After bedbugs, subway bugs? These dirty beasts are the phenomenon that has kept the whole of France in suspense for several weeks now. We see them everywhere, even where they are not, to the point that politicians have been forced to take up the subject. Videos of bugs wandering around on the seats of metro trains or Parisian suburban trains make you shudder. This is now the case for the Lille metro, whose layout promised travelers to be spared.
It is once again a video posted on TikTok which has put Internet users in PLS. Alii, his nickname, dropped the bomb on Sunday evening. “The Lille metro is a pain,” she comments in the background of a short ten-second film. Although the camera moves a lot, we nevertheless easily recognize a Lille metro train. And, on the PVC floor, a poor bedbug tries to escape the TikToker.
An environment unsuitable for bedbugs
After twenty hours of presence on the social network, this video has a million views and nearly 35,000 comments. In the latter, some are surprised to see such a parasite in this place for the simple reason that the environment is not conducive. No carpet on the floor or on the walls of the trains, no fabric seats, nothing that, in theory, would allow bedbugs to squat. A fact which also surprises the Lille public transport operator, Ilévia, who confirms that the “metro has the advantage of not having textile seats and coverings which we know are conducive to the proliferation of these insects” .
However, Ilévia does not deny the evidence, ensuring that its teams are already mobilized with the implementation, for several days, of a “cleaning, disinfection and disinsection protocol” in buses and trams. Protocol which, as a result, will be extended to metro trains.