another line.

Riding in the cab of a Line 1 train last week, I could see why the line needs more capacity — and the scale of the achievement if they pull it off. Even though it was August, when essentially half of Paris leaves town, the train slid to a stop at each station past great walls of waiting faces. In the privacy of the cab we seemed detached from the churn and crush in the carriages behind us.

Nabil, the young driver, pressed a yellow button to close the doors and shoved a black plastic lever forward to start the train. How did he feel about the move? “For me, it changes ­nothing,” he said. The negotiations with the unions took longer than the project itself, most progress was held up for two years but eventually a deal was done.

No one will lose their job. About half Line 1's 300 drivers will be kept on in other roles, such as control centre and ticket office staff, and the rest will go to fill vacancies and retirements on other lines. Salaries, not quite as lavish as ours at around £35,000 a year for more work than London Tube drivers, will be maintained. Plans are now afoot to do a further two lines.

For me, the most eye-opening part of the whole afternoon came at the end, when I asked how much it was all costing. The answer, said Churchill, was 150 million (£128 million), plus €400 million (£343 million) for the new trains, which they would have had to buy anyway. It will also save around £6 million a year in wages, with the automation element thus paying for itself over the lifetime of the ­system.

To put that into a London perspective, £128 million is the amount TfL is proposing to spend on providing step-free access (to the platforms but not to the actual trains) at just three of its 280 stations. The amount should also be compared with the £9 billion so far spent on London's Tube PPP with almost nothing to show for it. Paris's style of having one person in charge would, of course, be impossible under the PPP.

Although Paris is blazing the trail, with many other cities — including Helsinki, Nuremberg, Barcelona, Toronto and Hong Kong — coming to see and to follow suit, there is one predictable absentee from the list. London was once a leader in this field, with the Victoria line an early experiment in partial automation. But for all its interest in how the RATP manages projects, Churchill says that no one from TfL has come to talk to him about creating a driverless Underground line.

While the rest of the world gets on with the future, in London Bob Crow and his merry men can sleep easy for a while yet.

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