19 July: The Paris Métro

On this date in 1900 the Paris Métro inaugurated with an underground route connecting Porte de Vincennes to Porte de Maillot. Franz Kafka wrote “The Métro furnishes the best opportunity for the foreigner to imagine that he has understood, quickly and correctly, the essence of Paris.” Here are 10 things you might not know about the Paris Métro.

1. There are 14 lines (some sources say 16, as they include a couple of smaller lines, similar to London Underground’s Waterloo & City line) and the total length is 214kms. The Paris Métro runs more than 600,000 miles per day – the equivalent of 10 times around the world.
2. There are 303 stations, all roughly 500m apart. It’s also said that every building in Paris is within 500m of a Métro station. Many stations have striking individual themes - Arts et Métiers station is designed to look like a submarine; Bastille station walls depict the historic French Revolution and Concorde has the words from the Declaration of the Rights of Man from the French Revolution on its walls.
3. It’s called the Métro because the founding company was called La Compagnie du chemin de fer métropolitain de Paris. It is thanks to the Paris Métro that so many underground railways in cities around the world are referred to as The Métro.
4. The average speed is 20 km/h (12 mph). A trip between two stations takes 58 seconds on average, about half the time it takes to travel between two London Underground stations on average. Hence the record for visiting all the stations in the shortest time stands at around 13 hours in Paris compared to 15 hours for London Underground, even though the Paris Métro has 33 more stations.
5. Unlike London Underground the trains don’t go really deep underground. Abbesses is the deepest metro station in Paris, 40m below ground (Louis Vuitton named a bag after this station). During world war II it wasn’t possible, as it was in London, to use the Métro as an air raid shelter. It was, however, used as a meeting place for the French Resistance.
6. Before 1914, the Métro had stations called Allemagne (Germany) and Berlin, but the names were changed after the outbreak of the first world war. Allemange is now Jaures and Berlin is now Liege.
7. There are a number of “ghost stations” on the network which are no longer used, but some are opened to the public on specific days so if you time your visit to Paris right, you might get to see one. Arsenal, Haxo, Porte Molitor and Saint-Martin are ghost stations. Saint-Martin was closed because there is another station just 100m away, and it’s now used as a shelter for homeless people. There’s also a platform Porte des Lilas station which isn’t used, except as a location for films featuring the Paris Métro.
8. The tunnels were purposely designed to be smaller than the standard trains at the time, so that bigger railway companies wouldn’t muscle in and take it over.
9. The biggest station is Châtelet – Les Halles, which is actually the biggest Metro station in the world. The busiest is Saint-Lazare – around 47 million passengers pass through it per year.
10. While there are no “Mind the Gap” safety announcements, the Métro does have the "rabbit of the subway", a Rabbit depicted on stickers on the doors to warn people, children in particular, not to get their hands stuck in the closing doors.

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