Episode 2943
Transportation during the 2024 Summer Olympics and Paralympics
Mon, 2025-May-26 00:55 UTC
Length - 3:41
Direct Link
Welcome to Featured Wiki of the Day, your daily dose of knowledge from Wikipedia's finest articles.
The featured article for Monday, 26 May 2025, is Transportation during the 2024 Summer Olympics and Paralympics.
Transportation played a critical part in the success of the 2024 Summer Olympics and Paralympics, hosted in Paris, France. Due to the scale of the event, moving athletes, officials, media and spectators to competition venues constituted a major challenge. As part of Paris's bid for the games, officials stated that 100% of spectators would use public transport, and the compact arrangement of venues would deliver short journey times. Over €500 million was invested in improvements to transportation infrastructure for the games.
A mobile app was developed to facilitate spectator travel by offering a route calculator that can adapt to hazards. To assist travellers, 5,000 agents, identifiable by purple vests, were deployed in the stations and at bus stops. Most bus lines were accessible to people with reduced mobility, but with limited capacity in cases of high demand, such as during the Paralympic Games, 1,000 taxis accessible to people in wheelchairs were made available. The vast majority of Paris Métro stations were still not accessible to all, but some 150 wheelchair-accessible shuttles were provided to transport spectators between venues and an accessible station. Security around the transportation system was heavy and coordinated, but on 26 July 2024, the day of the 2024 Summer Olympics opening ceremony, a series of arson attacks disrupted rail services.
A stated goal of Paris 2024 was to halve the carbon footprint of the Olympic and Paralympic Games compared with London 2012 and Rio 2016. The organisers estimated that more than a third of the greenhouse gas emissions linked to the games would be from the transport of athletes and spectators. To meet this goal, all venues were made accessible by bicycle and public transport. Public transport was extended and improved, and services increased. Some 415 kilometres (258 mi) of cycle paths were created, linking major venues, with 27,000 temporary bicycle racks installed. The goal of halving carbon emissions was ultimately met, with an estimated 1.59 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, which represented a 54.6% reduction compared to the London and Rio average. Of this, 53% of the carbon footprint (about 833,600 tonnes of CO2 equivalent) was incurred by visitors travelling to the games.
This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 00:55 UTC on Monday, 26 May 2025.
For the full current version of the article, see Transportation during the 2024 Summer Olympics and Paralympics on Wikipedia.
This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
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Until next time, I'm standard Kendra.
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