Using ten taxi-boats each carrying up to six passengers, this new, environmentally friendly mobility offering for visitors connects two points of major interest for tourists: the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower. A few weeks ahead of the 2024 Paris Olympics, “Paris je t’aime”, the Paris Port Community (CPP) and Haropa Port are presenting “Taxi Seine Paris”, a brand new Seine shuttle service between two ports of call: the Louvre and La Bourdonnais.
Taxi Seine Paris also adds a bonus for the visitor’s Olympics experience because it links two major sites for the Games: the Concorde Urban Park and the Eiffel Tower Stadium. It also provides an opportunity to discover SPOT24 – the Olympic, sport and urban culture exhibition right next door to the La Bourdonnais shuttle stop.
It is as easy to use as a taxi thanks to a digital booking service: just select a journey on your smartphone and the first available boat sets out. The maximum lead-time to booking confirmation is five minutes. Shuttles can also be booked 24 hours in advance.
The project was conceived during the 2021 Sustainable Tourism Conference, and this deployment of taxi-boats in the French capital and surrounding areas helps strengthen mobility on the Seine. Alongside this, transportation on the river, which already consumes only a quarter of the energy needed for land travel, is the subject of a programme to retrofit new propulsion systems as part of a collective, voluntary scheme led by Paris Port Community (CPP) and Haropa Port: of the 150 commercial craft on the Seine, 40 will have already been made greener by the time of the Olympics – a process that is continuing.
This initiative, set in train by the CPP’s small boats committee, is also a practical reflection of a determination to make the Seine a focus for tourism. The river is listed as a World Heritage site by UNESCO, offering a continuous backdrop of exceptional monuments and architecture as well as uniquely beautiful landscapes highlighted when seen from the water.
This is an extra service provided for both visitors and Paris area residents for their journeys in the city and for a different way of seeing Paris.
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The article “Taxi Seine Paris”: A new shuttle service between the Louvre and La Bourdonnais first appeared in TravelDailyNews International.
