“The pavements are often narrow and cluttered. There’s always either a badly parked bike, dustbins, or dog waste,” says Virginie Dubost, a wheelchair user and disability consultant who lives and works in Paris. Recently, when coming out of a museum, she got stuck. “The pavement was very high, and it was complicated to turn around,” she tells me.
Paris should be accessible: France has passed three accessibility laws in the last 49 years. But these laws have not been enforced. For Nicolas Mérille, National Advisor on Accessibility for APF France Handicap, the French advocacy group for Disabled people, it is disheartening. “Some of our members cried when the implementation of the law was postponed another 10 years,” he recalls.
Then, in 2017, Paris won the bid to host the Olympic and Paralympic Games—and with it came promises of universal accessibility. Coincidentally, the Games are taking place just weeks before the latest accessibility deadline: “By September 26, 2024, all public establishments and transportation systems are required by law to be accessible to people with disabilities,” says Mérille.
In an attempt to keep both its Olympic and legal promises, Paris fast-tracked accessibility measures. In three years, the Mayor’s office has made city-wide improvements that would have otherwise taken 20 years—Parisian trams and buses are now wheelchair accessible, with vocal and visual stop announcements, and pedestrian crossings have vocal guides and tactile guiding strips.
Retrofitting accessibility features to the metro is more complicated and expensive due to the city’s historical infrastructure. Currently, only the latest line (Métro Line 14) is fully accessible. While many metro lines have vocal and visual stop announcements, “there are still no caption screens on most of the metro or trains to provide announcements or information about changes,” regrets Agnes Fédrizzi, a deaf physiotherapist who lives in the Parisian suburbs.
