Evaluation des politiques de transports et équité spatiale

Assessment of transport policy and spatial equity. - The set up of a transport system in a place generates inequalities in accessibility at the local, national or international level. This raises the problem of the unequal access to transport and local public goods, hereafter designated as the spatial inequity. In the assessment of transport policies, dealing with spatial equity leads to several problems mainly because of the contradiction between efficiency and equity. The cost-benefit analysis usually practised is unable to consider redistribution maters. This is clearly linked to its main hypothesis based on the assumptions of an optimal allocation. We propose first to formalise this difficulty, then we consider the way the contradiction can be arbitrated. Several hypothesis are then studied. The first one consists of the integration of the notion of accessibility into the consumer surplus in accordance with the proposition of KOENIG. The following rely on the welfare economics propositions and suggest, prior to the problem, to search for a more reliable and accurate definition of the spatial equity. The present method consist of the standard cost-advantage analysis but including the use of redistribution.