Toulouse - France

Toulouse

Country: France

Population: 514819

Elevation: 156.0 metre

Area: 118.3 square kilometre

Web: https://www.toulouse.fr

Overall score

Total

Amenities

A+

Childcare & Education

A+

Commute

Culture & Entertainment

Health

A-

NIMBY

C-

Noise

D+

The daily-life lens: what the internal scores suggest

Toulouse sits in southwest France on the Garonne River and has become one of the country’s faster-growing large cities in recent years: the municipality counted 511,684 residents in 2022, up from 470,672 in 2015.

No street, neighbourhood, or coordinates were provided (the input location appears as a missing value). That means the “living near this location” interpretation has to stay generic: it refers to an unspecified Toulouse address whose walking-distance coverage is excellent overall (Total score A), but where downsides are likely concentrated around noise exposure and some proximity to “undesirable” infrastructure (NIMBY). The internal grades are not judgments of service quality; they are signals about how many relevant facilities and connections tend to be reachable within short walking radii.

Amenities: A+ — daily services are likely to be abundant on foot.
Commute: A — walking access to public transport options is likely strong.
Health (accessibility): A- — healthcare access on foot is generally good, but less “dense” than the very top tier.
Culture & Entertainment: A — cultural venues are likely reachable without much friction.
Childcare & Education: A+ — strong walking access to childcare/schools/campuses.
Noise: D+ (negative) — proximity to noise sources is a meaningful trade-off.
NIMBY: C- (negative) — some “infrastructure adjacency” is plausible (major roads, rail, industrial/logistics, airport influence, etc.).

Why Toulouse feels the way it does: growth, jobs, and a stretched-but-adapting city

Toulouse’s identity is strongly shaped by two forces that show up in daily life: rapid metropolitan growth and an economy anchored in aerospace and high-tech manufacturing. On the metro scale, Toulouse Métropole counted 818,491 residents (legal population 2021), which helps explain why commuting pressure and housing demand are recurring topics in local planning.

The employment geography is unusually “pole-driven”: major job clusters sit in specific corridors (notably the aerospace complex to the northwest and the Labège/Montaudran axis to the southeast). The planned Line C metro project explicitly targets this structure, citing three large economic poles and estimating 220,000 jobs directly served along the route.

Growth and job concentration create a very Toulouse-specific rhythm: central districts and inner suburbs tend to behave like a walkable city, while cross-town trips can feel longer than the map suggests—especially when they must cross the ring road (A620) or follow the river/canal geometry. In practice, this produces a city that rewards proximity and penalises “the wrong side of a bottleneck.”

Interpreting the internal scores: coverage indicators, not quality ratings

The internal scores reflect accessibility/coverage—how many relevant facilities and networks tend to fall within walking distance—not the quality of those services. A “C” in Health, for example, would not imply poor hospitals; it would only indicate thinner nearby coverage. In this case, the pattern is clear: the address behaves like a high-convenience Toulouse location with a notable exposure to noise and some infrastructure adjacency.

High convenience signal: A+ for amenities and education implies short-walk solutions for errands and daily logistics.
High mobility signal: Commute A implies public transport is likely accessible on foot; the trade-off is that proximity to transport corridors often co-travels with noise.
Downside signal: Noise D+ suggests a “street-level penalty” (traffic corridor, rail, nightlife cluster, or an airport/heliport influence), which often matters more day-to-day than any city-wide average.

Housing: prices, rents, and the “quiet factor” that often decides comfort

Toulouse’s housing market is less expensive than Paris or Lyon, but it is not a “cheap big city” anymore. Notarial-market reporting for early 2024 places the median price for existing apartments around €3,200/m² in Toulouse (Q1 2024), while existing houses around the Toulouse agglomeration are shown with a median of €303,100 (Q1 2024).

On rents, the local rent observatory framework points to a mid-market reality rather than an outlier market. A 2024 snapshot for the Toulouse agglomeration reports a median rent of about €12/m² overall, with a higher median within the city of Toulouse (around €12.7/m²) and lower medians in the rest of the agglomeration (around €11.6/m²).

Building stock matters because it conditions both energy comfort and perceived noise. Toulouse has a large share of post-1970 housing: about 24.7% of main residences were built 1971–1990 and 22.4% since 2006, while 7.8% date to before 1919. The city also has a renter-heavy profile: roughly 68.1% of households are tenants (private + social), compared with 30.9% owners.

In day-to-day terms, older central flats (especially those on lively streets) can be charming but acoustically variable; newer stock often performs better but can sit closer to large roads or newer development corridors. This is where the internal picture becomes practical: a Noise D+ suggests that even a good apartment may require careful scrutiny of façade orientation, glazing quality, and night-time street activity. Without a specific address, it is not possible to identify the precise noise source—only that the proximity-based signal is strong.

