Last week, I said Dublin could end up as a poor man’s Dallas.
The Greater Dublin Area is on course for about three million people by 2050. Cities of that size tend to go one of two ways. Some keep a handful of strong centres, united by rail. Others scatter their jobs across office parks, and everyone drives between them.
St Louis and Dallas are highly dispersed, and they have the roads to match. One Dallas junction is fifteen lanes wide.
Dublin is not going to build fifteen lane motorway junctions. Absent a change of course, Dublin is headed for a dispersed model. Some Dublin trends: the M50 is at or over capacity for seven hours of a working day; five of the 12 BusConnects corridors will hit their limit in the year they open; the city centre’s share of morning trips has fallen from a quarter in 2006 to under a fifth.
Big German cities kept strong centres by through-running commuter trains through tunnels under the middle of town. They call them s-bahns. This transport model has a few advantages. The first is that it keeps the centre of the city strong by linking it with outer suburbs. The second is that it makes the most of existing assets: a shortish tunnel (4-10 km) can unlock a commuter system of several hundred kilometres.
This week is a guest post from Jonathan English’s terrific Infrastory newsletter (subscribe to Infrastory here). It’s the story of how Paris built the backbone of its transport network: a crossrail / s-bahn / through-running system called the RER.
Executive summary:
Drawing on inspiration from sources as distant as Japan, French planners devised a creative strategy that overcame technical, jurisdictional, and bureaucratic obstacles to connect disparate suburban lines of the national railway into a high-frequency, high-capacity urban network that doubled as an express rapid transit system within the city. The development of what’s called the RER transformed the metropolitan region and enabled the development of transit-oriented suburban communities that house and employ millions, while retaining a close connection with the historic centre of the capital city.
After the war, French national governments and regional governments recognized the need to serve a rapidly suburbanizing population.
At the dawn of the Fifth Republic in the late 1950s, trains from historic and newly developed suburban towns ran to century-old terminal stations arrayed around the perimeter of Central Paris. Commuters who couldn’t walk from those stations to their destination were forced into cumbersome transfers onto the congested Metro.
In the 1960s, the French national government embarked on a program of comprehensive regional planning that sought to resolve these problems through large-scale infrastructure investment. A centrepiece of these plans was the development of a new rapid transit system that would be both faster and more capacious than the existing Métro, permitting it to extend beyond the historic city walls to serve the rapidly expanding metropolitan region.
Though Paris enjoyed an exceptionally dense urban metro network, most of it was the legacy of construction before the Second World War. Public transportation expansion had stalled by the 1950s, with only insignificant extensions to the urban Métro reaching completion. The national government during the postwar Fourth Republic was wracked by repeated changes in government, which hindered long-term planning. No progress was made on the development of a system that would unify the broader, rapidly suburbanizing urban region.
The Fifth Republic, proclaimed by Charles de Gaulle in 1958, had aspirations to demonstrate and celebrate France’s grandeur through planning and great infrastructure projects. The modernization of Paris was to be, as it had been for previous aspirational French leaders, a centrepiece of that effort. The population of Greater Paris was growing rapidly in the postwar period, adding between 100,000 and 150,000 new residents per year, and much of this growth was occurring outside the historic city walls. Despite the ideas of planners like Le Corbusier, who sought to rebuild the historic city in the modernist style, the city built by the Baron Haussmann in the 19th century was left largely intact while most new development was relegated to the suburbs. A new public transportation system was needed to tie these rapidly growing communities to the heart of the capital.
The grand plans of de Gaulle for Paris were intended to rapidly overcome the infrastructure deficit that had developed during the Fourth Republic. The Gaullist plan, the Schéma Directeur d’Aménagement et d’Urbanisme de la Région de Paris sought to accommodate seven to eight million more residents in the Paris region.
The new plan included major infrastructure investments, such as a new airport to the north of the city in the town of Roissy that would become Charles de Gaulle International, and extensive suburban growth concentrated in two axes to the north and south of the city. It also finally elaborated on plans for a comprehensive regional rail network incorporating the new east-west line (now RER A) then under construction. It would add two additional north-south lines to create an ‘H’-shaped network centred on the historic city centre, amounting to more than 250 km of new railway lines throughout the urban area.
