Paris Metro Line 14 Has Run Without a Driver Since 1998
Did you know the French capital opened a brand-new metro line on 15 October 1998 with fully automated, driverless trains from the first passenger trip, complete with platform screen doors at every station?
Harper Quinn, Live desk · Sept. 30, 2026 · 3-4 min
PARIS - Did you know the French capital opened a brand-new metro line on 15 October 1998 with fully automated, driverless trains from the first passenger trip, complete with platform screen doors at every station?
RATP Group, marking the line's history on its Askip magazine, said Line 14 opened that day between Madeleine and Bibliothèque-François Mitterrand with seven stations. President Jacques Chirac inaugurated the line. It was the first new full metro line built in Paris in more than half a century, and RATP calls it the first high-capacity main metro line in a capital city to run in fully automatic mode.
BBC News, reporting on opening day, described the Meteor project as carrying fully automated, driverless trains, with plexiglass platform screens that open with the train doors. Designers pitched the line as able to move tens of thousands of passengers an hour on new signalling and faster rubber-tyred stock.
That empty cab is the curiosity peg. Line 14 was designed as project Météor (Métro Est-Ouest Rapide) and has used automatic train control since day one, with no driver in the cab. Staff still work the platforms and trains for passenger help and security, but the driving is done by the system. The success of that empty-cab experiment later helped justify automating older Paris lines, including Line 1.
Extensions followed: Saint-Lazare in 2003, Olympiades in 2007, Mairie de Saint-Ouen in 2020, then Saint-Denis-Pleyel and Aéroport d'Orly in June 2024, making Line 14 the longest on the existing Paris Métro network. Long before robotaxis sold empty-cab rides on city streets, Parisians were boarding a high-capacity underground line with glass at the front and nobody at a wheel. The curiosity is not that metros can run without a driver. It is that this one has done it in the French capital, empty cab, since the autumn of 1998.
Sources
Harper Quinn, Live desk. Harper Quinn is a senior correspondent on the live desk covering breaking driverless launches and permits. Previously reported mobility for wire services; based in San Francisco.
