Getting Around
As large cities go, Paris is not
that spread out. Still, if we had to
walk everywhere we want to go, our poor legs and feet just wouldn’t be able to
take it. Fortunately for us, and the
other ten and a half million inhabitants, a terrific public transportation
system exists which allows us to get just about anywhere in the metropolitan
area in a short amount of time.
My favorite way to travel in Paris
is by bus. Not only does it save you
from having to climb down and back up the stairs while using the subway, but you
also get to see the city en route.
Another plus is that many big streets contain a dedicated bus lane allowing
buses to avoid most major traffic tie-ups.
With these lanes, they can even go “the wrong way” down one-way streets, which can
definitely pose a hazard to some unsuspecting tourist! Local lines for us all end with the number 8:
28, 38, 58, and 68, making them easy to remember. We catch two of them just across the street from
our apartment building. Number 38 goes north
on boulevard Saint-Michel, which is good if we’re heading into the heart of
the city: like the Luxembourg Garden, place de la Sorbonne, bookstores near the
place Saint-Michel, or Notre-Dame. It’s
usually the most crowded bus as well.
Lately our preferred line seems to be the 68 which takes us to many
important tourist attractions, such as the Musée d’Orsay, the Louvre, the Opéra
Garnier, going all the way up to the Place de Clichy on Montmartre. If we take a short walk over to avenue du
Maine, we have buses 28 and 58 at our disposal.
The first heads toward les Invalides
and les Champs-Élysées, while the
second takes us to the Musée du Luxembourg, Odéon, and Chatelet. Handy charts showing the route are inside
each bus shelter in case we forget.
The métro
is generally faster than
the bus, although there have been times when passengers in the cars we were on
were asked to patienter. Like
when the police were searching the tunnels for a criminal or when there have
been problems with the signaling system or a brief power outage. Just a two-minute walk from our front door is
the Mouton-Duvernet subway stop. Here we
catch the M4 which kind of parallels the route of bus 38. If we walk or take the M4 up to place
Denfert-Rochereau, we have access to the M6.
This line heads east-west from Nation to the Arc de Triomphe. At Denfert we can also take the Orlybus to
Paris’s second airport or the RER, a kind of super-subway which makes fewer
stops and goes longer distances. Line B
of the RER is how we got in from the airport Charles de Gaulle at Roissy last January.
The RATP, the agency which runs
public transport in Paris, has very convenient websites which show us the various
lines; it even has apps which calculate when the next bus will arrive at our
starting point. Of course, some things
are impossible to predict: like how crowded the vehicle will be or how many
characters talking to themselves will be on board! Still, it’s a good way to travel. Just about every week we purchase two carnets of
ten for only 1,30 € each ticket. Money well
spent, I’d say.
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