Paris is on the verge of losing one of its distinctive traditions, the little paper ticket good for one ride on the Metro, buses and other forms of city transit. It’s been around since 1900, but the digital age is doing it in.
Not quite, of course: at least for now there are no plans to scrap it for those who show up at a Metro station to pay for one ride, but very few do that because a single fare is €1.90, and buying a ‘carnet’ of ten tickets reduces that to €16.90 and most regular riders these days are using either an electronic Navigo fare card, or have their transit passes loaded on their smartphones.
Starting yesterday, the transport operator Île de France Mobilités (a portmanteau for all the agencies in the region’s transit systems) will no longer sell the packets at fare machines in 100 selected stations. In January, another 176 stations will stop selling them and from March they will not be available anywhere.
Personal nostalgia note: I started buying carnets on my first adult trip to Paris in the late 1980s, and always brought a few home to start the next trip or to give as a ‘starter pack’ to friends visiting Paris for the first time. I switched to using a pass some years ago, and last month to using my phone… but there are still three tickets in my wallet, dated 2011…
For those interested in more nostalgia about the tickets, click HERE for an article from TheLocal.fr
Image from ParisByTrain.com: sample tickets over the years
