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This is a public market opening that has not gone unnoticed by some.
The Bordeaux metro project, an old sea serpent of mobility in the agglomeration, has just resurfaced.
As it had undertaken to do, Bordeaux Métropole launched the procedure on March 19 for an "
opportunity and feasibility study for the construction of a metro in the Bordeaux metropolis
", in order to envisage completion by 20240 For a maximum amount of 300,000 euros, this study should last 24 months, and therefore deliver its conclusions barely a year before the municipal elections of 2026.
The Bordeaux Metro Association, which has long campaigned for this project to finally get off the ground, is delighted with the city's willingness to give it serious thought.
"
The terms of the call for tenders promise a much more solid study than the advisability study initially announced since the feasibility of the project will also be studied by the selected service provider
", explains its president, Mickaël Baubonne.
But in the collective imagination, the idea of a metro in Bordeaux would have been abandoned a long time ago, in particular because the marshy basements of the city would not allow it.
A "
received idea
", according to Métro de Bordeaux, for whom "
the existence of former swamps has long since ceased to be a problem
", the association judging that "
Bordeaux has a basement allowing a metro to be dug there
but that "
it is at -20 meters that the subsoil, with its watertight marls, proves favorable to the construction of a metro if we opt for the tunnel boring machine
".
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“The metro does not respond to emergencies”
The reason for the absence of a metro in Bordeaux is more to be found in the political history of the city and the development of the tramway.
As early as 1986, the metro had been envisaged by Jacques Chaban-Delmas, mayor of Bordeaux from 1947 to 1995. The city councilor having abolished the electric tramway in Bordeaux at the end of the 1940s, the nuisances linked to car traffic in the city had caused a resurgence the need for an efficient public transport network.
It was ultimately his successor, Alain Juppé, who decided in favor of a tramway, inaugurated in 2003 in the presence of President Jacques Chirac.
Twenty years later, the tramway reveals its limits.
With now more than 800,000 people listed in the 28 municipalities of the metropolitan territory, the Bordeaux conurbation continues to attract, with around 45,000 more inhabitants in five years between 2012 and 2017, according to the Bordeaux Aquitaine Urban Planning Agency (A'urba ).
However, during the renewal until 2030 of the contract for the operation of the public transport network by Keolis, the intermunicipal authority specified that "one of the
major expectations of Bordeaux Métropole is to desaturate, optimize and make reliable the tramway, which remains the main mode of transport in terms of ridership and capacity
", predicting that in 2027,
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The metro project will therefore be studied in the coming months, but it will not be part of the developments for the next few years, the metropolis preferring to improve the existing one and consider, for example, the installation of gondola lifts on the Garonne.
But with an announcement of the results very close to the next municipal election, the outline of a Bordeaux metro could fuel the political programs and the divergences of the candidate lists.
If Pierre Hurmic, environmental mayor of Bordeaux, judges for the moment that
"the metro does not respond to the emergency
", without ruling out the possibility of setting it up in the decades to come, his opponents from the right and the center , they intend to seize this major development project.
