Talking Headways: A Streetsblog Podcast

Dec 12, 2023

This week on our Monday Replay, German Marshall Fund fellow Eric Eidlin is the host for two French High Speed Rail experts; Stephan de Fay, the Executive Director of Bordeaux Euratlantique, the public agency that is overseeing the redevelopment of Bordeaux’s main train station to accommodate several new high speed rail lines by 2020 and Etienne Tricaud, President and CEO of AREP, the French Railway’s architecture office. 

Together they discuss the geography of France and its high speed rail network, the station areas as not just transportation projects but major urban projects, the experts and powers available to public agencies working on station area planning in France, the design of the station area versus that of the district as a whole, and finally the importance of having an overall vision for integrating transportation and land use in the station district.

In the second half of the episode, Eric, Stephan, and Etienne chat about how large projects in France are treated as projects of national significance and the expectations on these projects. There’s also a discussion of the Paris region’s over 1,483 mayors and the way the Grand Paris project has created better governance structures.  Finally Stephan and Etienne discuss their perceptions of Diridon station and how we can create value with these opportunities.

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