This extension comes at the right time, one month before the opening of the Olympic Games. Line 14 is expected to carry one million passengers per day by mid-2025.
End of the race against the clock. The extension of line 14 will welcome its first passengers on Monday, June 24, to connect Saint-Denis, north of Paris, to Orly airport, a month before the opening of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. Emmanuel Macron inaugurated this extension, six days before the first round of legislative elections and one month before the Olympic Games to be held in the capital from July 26 to August 11.
Line 14 will above all be crucial for the smooth running of the Olympic Games since it will serve the athletes’ village, the Stade de France and the aquatic centre to the north, relieving the RER lines B and D and metro line 13. To the south, it will reach Orly airport in 25 minutes from Châtelet, in the centre of Paris.
During a visit at the beginning of June, the director of the project Stéphane Garreau spoke of a “link between the historic network and the future Grand Paris Express network” thanks to its connections with lines 15, 16, 17 and 18 during the construction phase. With a length of 28 km, eight new stations and 11 municipalities crossed, line 14 will carry one million passengers per day by mid-2025 and will thus become the first “supermetro” in the Paris region.
To respond to the foreseeable explosion in ridership, Ile-de-France Mobilités (IDFM) has paid €1.1 billion to buy 72 new trains currently being deployed, about fifty of which will be in service by the Olympics. The extension will have cost 3.5 billion euros. This extension will benefit 260,000 inhabitants south of Paris, in Val-de-Marne and Essonne, according to IDFM.
On the Orly side, “10% of employees and passengers will immediately abandon their cars in favor of the metro” while so far “90% of the 28,000 employees of the platform and 70% of passengers come by individual vehicle”, estimates its manager, Groupe ADP, which expects to see “nearly 100,000 passengers per day” pass through the new station.