To many of the athletes arriving at the 2024 Paralympic Games in Paris, the part of the city designed specifically for them amounted to something of a utopia, reports The New York Times.
The Paralympic Village had plenty of adaptive scooters that, when latched onto the front of a wheelchair, help it easily navigate the athletes’ mini-city, which is situated in the hilly exurbs of northern Paris. Tri-level water fountains had spouts at standing height, wheelchair level and ground level — for guide dogs. Every shower in the athlete housing complex could be rolled into. Even the T-shirt racks in the official merchandise store could be reached from a seated position.
“It’s the place in the world where I feel the least disabled,” Birgit Skarstein, a Norwegian para rower, said. She added: “I don’t have to go on Google Maps and zoom to see if there are stairs wherever I’m going, you know, to plan. I don’t need to figure out whether I can go to the toilet, because I know. And if the world could be like a Paralympic Village, it would be better for all of us.”
But never mind the world — even the rest of Paris is not like its Paralympic Village. Though the city made extensive improvements in the years leading up to the Games, it will be decades before its cobbled streets, narrow sidewalks and small parks achieve even a semblance of the Village’s accessibility.
Paris’s 124-year-old Metro system poses the largest challenge. Despite the considerable investment in infrastructure made since 2017, when the city won its Olympic bid, only 25 percent of the rail network that travels to central Paris — including the Metro, express rail and trams — is accessible to people with disabilities. And only one Metro line, its newest, is fully accessible to those who use wheelchairs.
“Just to make sure we become full-rights citizens — that’s the whole challenge and the whole idea of the Games,” said Michaël Jérémiasz, a former wheelchair tennis player and member of the Athletes Council who advised the Games’ organizers. “So we’ll measure all this in probably five, six, seven years. That’s where we can really measure the impact of the Games. Before that, that’s not something we’ll feel probably in real life.”
Before the Paralympic opening ceremony Wednesday, some of Paris’s efforts to improve accessibility were evident. Tactile strips, which aid visually impaired people, blended into the surroundings at some crosswalks near the Arc de Triomphe. Beige boxes attached to sturdy lampposts each housed a button that, when pressed, sounded a series of bells to let visually impaired pedestrians know it was safe to cross the street.
The improvements were made possible by an investment of nearly $140 million as part of an effort to make the Games accessible to everyone. Lamia El Aaraje, the city’s deputy mayor in charge of universal accessibility, said in an interview that 91 percent of municipal buildings would be fully accessible by 2025, up from 40 percent in 2022. She added that nearly $25 million had been spent to bring the city’s bus network to full accessibility by redesigning bus stops and training staff to accommodate disabled passengers.
Along with tactile strips and audible signals at 225 crosswalks, the city also added parking in 17 “accessibility enhanced” districts, with the goal of meeting its pledge to be “universally accessible” before the Olympics opening ceremony in July. The area also has 1,000 additional accessible taxis that Ms. El Aaraje said would remain after the Games.
While she acknowledged that having the Olympics as a deadline had been a useful cudgel to expedite development, Ms. El Aaraje said it went only so far in motivating the many stakeholders across a number of local and national entities.
“The Paris Metro within the city walls, the historic Metro, is not accessible,” she said. “And it’s true that it’s a pity we didn’t seize the opportunity of the Games to try and accelerate this issue.”
On Monday, Valérie Pécresse, the head of the public transport authority Île-de-France Mobilités and president of the Île-de-France regional council, proposed a plan for making all of the railway’s older lines fully accessible at a cost of 15 to 20 billion euros. Ms. Pécresse said the agency was ready to assume a third of the cost and called on the state and the city of Paris to cover the rest.