REVENUES AND TAXES For centuries, Lille has been a city of revenues contrasts : as a merchants city, great wealth and precarity have been living side by side, especially until the end of the 19th century. This contrast has been witnessed by Victor Hugo in 1851 in his poem Les Châtiments: « Caves de Lille ! on meurt sous vos plafonds de pierre ! » ((English) « Lille cellars : there are deaths below your stone roofs») EMPLOYMENT Employment in Lille has switched over half a century from a predominant industry to tertiary activities and services. Services account for 91% of employment in 2006. MAIN SIGHTS Lille features an array of architectural styles with various amounts of Flemish influence, including the use of brown and red brick. In addition, many residential neighborhoods, especially in Greater Lille, consist of attached 2-3 story houses aligned in a row, with narrow gardens in the back. These architectural attributes, many uncommon in France, help make Lille a transition in France to neighboring Belgium, as well as nearby Netherlands and England, where the presence of brick, as well as row houses or the Terraced house is much more prominent. PUBLIC TRANSPORT The Lille Métropole has a mixed mode public transport system, which is considered one of the most modern in the whole of France. It comprises buses, trams and a driverless metro system, all of which are operated under the Transpole name. The Lille Metro is a VAL system (véhicule automatique léger = light automated vehicle) that opened on 16 May 1983, becoming the first automatic metro line in the world. The metro system has two lines, with a total length of 45 km and 60 stations. The tram system consists of two interurban tram lines, connecting central Lille to the nearby communities of Roubaix and Tourcoing, and has 45 stops. 68 urban bus routes cover the metropolis, 8 of which reach into Belgium.
RAILWAYS Lille is an important crossroads in the European high-speed rail network: it lies on the Eurostar line to London and the French TGV network to Paris, Brussels and other major centres in France such as Marseille, Lyon, and Toulouse. It has two railway stations, which stand next door to one another: Lille-Europe station (Gare de Lille-Europe), which primarily serves high-speed trains and international services (Eurostar), and Lille-Flandres station (Gare de Lille-Flandres), which primarily serves lower speed regional trains. HIGHWAYS No fewer than five autoroutes pass by Lille, the densest confluence of highways in France after Paris: * Autoroute A27 : Lille - Tournai - Brussels / Liège - Germany / * Autoroute A23 : Lille - Valenciennes / * Autoroute A1 : Lille - Arras - Paris / Reims - Lyon / Orléans / Le Havre / * Autoroute A25 : Lille - Dunkirk - Calais - England / North Belgium / * Autoroute A22 : Lille - Antwerp - Netherlands. A sixth one — the proposed A24 — will link Amiens to Lille if built, but there is opposition to its route. AIR TRAFFIC Lille Lesquin International Airport is 15 minutes from the city centre by car (11 km). In terms of shipping, it ranks fourth, with almost 38,000 tonnes of freight which pass through each year. WATERWAYS Lille is the third largest French river port after Paris and Strasbourg. The river Deûle is connected to regional waterways with over 680 km of navigable waters. The Deûle connects to Northern Europe via the River Scarpe and the River Scheldt (towards Belgium and the Netherlands), and internationally via the Lys River (to Dunkerque and Calais).