Land use mix and daily mobility. The case of Bordeaux (In French)

The question of the urban form-daily mobility interaction was recently renewed. The model of the Compact City aims at increasing densities to decrease the use of the automobile. However, the density-mobility interaction is questioned in the polycentric city : on one’s hand, suburban employment centers produce original kinds of travel, such as cross-commuting or multi-prupose travelling ; on the other hand, they facilitate co-location of jobs and housing. That’s why the reflexion on the urban form-mobility interaction goes through the quantitative aspects of urban form (density) to qualitative ones : the diversity of land use. The idea is that land use mix brings the origin and the destination of the trips closer. In this paper, we make a distinction between two types of diversity : the functional one (i.e. the jobs-housing balance) and the economic one. Both may have an impact on daily mobility. We apply this question to the case of the metropolitan area of Bordeaux. In a first step, we test a general urban form model : we notice a significant impact of the degree of diversity on travel behaviour. Thus we are led to question about the influence of the type of diversity on travel patterns. We comment these results thanks to the location behaviour of the firms according to their activity.