This plan resembled contemporary projects in the United States, such as the Bay Area Rapid Transit in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Metro in Washington, D.C., in that it relied almost exclusively on new construction and was not designed to interoperate with the existing regional rail network. The new lines would parallel or completely rebuild hundreds of kilometres of existing rail corridors then operated by the SNCF, expending vast sums on duplicating infrastructure that already existed.
Construction of the first stations on the east-west line began as underground stations were gradually added to the suburban lines in the east and west of the city, with the ultimate intention of connecting the two corridors. Several lines were ceded by France’s national rail agency the SNCF, which was then uninterested in urban transportation, to the RATP, which sought to rebuild and repurpose the suburban lines as part of a segregated regional rapid transit system. These first stations spawned one of the most enduring controversies about the initial plans. The architecture of the stations was intended to mirror that of the Paris Métro stations designed by the celebrated engineer Fulgence Bienvenue, featuring a single arch ceiling rising over the tracks and platforms and no central supports.
Around this time, a group of French engineers and administrators went on a junket to Japan. Most junkets might have a limited impact at best, but this one was worth billions. The fundamental problem in Paris was not engineering. These were phone call problems: disputes over jurisdiction between the RATP and the SNCF. Instead of running trains seamlessly from the SNCF network onto the RATP-administered RER lines in the city centre, the RATP sought to either take over the SNCF lines to the exclusion of all other rail traffic, or to duplicate them, largely through expensive underground construction.
Tokyo showed them another way. Though no fundamental technical obstacles existed that would prevent shared operation, the two organizations were hesitant to cooperate on a plan to mitigate their operational differences, which included different electrical systems, different operating rules, and even which side of the rail corridor was dedicated to which direction of travel. On the SNCF, trains drove on the left, while the RATP trains drove on the right. But some of the specific barriers were even more minute. SNCF drivers preferred to stand while driving; RATP drivers sat. The brake handle was on the right on RATP trains, and the left on SNCF trains.
The metro system of Tokyo was an inspiration. It transported millions of passengers per day across a vast urban area that dwarfed even the French capital. They were stunned to see the Chuo line, which moved 100,000 passengers per hour into a single terminal station consisting of one 10 metre wide platform and two tracks. Most significantly for Paris, many of Tokyo’s private railway lines that served the city’s far-flung suburbs did not deposit their passengers at a single urban terminal. Trains would run on private railway lines from deep out in the suburbs until they reached central Tokyo. Then, they’d dive into the regular municipal metro, mixing with normal metro trains. At the other end, they’d often emerge from the metro and run on another private railway deep out into the suburbs once again. This required the co-operation of the municipal subway corporation and two private railway companies on either side of the metropolis. This example of cooperation between private companies convinced the Parisian planners that integration between the RATP and SNCF, which were, after all, both bodies of the French State, was possible.
Once cooperation between the RATP and SNCF was possible, a vast array of new opportunities became available to the Parisian planners. Before, new lines required extensive construction of new lines and the rebuilding of existing lines. After, RER could be rapidly deployed on existing lines. A few short segments of tunnels in the centre of Paris could now connect nearly the entire network of SNCF suburban lines. Instead of tunnelling through the suburbs, the legacy of 19th-century railway construction provided already-built corridors that spanned the metropolitan region.
The RER worked because it had strong and clear political backing, a clear objective, technically informed leadership that could make decisions and force disparate agencies to collaborate, and ultimately the willingness to use creative means and new technologies to bridge gaps.
In the mid-1960s, Paris was considering a plan that would spend billions of francs to duplicate regional rail networks that already existed. When the people who were planning the RER went to Tokyo, they saw completely separate rail operators sharing infrastructure and realized that they too could change the way they operated to be able to work together. They didn’t conclude that Japan was somehow too different to emulate; their reaction was that if Japan can do it, France can do it too, if not better. Out of that, we got the most successful regional rail system in Europe.
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