"Searching for the Grand Paris" "How did transportation evolve more recently?" -The election of Bertrand Delanoë in 2001 was interesting because he did not start from scratch. Jean Tiberi's mandate had heavily focused on transportation, especially the project of trams along the Boulevards of the Marshals, which started in 1995 as a possible solution to the pollution peaks which had occurred in Paris over the summer of 1995. There was already a public, social and political debate going on with the economic actors of the city about the issue as of 1995. Another thing he built on were all the debates regarding the situation of bikes and the development of soft modes of transport in Ile-de-France. This debate did not stem from pollution, but from strikes in 1995, which showed all elected officials in Ile-de-France that people in Paris and Ile-de-France were capable of riding a bike, if they needed to, when public transportation was not working. They could ride a bike, carpool, come up with other modes of transport than cars or public transport. Bertrand Delanoë, with the green party and the communist party, representing the three left-wing parties, came up with various proposals based on these. They resumed the project of urban tram network initiated by Jean Tiberi in order to come to a decision thanks to a public debate which took place soon afterwards in 2002 and 2003. It allowed the city to reach an agreement to develop a tram network over the Boulevards of the Marshals. Then, it could start expanding the network as early as 2003 and it could be completed a few years later, before Bertrand Delanoë was reelected in 2008. This was one type of project. Another one which was initiated then was a set of proposals regarding the decrease of speed in the city and pedestrianization. Another type of project developed by Bertrand Delanoë, still supported by the green party, as it played a very important role across this time period, was to work on sound quality and noise, using it maybe as a pretext, in order to identify traffic blackspots in Paris and to connect them with noise, for instance Boulevard Magenta, or some blackspots around main arteries in Paris. The city of Paris would then, based on this, work on reducing the importance of cars in the city by reducing the space the roads occupied in the city. "What are the current transportation issues in the Paris area?" The way the transportation networks were designed historically in and around Paris showed a failure in governance on the long term when it comes to taking into account the modernization and maintenance of the main networks. The RER is one obvious example, as is the SNCF's regional railway network, especially covering the suburbs. We can call it a crisis of the infrastructure or a failure in governance, there are many ways to put it. But in the mid-2000s, one thing that was observed and widely agreed upon by a range of political actors, both from the right and the left, as well as the various levels of public action, was that, on the long term, what had not been considered was the need for investments, modernization and maintenance. This was also the case in other capitals. London is one good example. In the 2000s, we had to admit there was a failure in governance to take into account the issues of maintenance and modernization of transportation infrastructure, and to respond to the transportation needs of the users from the inner and outer suburbs whose service offering was not as wide or dense as in Paris. In parallel, these areas had a very fast urban and demographic evolution. So to respond to both issues, the region presented a first project in the mid-2000s, in order to revise the Ile-de-France land use plan, called the SDRIF, in 2007. This project was pretty discreet, it essentially offered not very glamorous proposals, modernizations, a concentration of investments towards quality, a densification of the existing offer. But it was a way to make up for what was missing based on observations after 30 years of developing public transportation in Ile-de-France. In opposition to this project, there was a proposal in 2007 by Nicolas Sarkozy which would lead to the Grand Paris Express, structured around two major issues. First, Paris had to become competitive with other global capitals. So Paris and Ile-de-France had to regain their place among capitals by targeting a few areas for economic growth and strategic areas for the growth of the region. After identifying these strategic areas, we could offer a fast transportation network in order to connect faster and more efficiently the region. The aim was for Ile-de-France to have a seat among European capitals. The second axis of Nicolas Sarkozy and Christian Blanc's project was a much clearer project at first sight than the one presented by Ile-de-France for the new 2007 SDRIF. It offered two main axes, which can be seen on the plan proposals and which still define this model. It aimed at structuring the Grand Paris around transportation infrastructure, and moved the border from the outskirts of Paris and the ring road to the inner suburbs and what has now become the borders of the Grand Paris. The main driving force in this plan, since about 2008 or 2009, has created successive initiatives with private partners, but also with research and development programs, sometimes funded by the European Union or funded by other major public companies, such as EDF. These initiatives helped the city of Paris use innovation and experimentation on a small scale, for instance to develop Vélib, the bike-sharing system, to develop carpooling, or today, to develop electric bikes and cars. It tested on a small scale with private-public partnerships, supported by private programs, a few proposals in the transportation sector. They were then extended to a larger scale, especially to the inner suburbs, as were Vélib or Autolib, when they could be. Through research and development funded by major European programs, Paris was able to work at the European level to develop proposals or initiatives. For instance, today, connected objects are growing, big data has an increasing place as do information technologies through these major projects.