Out of a total of 445 train and RER stations in the Paris region, around twenty have been substantially improved. We examine three striking examples.
It took more than ten years of work to transform Saint-Lazare, Paris’s oldest railway station into what it is today: a leading multimodal hub in the French capital. Indeed, the second largest French train station in terms of passenger flow, which handles 128 million passengers a year, has been improved after several phases of planned works between 2003 and 2014, for a cost of 250 million euros. The main goals were to cope with the increasing number of users, expected to rise by 20 % by 2020, deliver a better quality of service and to encourage intermodality. The principal improvements include the pedestrianisation of the station’s forecourts, improvement of passenger information, enhancement of accessibility for disabled people, the creation of 250 parking spaces, the development of soft transportation modes, and better connections between the 27 bus lines, six metro and RER lines, the 1,600 trains and so forth that rub shoulders in the station every day.