structural:reformatting, structural:expansion
Transport

The city is linked to Paris by the A11 motorway, which passes through Angers, Le Mans and Chartres. Nantes is on the Way of the Estuaries, a network of motorways connecting northern France and the Spanish border in the south-west while bypassing Paris. The network serves Rouen, Le Havre, Rennes, La Rochelle and Bordeaux. South of Nantes, the road corresponds to the A83 motorway; north of the city (towards Rennes) it is the RN137, a free highway. These motorways form a 43-kilometre (27 mi) ring road around the city, France's second longest after the ring in Bordeaux.

Nantes's central railway station is connected by TGV trains to Paris, Lille, Lyon, Marseille and Strasbourg. The LGV Atlantique high-speed railway reaches Paris in two hours, ten minutes (compared with four hours by car). With almost 12 million passengers each year, the Nantes station is the sixth-busiest in France outside Paris. In addition to TGV trains, the city is connected by Intercités trains to Rennes, Vannes, Quimper, Tours, Orléans, La Rochelle and Bordeaux. Local TER trains serve Pornic, Cholet or Saint-Gilles-Croix-de-Vie.

Nantes Atlantique Airport in Bouguenais, 8 kilometres (5 miles) south-west of the city centre, serves about 80 destinations in Europe (primarily in France, Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom and Greece) and connects airports in Africa, the Caribbean and Canada. Air traffic has increased from 2.6 million passengers in 2009 to 4.1 million in 2014, while its capacity has been estimated at 3.5 million passengers per year. A new Aéroport du Grand Ouest in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, 20 kilometres (12 miles) north of Nantes, was projected from the 1970s, to create a hub serving north-western France. Its construction was however strongly opposed, primarily by green and anti-capitalist activists. The potential construction site was long occupied and the project became a political topic on the national scale. The French government eventually decided to renounce to the project in 2018.

Public transport in Nantes is managed by Semitan, also known as "Tan". One of the world's first horsebus transit systems was developed in the city in 1826. Nantes built its first compressed-air tram network in 1879, which was electrified in 1911. Like most European tram networks, Nantes's disappeared during the 1950s in the wake of automobiles and buses. However, in 1985 Nantes was the first city in France to reintroduce trams. The city has an extensive public-transport network consisting of trams, buses and river shuttles. The Nantes tramway has three lines and a total of 43.5 kilometres (27 miles) of track. Semitan counted 132.6 million trips in 2015, of which 72.3 million were by tram. Navibus, the river shuttle, has two lines: one on the Erdre and the other on the Loire. The latter has 520,000 passengers annually and succeeds the Roquio service, which operated on the Loire from 1887 to the 1970s.

Nantes has also developed a tram-train system, the Nantes tram-train, which would allow suburban trains to run on tram lines; the system already exists in Mulhouse (in eastern France) and Karlsruhe, Germany. The city has two tram-train lines: Nantes- Clisson (southern) and Nantes- Châteaubriant (northern). Neither is yet connected to the existing tram network, and resemble small suburban trains more than tram-trains. The Bicloo bicycle-sharing system has 880 bicycles at 103 stations.