After having sent a letter last week to the RATP asking it to take “necessary measures”
to deal with the chronic delays in Ile-de-France transport, Valérie Pécresse once again inveighs against the transport company in an interview with Parisian this Sunday
e. The boss of Île-de-France Mobilité asks the RATP to “return to 100% of the pre-Covid offer” in Parisian transport. She also challenges former Prime Minister Jean Castex, tipped to take over the lead of the group.
In the columns of Le Parisien, the president of the Île-de-France region deplores the deterioration of the bond of trust with the RATP, which has been struggling since the start of the school year to ensure its bus offer with 25% services not done in Paris and in the inner suburbs and “had assured that there would be no impact on the metro and ‘that everything was fine’“. “It was wrong”she is indignant, describing a deterioration in the service “in unacceptable proportions”. In particular, it accuses the Régie of having “underestimated the problems she encounters on the metro”. “In particular on lines 3, 4, 6, 8, 11, 12 and 13, the most degraded, with regularity rates below 91%.”
As many metros as before the Covid
She asks for a return to 100% of the pre-Covid offer on the metro – against 98% on average in theory – because Ile-de-France residents are back in transport but also “because of the lack of buses which leads to a transfer to the metro, works in Paris which mean that we can no longer drive, the cost of energy…”.
Jean Castex, who will be heard this week by the National Assembly and then the Senate with a view to his expected appointment, “will have to roll up their sleeves”, warns Valérie Pécresse, calling on the former Prime Minister to use all his political weight with the government to obtain financing measures. “With the Covid debt, inflation, doubling energy costs and new financing needs linked to new lines like those of the Grand Paris Express (…) we are facing a wall”she thinks IDFM must find 950 million euros to complete its 2023 budget and “the state does not give me money”.
The threat of the Navigo pass at 100 euros
“I find it totally unfair and socially unbearable for travelers to finance the enormous needs of 2023 alone”, regrets Valérie Pécresse, waving the threat of a Navigo pass at 100 euros. “We can avoid it if the state finally answers us, authorizes an increase in the mobility payment or gives us the tax revenue promised in 2020; in short, (if it) stops walking around.”