La Poste pick up service from metro station on trial

Busy residents in the north of Paris will have the option of having letters and parcels delivered to their local metro station to avoid making a trip to the post office. The scheme, a joint venture between La Poste and the Paris public transport authority RATP, will be piloted next month at Simplon metro station.

Local residents who sign up for the service can ask for any undelivered parcels or recorded-delivery letters to be forwarded to the metro station if they are not in.

They will then receive a text message inviting them to pick up the object from the ticket office any day of the week until as late as 23.30.

The plan was outlined to ticket office staff across the metro network at the beginning of the summer and, if the trial works well at Simplon, could be extended elsewhere later this year.

Urban transport union SUD-RATP is hostile to the idea. About a third of station staff on line 4 went on strike at the end of July to protest against the experiment.

The union fears the initiative will be increase the workload on station ticket office staff. However the RATP argues that most tickets are sold by automatic machines.