Transport and commuting: a strong network, plus a major construction decade

Toulouse’s daily mobility is structured around the Tisséo public transport system (metro + tram + buses) and a growing set of “link” modes. A notable addition is Téléo, described as a 3 km urban cable car connecting key destinations in roughly 10 minutes, in service since May 2022.

The internal Commute A score implies that stops and commute infrastructure are likely easy to reach on foot from the unspecified location—typically the biggest factor in whether public transport becomes a default mode rather than a contingency plan. City-wide commuting patterns support this “two Toulouses” idea: within the municipality, a large share of workers still use cars, but walking and public transport are significant. In 2022, the modal split for commuting among employed residents shows about 44.0% travelling by car, 21.2% by public transport, and 31.8% on foot (with smaller shares for two-wheelers).

What is changing the most is the medium-term network shape. The Line C metro project is presented as a 27 km line with 21 stations, designed for roughly 200,000 passengers per day, with trains every 3 minutes at peak and service roughly from 5:00 to 1:00. Its stated ambition is also spatial: about 60% of Toulouse Métropole residents would be within 10 minutes of the future metro network (Lines A, B, C combined).

These figures matter for daily life because they signal a city transitioning from “two-line metro plus surface network” to a more multi-corridor system. During the build phase, however, construction zones and rerouted surface traffic can add friction—often experienced most acutely in already noisy corridors. That is a plausible explanation for how an address can score very high on commute convenience while also scoring poorly on noise.

Amenities and errands: what A+ typically means in Toulouse

An A+ amenities score is usually felt in Toulouse as a short-walk lifestyle: a bakery run, grocery top-ups, cafés, basic services (ATMs, pharmacies, small repairs), and restaurants close enough that errands stack efficiently. The city’s planning discourse increasingly frames this as “quarter-hour” proximity. Around Matabiau, for example, the Grand Matabiau project explicitly references the “ville du ¼ d’heure” (15-minute city) idea as a way to offer quicker access to everyday services.

Where Toulouse can be uneven is in the distribution of certain “big errands”: the largest retail formats and many hypermarkets tend to sit at the urban edge, while specialised services cluster around a few hubs (historic centre, major interchanges, certain commercial corridors). For a high-amenity location, the likely pattern is simple: daily needs are easy, while the occasional “bulk trip” is a short transit ride or a targeted drive—depending on the household’s mode preferences.

Healthcare: A- access on foot, and a very large hospital backbone

The internal Health (accessibility) A- means walking-distance coverage is generally strong, but not necessarily “saturated” with options at very short distances. In Toulouse, this distinction matters because the city’s healthcare backbone is large, but neighbourhood-level access can still vary (especially for specific specialists, physiotherapy, or certain diagnostics).

On capacity, the regional anchor is the CHU de Toulouse, which reports (for 2024) 2,995 beds and places, about 1,012,558 outpatient consultations, 228,885 emergency visits, and 639,746 calls to the SAMU—a scale that confirms Toulouse’s role as a major tertiary-care centre for a wide catchment area.

In real-life terms, the city’s hospital strength does not automatically remove “queue realities” (appointment lead times, specialist bottlenecks), but it does mean that higher-level care is present locally and not structurally distant. The practical question at street level is often simpler: whether daily health infrastructure (pharmacies, GPs, labs) is reachable on foot—precisely what the internal score is trying to proxy.

Childcare and education: strong coverage, plus predictable pressure points

The internal Childcare & Education A+ suggests that nurseries, schools, and/or campuses are likely reachable on foot in a way that reduces daily logistics risk—particularly valuable for households with split schedules and limited car dependence.

Toulouse also functions as a higher-education magnet. At the academy level (Académie de Toulouse), higher-education enrolment is reported at roughly 147,748 students (2023), up year-on-year in the cited summary.

Large urban projects also bake education into land use. Grand Matabiau’s programme, for instance, references 3,000 homes and includes public facilities such as a crèche and a school group (plus a gymnasium), alongside green space targets.

Where friction still arises is less about the existence of schools and more about catchment logistics, perceived school fit, and capacity pressure in fast-growing zones. High walking coverage reduces time cost; it does not eliminate competition dynamics in specific schools or childcare formats.

Culture, leisure, and green space: strong central gravity, with city-wide options

Toulouse’s cultural offer has a clear centre of gravity, but it is not exclusively “centre-only.” The city hosts institutions with national visibility—such as the Opéra national du Capitole, with programming spanning opera, ballet, concerts, and recitals.

Science and aerospace culture are also unusually prominent. The Cité de l’espace reports a record year in 2022 with about 423,000 visitors (up year-on-year), highlighting how this venue functions as both a cultural site and a civic identity marker.

For everyday decompression, green space availability is often more important than headline attractions. Toulouse Métropole’s own inventory counts 170 parks and gardens, plus a large tree stock of roughly 160,000 trees.

In a high-accessibility location (as the internal A/A+ cluster implies), culture and leisure tend to work as “short-notice options”: an evening performance, a museum visit, a run along a canal, or a spontaneous park break. The main uncertainty—again tied to the location being unspecified—is whether noise sources sit between the home and those amenities, shaping the perceived ease of using them frequently.

