Yesterday the Paris Metro launched a drive for better manners on their subway with an interactive website and poster campaign designed to make Parisian commuters think about their behaviour.
The poster theme describes L'Homo Modernus and tries to portray us as people who have evolved beyond throwing our half eaten food ont he floor, not smoking in places we shouldn't and putting tools like Stanley knives to good use rather than slashing seats.
RATP says it spends 25 million euros a year cleaning graffiti from trains and buses and has to repair 4,500 seats slashed with knives at 100 euros each every year. It could also buy 30 new subway trains with the revenue it loses to fare dodgers each year.
Their site outlines the usual list of annoying behaviour that we suffer on the Tube (people screaming down mobile phones, putting their feet on the seats etc etc) with seated passengers deliberately ignoring pregnant women topping the list.
You can even play a little interactive game where you can move characters around a station concourse. I'm rubbish at computer games and also only have fairly rudimentary French, so all I managed to do was get a chavvy looking hoody to keep crashing into the barriers and bouncing back into the station. But perhaps that's the intention and it's a new type of therapy where you can exact your revenge on fare dodgers.
Anyway it's sobering to see that the Parisians have the same problems as us and after yesterday's discussions on smoking, perhaps it may mean that French Smoking Man might think twice before lighting up.
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