PARIS:Paris’s oldest and busiest underground railway line is to be given a multimillion-euro overhaul which local authorities hope will make it more stylish, streamlined and — crucially in a city regularly crippled by industrial action — more strike-proof than ever.

The central Line 1, which allows passengers to hop out at the Champs Elysees, the Louvre, the Bastille and the falafel joints of the Marais district, is to be converted into a fully automatic service in which traditional train drivers will no longer be needed.

Although the director of the metro, Serge Lagrange, has insisted the makeover was not inspired by the desire for an anti-strike line, unions point out that the reliance on machines instead of people will make the service far less vulnerable to strike action.

While it may be bad news for the 250 train drivers who are expected to be taken off Line 1 by the end of the three-year makeover, the switch is likely to be welcomed by Parisian commuters whose journeys are often disrupted when drivers down tools.

Several strikes in protest at the government’s handling of the economic downturn have this year reminded the city how easily its overstretched public transport system can buckle under the pressure of mass walkouts.

Although made far less crippling by French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s minimum service law, which made it a legal requirement that a certain number of staff stay in place during stoppages, recent actions have belied the president’s inflammatory remark last year that “these days, when there’s a strike, no one notices”.

Pierre Mongin, the chief executive of the city transport authority (RATP), said Line 1’s EUR629 million makeover would give inhabitants a “safer, more regular and more flexible” service linking them from the city’s north-western La Defense business district to its south-eastern Chateau de Vincennes.

The RATP hopes the new system, due to be in place by 2012, will see trains stopping at stations every 85 seconds during rush hour. At present the line, which with 725,000 passengers per day is the most used of Paris’s metro services, suffers from overcrowding due to its prestigious stops and an increase in traffic on the metro as a whole since the start of 2008.

Line 1 was inaugurated during the Universal Exhibition of 1900.