Ruffec is about 2/3rds of the way between Paris and Bordeaux. The TGV that goes from Paris to Bordeaux used to have a stop in Ruffec. Not any more, because they had to build a completely new line for the last leg of the trip, that goes through the countryside.
In fact there are now ZERO direct trains from Paris to Ruffec; to get there you need to change trains at Poitiers, which can be complicated if you're old or you have lots of luggage. The train from Poitiers to Ruffec is a regional one that stops everywhere. Going from Paris to Ruffec used to take less than 2 hours and now takes at least 3.
So high speed train isn't about helping transform urbanites into country people; it's about moving urbanites around.
Now it's not possible anymore because the new line avoids the towns.
Brilliant observation.
However, the city has been developing heavily before that and Parisians who wanted a nicer place to spend their quarantine have plenty of other places to go to, either in the west part of the country or the south.
In my opinion what needs to be done to further decentralize the country away from paris is to improve the connection between the other cities, eg Bordeaux Marseille is 6h by train!
But yes
So it's easy to see that the effect on the receiving city can be quite pronounced.
Suddenly, your swimming pool in Provence was 3 hours away from central Paris, with cheap tickets if you started early.
In the words of Roy from The IT Crowd:
> People, what a bunch of bastards.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZHLkTHuPJs&t=52s
:)
Even before the quarantine made everyone reconsider why the hell they were also confining themselves to Paris, wealthy and mobile Parisians saw the opportunity to make Bordeaux home and commute when they needed to. I credit that almost entirely with the arrival of the two-hour TGV. It's as if three hours was too much time, and two hours was the magical threshold that made living between the two cities feasible.
Now it is teeming with Parisian opportunists, and I totally understand why. Paris has been crowded, polluted, and unreasonably expensive, and Bordeaux was quite literally the opposite: laid back yet sophisticated, beautifully framed along the Garonne river, and with easy access to nature and the ocean. But now with the sudden influx of Parisians, there is some malaise among the Bordelais that the city has fundamentally changed not only in demographics, but in cost and culture.
The before and after effects are palpable. I saw Bordeaux before the boom started. In 2016/2017, it was sleepy and still cleaning the blackened grime off the building façades. The rents and cost of living reflected a city still growing, but the city itself has long been wealthy and home to a UNESCO world heritage site. Now there are cranes everywhere. New developments are cropping up around the city, and the costs of rents and living have soared. It even feels louder. The housing stock is depleted because the newcomers have purchased everything. That's not all bad for landholders and property owners, but it really sucks if you're just trying to make your way into the market, let alone a student trying to rent something.
A part of me feels like it's a lost treasure that's now been overrun by the same people who make living in Paris so exasperating. I guess this is the nature of change, and I attribute it almost entirely to the TGV line. French life will always be centralized in Paris, and so without these high-speed lines, there is little reason to think Bordeaux would have grown so much if not for the reduced travel time.