The route of the new TGV line Paris-Nice provokes stormy debates inside the political circle before it even been definitely decided!
Out of the three defined routes of the beginning, two were selected:
- the first one links up Aix to Nice going along the motorway.
- the second one serves Marseille and Toulon to finally join Nice.
And the partisans of the two routes have been clashing for months to have the last word. As long as they risked their election, the three UMP mayors of the French Riviera, Jean-Claude Gaudin (Marseille), Hubert Falcon (Toulon) and Christian Estrosi (Nice), were coming out for the first route. But from June, Christian Estrosi has been changing his mind and has been coming round for the second one. Of course, Jean-Claude Gaudin doesn’t agree with him, supported by the trade union of the department. Their main argument: economically, Marseille and Toulon, the main economical areas, can’t go without this TGV line Paris-Nice. To ignore those areas would be, according to their own words, a “Parisian contempt”.
The prefect Michel Sappin and the President of the council of the Alpes-Maritimes are in favour of the first one, supposedly because of money reasons.
But the partisans of the second one, including the President of the council of the Bouches-du-Rhône, argue that the first route would spoil the landscape of the Ste Victoire Mountain.
As well as those political debates, some opponents to the TGV line Paris-Nice demonstrated against it last Saturday. The collective “La Provence dit non à la LGV” protests against the exorbitants costs of this TGV line Paris-Nice (over ten billions euros!).
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