After the inauguration with great fanfare of the expansion of line 14, first “supermetro” From the Paris region, the next section of the Grand Paris Express will have to wait: the inauguration of the southern section of line 15 has been postponed by about six months.
It was scheduled for December 2025, but delays in testing forced the Société des Grands Projets (SGP), main contractor for most of the Grand Paris Express lines, to postpone its opening until the summer of 2026.
“I am very disappointed”The president of the Ile-de-France region, Valérie Pécresse, reacted to Thursday’s announcement of this new delay. “Line 15 south is highly anticipated by the inhabitants of the Ile-de-France region and the cities south of Paris, but also to reduce the saturation of the RER A and B between 10 and 20%”he added, asking the PEC to meet the new deadline, because “six months of new delays means not meeting tomorrow with nine months, twelve months (…) or, worse still, postpone it until 2027”.
The president of the SGP, Jean-François Monteils, admitting that it was “bad news”insisted “The extreme complexity of the Grand Paris Express, which is mainly due to its size”to justify this new delay.
A calendar that keeps getting delayed
In total, lines 15, 16, 17 and 18 will form 200 kilometers of a completely new automatic metro network by 2031, consisting of 68 new stations spread throughout Ile-de-France. This construction site, “the largest in Europe”According to Monteils, it is estimated at 36.1 billion euros, compared to 22 billion in 2010.
Line 15 South, by itself, will have a length of 33 kilometers and will cross 22 municipalities in an arc from the southwest to the southeast of the capital. Its cost remains unchanged despite the announced delay, at 8,000 million euros.
It is not the first time that this line has suffered a schedule change. Initially scheduled for 2020, the inauguration was first postponed to 2023 before Edouard Philippe, then prime minister, set the date for 2024. Covid and the interruption of works added another year to the calendar.
This time it is the tests that are responsible for the delay. “We entered this testing phase relatively recently, in September”instead of July, said Jean-François Monteils. The teams then discovered “unexpected errors, difficulties that we did not fully anticipate”he added, without going into details.
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He also highlighted the technical challenge of the project and its unique nature, with service providers who in turn “they have added deadlines for their own internal security procedures”postponing the holding of the tests.
Line 15 planned for 2031
The SGP, originally created for the design of the Grand Paris Express, saw its missions expanded in December 2023. It is now involved in the creation of “Metropolitan RER” being the project manager of the infrastructure necessary for the creation of these new services, which will be developed throughout France.
“Ile-de-France, which is SGP’s first customer, hopes that the project owner does not disperse and that the company fulfills its commitments fundamentally, that is, delivering the lines of the automatic metro system on time and with the expected level. quality »snapped Valérie Pécresse.
Ultimately, Line 15 will need to be supplemented with sections to the east and west to form a circle around the capital. It will be 75 kilometers long and will be made up of 36 new stations, an infrastructure with no equivalent in the world, according to the SGP. Its inauguration is scheduled for 2031.
