Paris metro lines will no longer be interrupted when a passenger feels unwell on board. The president (LR) of the Ile-de-France region and Île-de-France Mobilités Valérie Pécresse announced on BFM Business this Tuesday, February 27 that a new “Samu protocol” for unwell travelers had been validated. A measure intended to reduce traffic incidents which have exploded in recent months in the capital’s transport system and are deteriorating the regularity of the lines, already undermined by a shortage of drivers.
Evoking an “absurd doctrine” where a passenger who has fallen ill is treated “as if he had suffered a shock from a road accident [by putting him] in PLS in the train” rather than “taking him out to make it breathe,” she pointed out that cities like London or Tokyo had a different approach. From now on, the person will be taken out of the train and taken care of by emergency services on the platform, so as not to interrupt traffic.
Suspicious packages, the proliferation of which was singled out by RATP president Jean Castex as one of the causes of the decline in regularity of metro lines, will also be treated differently. They will not have gone out onto the platform to let the train leave – “we are in Vigipirate, we will not do that”, underlined Valérie Pécresse – but dog brigades will be deployed “to sniff the packages for, in a quarter of ‘hour, ten minutes, remove the doubt and be able to take them out’ and let the oar start again. Artificial intelligence will also be used to better identify these packages on video surveillance images.
“We have had a huge crisis in public transport,” admitted the president of IDFM, pointing to the “shortage of drivers” of the metro and RER operators, the RATP and the SNCF. “They are recruiting like crazy,” she said, however, assuring that she was “hopeful that by the end of March, transport will have returned to normal.” Just in time for the Olympics?