Who would have believed it. This Tuesday morning, dozens of curious people got up at half past four in the morning to be on the first train of the new Rennes metro line. Launched at nearly 80 km/h, the equipment developed by Siemens Mobility surprised its first travelers with its speed and wider space. “It’s borderline moving”, slipped Nina when setting foot in the long-awaited line B.
Postponed twice, the opening of the line took place without incident and under the applause of the inhabitants present in a mixture of excitement, admiration but also relief. To afford its new toy, the Breton capital hosted the largest French civil engineering site of the decade and agreed to pay the tidy sum of 1.3 billion euros. A bold choice that the metropolis had undertaken in 2002 in order to “drive out” 50,000 cars per day from its urban area. A choice all the more cheeky as it has become increasingly rare. What if Rennes had just inaugurated one of the last French metros? Not impossible.
After it, there will be Toulouse, which hopes that the 27 km of its third line will be delivered in 2028. Paris too, which has several projects in progress with the extensions of lines 1, 11 and 14 (north and south up to at Orly airport), and the creation of four new lines of the Grand Paris Express which will make it possible to circumvent the capital, i.e. 200 km (as much as the current network) to be delivered by 2030. But after? Everywhere in France, the question of the metro agitates local elected officials, especially among ecologists. In Bordeaux, after having been reluctant to look into the subject for a long time, the metropolis has decided to launch an opportunity study for after 2030. In Lyon, the new line and the three extensions envisaged could all be abandoned in favor of a express tram. In Lille, the train doubling project planned for Euro 2016 has still not been delivered. A brake? “I promise you there is a craze for the metro. We have been contacted by several cities, including French cities,” assures Stéphane Bayon de Noyer. Except that apart from the immense Parisian construction site, no metropolis has recorded such a construction site.
Never wait more than four minutes
The boss of Siemens Mobility has just delivered his first CityVal in Rennes. Others will come to Frankfurt and Bangkok. After years of research and millions of investments, the German manufacturer intends to sell its automatic metro elsewhere in the world, relying on its unequaled performance: a top speed of 80 km/h, an average of 36 km /h including stops and the ability to have a train every sixty seconds in the station. “The advantage of an automatic metro is that it is autonomous. He is not stuck in traffic or forced to stop at traffic lights, he is not a source of accidents. It is carbon-free, energy-efficient and does not require a lot of human resources to operate,” boasts the CEO of the German manufacturer. The Rennais know it. Even at the slowest hours of a Sunday in November, they will never wait more than four minutes for a metro. Not yet automated, the tram system cannot compete. The metro problem is therefore elsewhere.
“The first argument against the metro is its cost. We are talking about 60 to 100 million euros per kilometer. It’s huge for communities, ”analyzes Julien de Labaca. This mobility expert observes that outside of Paris, the metro solution is no longer the trend.
“It’s a bit like the TGV. All the most profitable lines have already been completed. In Rennes, they had made a bold choice, a real political choice. As the first line works well, they made a second one and they are right. But this is not valid everywhere”.
If the underground works so well in the Breton capital, it is because it never breaks down, displaying an availability level of more than 99%. However, its elected officials already know that they will not make a third line. “The automated metro has an unequaled level of performance in an urban environment. But it costs too much for it to be stretched in a less dense environment, ”recognizes the vice-president responsible for transport Matthieu Theurier.
The tram ? A more limited transport capacity
But the cost is not the only reason for the distrust of certain communities towards the metro. According to the mobility expert, the underground system has also aged in recent years, accelerated by the health crisis. “With the Covid, the underground, there are people who no longer want it. We talked about pollution in stations, people stuck in smelly stations. And then when you build a metro, you question less the place of the car on the surface. There is an urban requalification but not as flagrant as when a tramway is fitted out”.
The disadvantage of the tram is that it can saturate. In Bordeaux and Nantes, the metropolises are at an impasse today, being unable to run more trams, while these are crowded at rush hour. “The tramway has a much more limited transport capacity and more complicated flow management which limits its availability. The metro is free of all that, ”argues the boss of Siemens Mobility.
Today, the most popular means of transport is the trambus, also called high-level service bus (BHLS). A solution chosen by Rennes for its suburban connections, for example. Much cheaper and faster to implement, these vehicles are stiff competition for metros. “At the time when many metros were built, this solution did not exist. The buses were too limited in capacity to compete with them. But today, we have carbon-free articulated buses that work very well on electric power, ”analyzes Julien de Labaca. These BHLS systems are increasingly chosen by local authorities, who see a real financial interest in them. “When you build a metro, you can’t do anything else at the same time,” acknowledges ecologist Matthieu Theurier. And all the other projects have to wait their turn.