Marseille, Saturday 24 October: public transport will run after all. What still applies, and how to plan a day when the rules change overnight

A correction to our post of 22 October. Last night we reported that Marseille's metro, tram and buses would stop on Saturday 24 October. On Friday 23 October the Bouches-du-Rhône prefecture withdrew that decision: the RTM network will not be shut down.

What changed

The prefect had planned to halt public transport in Marseille for 24 hours, from 5 a.m. on Saturday to 5 a.m. on Sunday. In a statement on Friday, the prefecture said the measure was being dropped. The only reason given: according to the prefecture, the proposal did not win the agreement needed to carry it out. As the statement is reported, it does not say who objected.

Instead of a full shutdown, the network will be managed through the day according to the public-order situation. In practice: services run, but individual lines, sections or stations may be closed and reopened during the day, with no timetable announced in advance.

What still applies

• All protests are banned on Saturday 24 October across the whole Bouches-du-Rhône department, not only in Marseille.
• The curfew in parts of Marseille now covers adults too. Until now it applied only to minors. It runs on the night of Saturday to Sunday and the night of Sunday to Monday, from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m., in the hyper-centre, in some shopping areas and around several public buildings — the town hall, the prefecture and the courthouse. The exact boundaries are set by the prefect's order (arrêté); the openly available sources we saw do not list the streets, so we won't guess them.

How to plan a day like this

The week since 17 October has shown that measures for a protest day can be announced, widened or withdrawn within 24 hours. A few habits that will still be useful after this Saturday:

1. Check in the morning, not the night before. A decision you read in the evening may be out of date by morning — as happened today. Before leaving, check the operator's official channels: RTM in Marseille (rtm.fr and its app), RATP and IDFM in Paris, TCL in Lyon.

2. "Running" does not mean "will get you home". Real-time management usually targets the specific place and time where something is happening. If you are heading into the centre, work out a way back without the metro: on foot, by bike, or via another station.

3. A curfew is tied to a place. It does not cover the whole city, only the area defined in the order. If you live or work in central Marseille, find out in advance whether your address or route falls inside it, and plan to be home before 11 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday nights. Whether the order has exceptions, for instance for travel to work, is in the text itself; the open sources don't say, and we won't speculate.

4. The protest ban is a separate measure. It applies whether or not transport is running. We explained how such bans work and what a participant risks in our 22 October post on the bans in Lyon, Rouen, Le Havre and Chambéry.

5. Carry ID. On a day with a heavy police presence, it makes sense to carry an identity document or your residence permit (titre de séjour), or the receipt for its renewal.

What still holds from yesterday's post

The section on what the rules say about work when there is no transport is still relevant: under real-time management a line can stop at any moment, so the question of what happens if you are late hasn't gone away.

No further changes to Saturday's measures had been announced at the time of publication. If the prefecture changes them again, it will show up on its website and on RTM's channels.

Sources: France 3 Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, ici (Provence), Maritima, reporting the prefecture's statement of 23 October 2026. At the time of writing, the statement had not been posted on the Bouches-du-Rhône prefecture's website.