Paris bids adieu to its paper metro ticket after 120 years

Paris metro is to ditch its rectangular paper metro tickets in favour of contactless alternatives after 120 years in which they have inspired poems, artworks, songs and films.

The decision to retire the small rectangular tickets, which were first used during the 1900 Paris exhibition, comes more than a decade after the London Underground went mostly paperless.

Hundreds of millions of paper tickets are still sold in Paris every year, and Parisians have found many other uses for them, ranging from book marks and miniature notepads to filters for cigarettes and joints.

“At school we used to fold them into origami frogs for games,” recalled Lionel Paillès, author and perfume specialist. “At one point they were almost fashion accessories. People would stick one behind their ear or under their watch strap,” he said.

The metro ticket also has cropped up in French popular culture, famously in singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg’s 1959 hit “Le Poinconneur des Lilas” (the ticket puncher at the Lilas station), in which a collector laments his life in the dark punching “small holes”.

It was a keepsake for Yves Montand in the 1953 film “Wages of Fear”; and on the cover of Raymond Queneau’s novel “Zazie in the Metro” that director Louis Malle made into a film in 1960.

‘Chip crisis slowed us down’

Ile-de-France Mobilites, which operates the metro’s ticketing system, had wanted to phase out the pack of 10 tickets known as “carnets” in the spring.

But the plan was delayed by Covid and then by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which sparked a global shortage of microchips needed to make the smartcards to replace the tickets.

“We were in a hurry, but the chip crisis slowed us down,” Laurent Probst, the director-general at Ile-de-France Mobilites told AFP.

The operator has started cutting the number of metro stations that still sell carnets and many turnstiles can no longer read paper tickets.

Mr Probst said carnets would be gone completely sometime next year, adding that travellers will probably still be able to buy single tickets at 1.90 euros until 2024, a markup from the 1.49 euros a single journey costs when using a smartcard.