The Minister Delegate for Transport thus wishes to avoid any risk of disruption of the Olympic Games in 2024.
Minister Delegate for Transport Clément Beaune does not rule out postponing the opening to competition of the current RATP monopoly on buses in Ile-de-France, scheduled for January 1, 2025, if there is a risk of disruption of the 2024 Olympics, he told La Croix on Thursday.
The left-wing opposition to Valérie Pécresse, president of the region and of the transport authority Île-de-France Mobilités (IDFM), has been campaigning for several months against the arrival of competition or for its postponement, believing that the market opening process is already having an impact on RATP’s current difficulties. The schedule for buses defined by a law of 2009 “coincideswith the organization of the Olympics, 250 left-wing elected representatives from the Ile-de-France region in particular underlined Monday in an open letter to Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne, seeing it as an additional argument against a “big leap into the lowest social and into the organizational unknown“. All of the Régie’s unions are similarly opposed to the loss of its monopoly, hence the fear of strikes, in addition to a possible disorganization of the service.
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“I won’t make you believe we don’t think about it“, replied Clément Beaune, questioned by The cross on the risks of disruption during the Olympic Games, organized six months before the deadline. “The community that has this responsibility is the region“, he noticed, designating in fact IDFM. “It is up to her first to tell us the situation and the risks, we will discuss them, and I am open to all options.» «Opening up to competition is a tool. If it is relevant within the current schedule, then it should be used on the scheduled date. If it is relevant at a later date, it must be activated later“, estimated the minister, clearly returning the ball to Valérie Pécresse.
After putting buses in the outer suburbs into competition, IDFM has divided up the current RATP monopoly in the heart of the Paris region into twelve lots, and has already launched calls for tenders for four of them. “If it is decided to postpone the opening to competition, it will be a political choice“, we say in the entourage of its president. “We apply European legislation transcribed into French law. (…) IDFM is in battle order to be ready for January 1, 2025“, added a spokesperson to AFP.