The general director of the RATP, Jean Castex, was re-elected, on Wednesday, October 9, as head of the public company after the vote of the deputies of the sustainable development commission of the National Assembly, validating his appointment for a new mandate of five years.
The deputies validated this appointment, proposed by Emmanuel Macron on June 3, by thirty votes to six and nine abstentions, a week after an identical vote by the Senate’s Territorial Planning and Sustainable Development Commission.
The former prime minister, 59, took the reins of RATP in November 2022 after the resignation of the company’s previous general director, Catherine Guillouard, who left the company for personal reasons, in a difficult context for the public company. . “During these almost two years at the head of the RATP, I have been and continue to be very happy”Jean Castex stressed in the preamble to his hearing on Wednesday in the Assembly.
Faced with a shortage of bus drivers, strikes linked to the opening to competition and high absenteeism, the RATP was unable to manage a quarter of its buses and 10% of its metros. After gradually restoring service quality through massive recruitment campaigns, the company successfully navigated the Olympic Games, transporting spectators to the competition venues without problems.
Fight the problem of abandoned packages
The transport network managed by RATP is located in a “In the middle it is not easy to manage”he recalled, highlighting the numerous modernization projects underway. will be necessary “do a lot of pedagogy towards our users” in the years to come, insisted Jean Castex. He also wants to integrate them more into the group’s governance.
“Our fellow citizens find it increasingly difficult to travel by car, while the development and modernization of public transport (…) [ne sont] It’s not completely finished yet.[s] »insisted the general director of the RATP.
Many more modern metros still need to be delivered to renew obsolete equipment, and lines 15, 16, 17 and 18 of the Grand Paris Express will open gradually by 2030, doubling “the historic metro line”. Jean Castex has set several priorities for his new mandate, in addition to the success of the “investment and modernization project”in particular the fight against the problem of abandoned packages and the “abuse hunt” linked to absenteeism in the company.
