page_title: Voguéo
section_title: Paris water taxis
hierarchical_section_title: Voguéo / History / Paris water taxis
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Les bateaux à aubes sur la Seine, mus par la vapeur, près du pont Louis-Philippe, vers 1840. Paris (France).
context_page_description: Voguéo was a water taxi service operated on the River Seine and the River Marne in the Île-de-France.
  The Syndicat des transports d'Île-de-France adopted the service in 2007. It started on 28 June 2008 between the Gare d'Austerlitz in the 13th arrondissement of Paris and the École Vétérinaire de Maisons-Alfort Métro station. Between the two termini the journey took 38 minutes, and the following year this was reduced to 28.
  Unlike the tourist river services in Paris, this new route was different. It was designed for commuters, not tourists, and financed by the STIF, which meant it could be integrated into the existing fare system for the Île-de-France. For the occasional traveller, a one-time ticket was sold on board. The route revived passenger river transport on the Seine, since it disappeared in 1934 from competition with the rail network. Service was provided by the Compagnie des Batobus with catamarans specially built by Fountaine-Pajot.
  On 5 June 2011 this "experimental service" closed, although there was due to be a fuller service starting "some time in 2013" this has not materialised.
context_section_description: Water taxis on the Seine operated for many years, but were rapidly made redundant at the start of the 20th century with the development of rail transport. Some were local to the inner city like the Paris Métro, while others reached out to the suburbs like the railways, such as the Vincennes line. Until 1828, with the creation of horse-drawn buses, passenger river traffic was the only mode of public transport in the Île-de-France.
  Until the 19th century, horse-drawn boats and galiots served a steady stream of passengers on the river. Until the canal excavations around the river and the creation of locks downstream to Rouen under the reign of Louis-Philippe I, most of the traffic travelled upstream from Paris. At the end of the 17th century, and in the 18th, boats relayed goods to Montereau and Sens, in Yonne. Others served as passenger transport from the Pont Royal in Paris to the villages of Passy, Auteuil, Meudon, Sèvres and Saint-Cloud, downstream, and were particularly frequent on Sundays and holidays after the opening of the public Parc de Saint-Cloud by Queen Marie Antoinette, and the establishment of a funfair in September. An order of 23 March 1735 fixed the fares for river journeys: two French sols for Chaillot and Passy, four for Sèvres and Saint-Cloud, and up to two sols for each stop beyond. It took two hours to travel from Paris to Saint-Cloud.
  From 1837, river barges were steadily replaced by steamboats with free connections with the many bus lines, such as the Compagnie des Bateaux à Vapeur de Paris à Saint-Cloud. Under the Second French Empire, the river navigation was reorganised, and reinforced for the 1867 Éxposition Universelle, which took place on the Champ de Mars, Paris.
  The Compagnie des Bateaux-Omnibus was established in 1866. It provided river transport between Charenton and Suresnes with a fleet of paddle steamers, similar to those used since 1864 on the river Saône in Lyon and built in the Lyon district of La Mouche, from which the name Bateau Mouche comes. The service had a strong reputation with the public, and the Préfecture set the fares, timetables and frequencies.
  Several companies swiftly followed: in 1876 the Compagnie des Hirondelles Parisiennes operated eighteen pontoons, twelve of them in Paris. In response, the Compagnie des Bateaux-Omnibus reduced its fares and increased the number of boats in service. But the fierce competition turned out to be disastrous, and in 1878, the two companies ran operations jointly. A third player appeared in 1885, the Compagnie des Bateaux Express, which operated fast boats with lower fares on the Marne between Lagny-sur-Marne and Charenton, and another line from Charenton to Suresnes. In 1886, the several companies merged under the name Compagnie générale des bateaux parisiens.
  This company ran three lines: Tuileries–Suresnes, Charenton–Auteuil and Austerlitz-–Auteuil. A fourth opened in 1895 between the Louvre and Ablon-sur-Seine. The Charenton–Auteuil line was the busiest, with a flat fare of 20 centimes, more on Sundays and holidays. Traffic was immense, with 25 million annual journeys (around 70 thousand a day) between 1886 and 1900, over a route totalling 39 km (24 mi) from Charenton-le-Pont to Suresnes totalling 47 stops. Service was provided by a fleet of 107 boats. River traffic reached its zenith during the Exposition Universelle of 1900 with 42 million passengers, but after 1900 the service quickly declined with the evolution of the electric tramways and the opening of the Paris Métro dealt a fatal blow. In 1913, there were 13 million passengers, but traffic collapsed during the First World War, and service finished in 1917 from a lack of passengers.
  In 1921 the STCRP, the predecessor of the RATP, won the concession for Parisian riverboats. On 4 May, a line opened between Maisons-Alfort and the Louvre, then extended to Auteuil, but the traffic numbers anticipated by the Conseil général of the Seine department, of around seven million passengers a year, turned out to be less than two million. Changes in the fares and routes, aiming to make th
caption: Steam-driven paddle steamers on the Seine near the Pont Louis-Philippe, around 1840
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