Urban planning and development: where the city is heading (and what it disrupts)

Two development narratives dominate Toulouse’s near future: network investment and station-area redevelopment. The Line C metro scheme is framed around connecting major economic poles and reducing car dependence, with performance targets such as peak frequency and daily ridership.

In parallel, the Grand Matabiau quais d’Oc project—centred around Toulouse-Matabiau station—positions itself as an everyday-life project toward horizon 2030, combining a mobility hub with mixed urban programming.

The land-use scale is substantial: programming references 3,000 dwellings, 4 hectares of green space, 30,000 m² of services/shops, and 200,000 m² of offices, with multiple future Line C stations in the area.

These projects matter to the internal “NIMBY” reading. A C- NIMBY score often reflects proximity to rail corridors, major interchange zones, industrial/logistics areas, or other infrastructure that can be visually or functionally intrusive even when it is economically valuable. Without the address, the safest interpretation is probabilistic: the location likely benefits from proximity to infrastructure (hence Commute A) while also absorbing some of its externalities (hence Noise D+ and NIMBY C-).

Safety, air quality, and noise: interpreting the downsides without overclaiming

Safety. France’s official security statistics system (SSMSI) publishes annual overviews and atlases for recorded offences. These datasets are useful, but they require careful interpretation: reporting practices, the presence of major transport hubs, and commuter inflows can inflate recorded counts in large cities relative to residential experience. The Ministry’s 2024 statistical overview and atlas framework provides the official context for such comparisons.

At the city level, some reprocessed local summaries report that Toulouse recorded about 43,526 crimes and offences in 2024—roughly 85.1 per 1,000 inhabitants. This figure should be treated as indicative (a repackaging of official data rather than the primary statistical publication), but it aligns with the general pattern that large metropolitan centres carry higher recorded volumes, especially for property-related offences around busy nodes.

Air quality. Monitoring in Toulouse is conducted by Atmo Occitanie, including territory-focused studies. One Toulouse Métropole publication describes annual mapping of NO₂ concentrations for the Toulouse air-protection-plan area and explicitly frames the analysis against stricter health-oriented benchmarks introduced by the WHO in 2021. In practical terms, this typically means that “near a major road” and “away from traffic corridors” can feel like two different air-quality microclimates, even within the same city.

Noise. The internal Noise D+ is the clearest “street-level” red flag in the dataset. Toulouse Métropole’s noise-prevention planning (PPBE) explicitly covers the main categories of urban noise sources—roads, rail, and other infrastructures—under the national framework implementing EU noise policy.

Airport influence is another Toulouse-specific dimension because of Toulouse-Blagnac. Official documentation on airport strategic noise mapping explains standard indicators such as Lden and Ln, including the weighting that treats evening noise as about 3× and night noise as about 10× more penalising than daytime events in the composite indicator. That weighting reflects why a location can feel “fine” in the daytime and still be scored poorly if night-time exposure is structurally present.

Trade-offs: who Toulouse tends to suit, and who it frustrates

Suits: households aiming for a car-light routine, where errands and social life can happen on foot (consistent with Amenities A+ and Culture A).
Suits: students and early-career workers who benefit from dense education coverage and an urban rhythm that supports late-evening mobility (Childcare & Education A+, Commute A).
Suits: health-sector workers and households prioritising access to high-capacity tertiary care within the region (strong city-wide backbone), even if neighbourhood coverage varies.
Frustrates: noise-sensitive residents (shift workers, families with infants, anyone prioritising sleep quality) if the specific dwelling sits near a corridor captured by the Noise D+ penalty.
Frustrates: households seeking “quiet + cheap + central” simultaneously; the market pricing and rent medians suggest trade-offs between size, location, and comfort.
Frustrates: residents who must cross the city frequently by car at peak times; Toulouse’s growth and corridor structure can turn short distances into longer trips, and major works periods can amplify this effect.

Street-level summary box

What is easiest to access (high confidence from internal scores): daily errands and services on foot (Amenities A+), public transport options within walking distance (Commute A), and education-related facilities close enough to reduce daily logistics risk (Childcare & Education A+).
What is likely present but slightly less “dense” than the very top tier: healthcare coverage on foot (Health A-), meaning pharmacies/GPs/clinics are likely nearby but not necessarily in the highest concentration.
What is most likely to be annoying: a meaningful noise source nearby (Noise D+), commonly associated with traffic corridors, rail influence, nightlife clusters, or airport-related exposure depending on the exact micro-location.
What the NIMBY score implies: some proximity to infrastructure that can be visually/operationally intrusive (C-), which often coexists with strong commute convenience in dense cities.
Key uncertainty: without a specific address, the exact source of noise and NIMBY exposure cannot be named; the safest interpretation is “excellent convenience with a corridor-adjacency penalty.”