Paris Metro: From Orly Airport to the Heart of the Capital in just 25 Minutes

It serves 30 million passengers a year. It is the second busiest in France. One of the top ten in Europe.. Aéroport d’Orly (Orly Airport), an increasingly strategic infrastructure for the country, has been directly connected to its reference city, Paris, for less than a year, thanks to the extension of a metro line.

Inside the airport, there is the new southern terminus of Line 14, the Aéroport d’Orly station, one of the seven new stops built along the 14 kilometers of southern extension of the metro line, inaugurated in June 2024. President Emmanuel Macron attended the inauguration of the station.

Line 14 now stretches 28 kilometers in total and is the longest in the current Parisian metro system. It allows travel from Paris-Orly airport to the city center in about 25 minutes; while it takes around 40 minutes to reach the opposite terminus, Saint-Denis–Pleyel metro station (also opened less than a year ago), located in the northern outskirts of Paris.

With the southern extension works, Line 14 now serves ten additional municipalities and three departments in some of the most populated areas of the region. In short, this line is further strengthening its already central role in the the Paris transportation system, as it also crosses three of the seven railway stations in the capital, offering travelers connections to ten lines (out of a total of 16) of the Paris metro and five lines of the regional express train network (RER).

Inaugurated in the distant 1998, Line 14 of the Paris metro was the first urban line to be fully automated. Today, it has become the “backbone” of the most ambitious and innovative sustainable mobility project in Europe: the Grand Paris Express, a new regional metro network under construction that will span approximately 200 kilometers and ensure transportation coverage through 68 stations.

Already in the planning phase of the Grand Paris Express, it was decided to extend Line 14 southward and northward (the latter completed in 2020), and that the line would be structural for the entire new Paris subway system. Line 14 ensures connections with the Paris public transportation in the heart of the city and with the future lines 15 South, 16, 17, and 18.

The southern extension works of Line 14 were carried out in consortium with Webuild, which is also involved in other lines of the Grand Paris Express (15 and 16) alongside the French partner NGE. For Line 14, Webuild excavated a 4.1-kilometer tunnel from the Pont de Rungis station to the new Orly airport subway station.

The Société des Grands Projets, the public entity responsible for the design and construction of the Grand Paris Express, reports that with the southern extension of Line 14, it serves well over 260,000 residents across Paris, Val-de-Marne, and Essonne.

Part of the Line 14 extension project also includes the construction of its northern terminus, the Saint-Denis-Pleyel metro station, the largest in the entire Grand Paris Express.

Designed by the Paris office of Kengo Kuma & Associates, it is also known as the Olympic Games station because it is located between the Stade de France, the Olympic Village, and other venues that hosted the 2024 Paris Games.

At 28 meters deep with four underground levels, 26,000 square meters of passenger space, and a total of 48 tracks, Saint-Denis-Pleyel is expected to serve 250,000 passengers per day by 2031—when the Grand Paris Express is completed—the highest number of any station in the new metro system.

The station includes 5,000 square meters of multifunctional spaces for cultural initiatives and 1,000 square meters of retail and commercial areas. At level -4, the platform walls feature 45 linear meters of murals by illustrator and University of Granada professor Sergio García, who explained that they “depict what Saint-Denis was and what it could be in the future, with an industrial past marked also by proletarian and communist struggles.” The artwork is developed across 11 large panels, one of which is dedicated to the 100-meter Olympic final at the Stade de France.

Outside the station, the Franchissement Urbain Pleyel, a 700-meter walkway, connects the Pleyel neighborhood, home to the Olympic Village, with La Plaine, which hosts the Stade de France and the Olympic aquatic sports center.