I certainly did not take all of the lines and did not alight at all stations I crossed, but I was still prepared for much worse! To provide a point of comparison - the busiest stations in Ottawa all smell of urine almost all the time and they see much less traffic than their counterparts in Paris. It is in some ways a uniquely Ottawa problem but it was still nice to use the Paris metro to travel in the city.

Vienna metro was even cleaner and slightly less sketchy than Paris, but that is also not a fair comparison in terms of size and demographics. The Delhi metro is almost equally impressive as Paris's in convenience but feels about as clean as Ottawa.