Next July and August will be a tough time for ADP, the operator of Paris’s two airports, adding Olympic and Paralympic traffic to what is already one of the world’s most-visited cities.
And it’s not just the hundreds of thousands of added visitors who are expected; the airports also have to be ready to deal with 85,000 athletes, coaches and officials participating in the games, and bringing with them all sorts of unusual baggage including items such as canoes, vaulting poles and specialized bikes.
Local officials say that “in terms of numbers, it’s a drop in the ocean” but that the Olympians have expectations “different from those for which our infrastructure is designed.” The head of ADP, Jerome Harnois says “there will be a volume of oversized luggage that is just not the one we usually have.”
While plans are in place to meet and greet each arriving planeload of Olympians and get them to their local destination, things may not be as easy for other visitors, and officials are planning to regulate traffic around the airports to avoid chaos. At Orly, public transit will be better than in the past with the opening of the new Metro Line 14 to the airport, but the main airport, CDG, will not have the originally-planned fast rail link to the city.
Other efforts to ease the crunch include installation of more automated passport gates and opening the electronic ones to people from more countries as well as shifting some of the load away from the two airports by having the expected arrival of 120 heads of state shifted to the city’s old airport at Le Bourget.
Another test will come when the games are over. While athletes will arrive on different schedules depending on their training and competition schedules, there’s expected to be a serious crunch at the end when most will want to leave immediately. “The flows before the opening will be spread over two to three weeks. On the other hand, after the closing ceremony, everyone leaves in between 48 and 72 hours,” Harnois said.
