> “We thought ours was expensive,” said Laurent Probst, managing director of Île-de-France Mobilités, which controls transit in the French capital.

> The small number of workers has not slowed the Paris project. The line, which will run driverless trains every 85 seconds, is set to open by 2020, six years after groundbreaking. The Second Avenue subway, by contrast, took a decade to build.

> M.T.A. officials declined to comment on the Paris project.

French inefficiency used to be a joke in the US when I was a kid. Joke’s on us now I guess.