Starting at Notre Dame and ending at the Eiffel Tower sounds like a classic Paris day. In between, we set a challenge: cross the city using only public transit and discover what makes a system feel truly effortless.

The result is a rapid tour through metros, trams, the RER, buses, bike share, and even the Montmartre funicular—from Châtelet’s maze to La Défense and Saint-Lazare—highlighting lessons on frequency, fares, automation, and street design. With a look at Line 14 and the sweeping Grand Paris Express expansion, this episode captures why Paris remains one of the world’s most navigable transit cities.

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We weigh the $150 million St. Louis MetroLink extension to MidAmerica Airport against projected ridership and explain how Illinois state funding, decades of pre-planning, and significant optimism have made this project a reality.

• cost, scope and context of the MidAmerica Airport extension
• ridership at Lambert versus MidAmerica and what it implies
• lack of anchors near the new terminus and first-mile gaps
• Illinois’s Rebuild Illinois funding and shovel-ready advantage
• development logic behind building into empty fields
• the Green Line corridor, voter backing, and federal hurdles
• pivot from light rail to dedicated-lane BRT and timelines
• risks of BRT creep and ways to protect speed and reliability
• how to engage with local planning and share feedback

If you are in the St. Louis area or in Illinois and you want to give your thoughts about these two projects, the BRT line and the Mid-America Airport extension of the Red Line out of St. Louis, please send us an email. If you want to support the show, the best way to do so is via our Patreon. You can also just subscribe, like the episode, all that good stuff.

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We travel to the edge of Paris to ride a new five-station urban gondola that extends Metro Line 8, showing how aerial transit can beat ground constraints, cut commute times, and invite better station design. Along the way, we talk with David Rambert, Project Manager for Architecture and BIM Manager at Atelier Schall, the agency responsible for the C1 station designs. He gives us more insight about accessibility, costs, and why gondolas fit this corridor.

• reasons a gondola beats a rail extension (in this scenario)
• six-year design–build timeline and lower capital costs
• right-sized capacity around 1,600–2,000 people per hour per direction (pphpd) with strong ridership
• accessibility choices, including level boarding and tactile paths
• station design that blends into the landscape and supports TOD
• travel time cut from 35 to 18 minutes with 30-second headways
• quieter operations and lower operating costs than buses
• global context from Colombia to La Paz and Mexico City
• where gondolas fit between bus and rail in a network

If you want to see more from our interview with David, we posted a longer version of the interview on Patreon, where you can support the show directly. Send us an email if you've got something like this that you want us to go check out in the future.

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