Paris 2024: The Grand Paris Express
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 796 Ratings
🗓️ 21 July 2024
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
People arriving at Paris’s Orly Airport for the 2024 Olympic games will be able to take an underground train straight to Saint-Denis where most of the Olympic action is taking place.
It's thanks to a line extension that opened on June 24. And that is just the ‘hors d’oeuvre’. The Grand Paris Express is a metro expansion on a massive scale whose aim is to transform the city from a normal-sized European capital to a metropolis the size of London.
What could it do for the Parisian, and French, economies?
(Image: Saint-Denis–Pleyel station in Paris, France. Copyright: Société des grands projets / Kengo Kuma & Associates / Sylvain Cambon)
Presented and produced by John Laurenson
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, welcome to Business Daily on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:09.3 | I'm John Lawrenson, and all this week we're looking ahead at the Olympic Games. |
| 0:14.1 | We start in Paris on Friday the 26th of July. |
| 0:17.6 | Today, how a massive extension of Paris's underground rail system is about to transform |
| 0:23.7 | this city. Thanks to this development, people arriving at Olli Airport for the Olympic Games |
| 0:30.1 | will be able to take an underground train straight to San Deney on the other side of town |
| 0:35.7 | where most of the athletic events are taking place |
| 0:38.3 | and that's just the hors d'oeuvre |
| 0:40.3 | because the Grand Paris Express |
| 0:42.7 | or Greater Paris Express |
| 0:44.3 | is the biggest urban development project in Europe |
| 0:47.5 | it's the doubling of all the metro lines in Paris |
| 0:52.3 | it's 330 kilometres of new lines and 70 new stations. |
| 0:58.0 | It could be good for business. |
| 1:03.7 | Where's the productivity in people arriving exhausted at work? |
| 1:07.3 | After one, sometimes two hours of a difficult commute. |
| 1:10.8 | This is going to make people work more efficiently. |
| 1:13.9 | And make quite a small capital city into a very big one. |
| 1:21.2 | Not even the inhabitants themselves have woken up yet to the revolution that has begun, |
| 1:25.9 | but there's no other city in the world |
| 1:27.5 | that is living through anything like it. |
| 1:30.2 | That's all coming up on today's Business Daily. |
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