Paris Smart City and the Transport Challenges by Edgar

Today, transport services of Paris have several issues: lack of accessibility for people with reduced mobility, frequent interruptions due to breakdowns and failures, physical transport tickets, and missing or incorrect information.

For the Olympic and Paralympic Games 2024, Paris and its region will host 15,000 athletes, 20,000 journalists and millions of spectators coming from all around the world and crowd management is one of the key challenges in hosting an Olympic Games, whether in the city, in the Olympic Village, or at sporting venues.

The transports network needs major renovation works intended to create capacity for larger numbers of tourists by using smart technologies and become 'smart city'. With this in mind, Paris must remodel its transport system in order to provide a simple, accessible and pleasant experience for its many future passengers.

WHICH SOLUTIONS FOR THE TRANSPORT CHALLENGES?

Three ways: connected mobility, zero emissions and accessibility.

CONNECTED MOBILITY

Connected transport means to give passengers a better experience with real-time analysis of traffic flows, autonomous vehicles in the Olympic village, and WiFi in the metro to guarantee information access. Wi-Fi has an essential role in smart cities to ensure many technologies for accessibility to the mobile network in metro, car parks, and other urban areas.

ZERO EMISSION TRANSPORT

All spectators will be able to access a public transport solution to travel to competition venues in order to encourage people to leave their cars at home. This city of Paris will propose greener transport modes, such as the bicycle, more accessible and encourage people to get around the city with no gas emissions. Smart Parking will be also developed to help finding a parking space and optimise parking with innovative connected solutions. For example, AppyParking, notifies users of free parking spaces around them in real-time.

ACCESSIBILITY (PARALYMPIC)

One of the major problems of the current network is that the trains and the metro are not very accessible for people with reduced mobility. Majority of transports will be fully equipped for passengers with reduced mobility for the start of the Olympic Games.

The first 'Grand Paris Express' or 'supermétro' trains set to enter service in 2022 to create links between peripheral towns and the city network will be fully accessible to people with reduced mobility.

To conclude, transport sytem is an important challenge for the hosting of the Olympic Games but also an opportunity to invest in improving them. The French organisation has promised the "best public transport system in the world", with the objectives to make it connected, environmental friendly and accessible.

Sources: Paris 2024 website, Wikipedia 2024 Summer Olympics page, Ucopia article, Openreality website article on Paris 2024

Pictures from Paris 2024 website, SportetSociete.org, Ecole des Ponts-Paris Tech