The modern system has been superimposed on a complex map of streets and wide boulevards that were set in their current routes in the 19th century.

The award was accorded for the continual efforts to expand active transportation networks, including specifically designated to help children, women, disabled persons.

[4] In the years 2022–2023, 53.3% of the trips in the city centre were made on foot, 30% on public transport, 11.2% on bicycles and 4.3% on cars.

[5][6] In 2022 the organization "Tools of change" finished a landmark case study about the transportation system in Paris.

[7] Paris is known for the non-linearity of its street map, as it is a city that grew 'naturally' around roadways leading to suburban and more distant destinations.

Paris is also the hub of the Réseau Express Régional (RER), a train network with higher speeds and wider stop spacing than the Métro which connects the capital to its suburbs.

The Transilien, a rail network radiating from the capital's train stations, provides service to other suburban destinations.

The average amount of time people spend commuting with public transit in Paris, for example to and from work, on a weekday is 64 minutes.

The RER (Réseau Express Régional) is a network of regional trains that run far into the suburbs of Paris, with fewer stops within the city itself.

Transilien trains operate on suburban lines connecting Paris's main stations to the suburbs not reached by the RER.

The Transilien lines are named as a play-on-words for the "transit" of "Franciliens," inhabitants of the "Île-de-France" région of which Paris is the capital.

The T3 line, opened in stages starting in 2006, runs on grassy track alongside much of the city borders of Paris.

Paris's first "embarcadère" train station, the predecessor to the gare Saint-Lazare, appeared from 1837 as a home for the novelty Paris-à-Saint-Germain local line.

Over the following ten years, France's developing rail network would give Paris five (including the Saint-Lazare station) national railway stations and two suburban lines, and from 1848 Paris would become the designated centre of an "Étoile" (star) spider-web of rail with reaches to (and through) all of France's borders.

The still-developing SNCF's TGV (Train à Grande Vitesse) network, since its birth in 1981, brings France's most southerly Marseille only 3 hours from the capital.

Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle takes the majority of international flights to and from Paris, and Orly is a host to mostly domestic and European airline companies.

While the nobility and wealthy had carriages, horses or chairs carried by porters, ordinary citizens had to walk.

[14] The first public transit service in the modern sense (fixed routes, distance based fares, a seven and a half minute headway) were the short-lived Carrosses à cinq sols introduced on the basis of an idea by Blaise Pascal.

Early in the 17th century, the first wheeled one-horse carriages with drivers for hire, called fiacres, were introduced in Paris.

Paris taxis played a memorable part in World War I, carrying French soldiers to the front in the First Battle of the Marne in 1914.

[15] The horse-drawn omnibus, a large square coach with rows of seats inside, carrying between 12 and 18 passengers each, was introduced in Paris in 1828.

In 1855, Emperor Napoleon III ordered all the lines consolidated into a single company, the Compagnie Générale des omnibus.

The Chemin de fer de Petite Ceinture (that had become 'Petite' from 1882 because of the construction of a wider ring of Grande Ceinture rail) was almost a predecessor to the Paris métro: it carried more than twenty million passengers in 1889, and forty million in the year of the 1900 Paris Exposition.

[19] The first line was between Porte de Vincennes and Porte-Maillot, which served the Exposition site at the Grand Palais.