Le Metro

Et voila! J’ai mon propre carte, chargement pour une mois! 

As always, I love the Paris metro system. It’s cleaner than most, it’s quite fast, and it easy to understand. 

Today I realised though, that the graphic design system for the metro is absolutely astounding. The map isn’t so unique, many cities may have that. The signage is clean, but again it exists elsewhere too. 

But if you look at the train route on the boards inside each train. It’s made for such easy ‘update’ stickers for stops that are temporarily closed, one angular patch stuck on the board that peels off clean later. For the first time today I also saw a great sticker for station access changes: stations with no connections have a coloured circle to mark them, ones with connections are a white circle with a black outline. For a station that just got a connection, they had a transparent sticker with just a new outline and the dotted line and name of the connecting train. Zero cost of replacing all boards. 

The metro carte too. A pre glued area to paste your photo, a peek off ‘page’ that pastes over the card as inbuilt lamination on top of the photo, and a easy slide card case. My photo was a bit larger than required, but no fuss, the lady pulled out scissors, cut neat straight lines and stuck it there. 

And the people! Like automated systems of cars they file through the tunnels, always on the right hand side, varying lane width as per direction-population. 

Efficient systems. I like it. 

(Except my endless walk everyday at the crowded St. Lazare to change trains, but eh).