This is what the Paris metro map looks like if you're in a wheelchair

Hey, so, TfL isn’t the only city transport authority doing some pretty cool things with maps these days. RATP, its Parisian equivalent, has produced its own plan-interactif.

There are all sorts of exciting things you can do with this baby. You can use it to plan your journey:

You can check the time of the next trains:

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You can pull up maps of the areas around a station:

It’s good. If you’re planning to be in Paris any time soon, it’ll come in handy.

But one of the other whizzy things the map does is to highlight which bits of the network are accessible if you’re in a wheelchair. And the results of that are, er, less good

Here’s a screen shot of the whole network:

Here’s what happens if you set it only to show “stations with wheelchair access directly to trains with no need for staff assistance”:

That’s without staff assistance, though, so here’s what happens if you include lines you can access with staff assistance.

One extra heavy rail line. But apparently not any of the stations on it, which is a bit weird, so we suspect there’s a bug at work somewhere.

The problem here is not that the stations themselves aren’t accessible: many Paris metro stations are “wheelchair accessible”, in that there are step-free routes down to the platforms. The problem is that the trains aren’t.

This geographical map of transport in Paris from 2008 includes a list of stations, with a wheelchair symbol to note that they’re step free. Almost all of them also have a little asterisk, pointing you towards a note that explains that you need an escort if you actually want to get the wheelchair onto a train.

To be fair to Paris, this is largely a legacy problem, and there are signs that RATP is trying to change things. The thing that the accessible lines have in common is that they’re all relatively new: Line 14 of the Metro dates from 1998; the first of the trams opened in 1992.

We also think the interactive map might be a bit, er, wrong. According to the list linked to above, stations on RER E, which opened in 1998, are also step free. For some reason, they’re not on the map of accessible lines.

But if the details are wrong, the overall message unfortunately seems to be accurate: if you’re in a wheelchair, there are large chunks of Paris you can’t get around under your own steam.

Which seems a bit sad, really.

Hat tip: Peter Apps, of the Project for the Study of the 21st Century