Changing Daily Urban Mobility : Less or Differently ? France

How can travel behaviour be reorganised in order to reduce the consumption of environmental resources arising from daily mobility? The term "environmental resources" is used here to refer to the nuisances daily mobility creates with regard to the quality of life, the local and global environment and the land and energy consumed by transport activities. Several options would seem to be open: - Demand for transport could be shifted away from individual road vehicles towards modes that are less wasteful of resources per passenger-kilometre; - The volume of emissions generated by the road transport sector could be reduced through technological and organisational innovations within this sector; - Growth in the number of kilometres travelled by motor vehicles could be reduced or at least slowed. Our discussion will focus on daily mobility in urban areas and the catchment area, i.e. the areas in which the bulk of the population lives. It should, nonetheless, be borne in mind that urban trips, in the strict sense of the term, and regional trips, which take account of the emergence of city regions, only account for a portion of the total number of passenger kilometres travelled (in France, such trips accounted for approximately half of the total in 1990, for all surface modes and air). The scale of this daily mobility in urban areas and the scope for achieving a modal shift from the car to public transport and non-motorised modes (walking and cycling), make daily mobility the ideal target for action. This report therefore does not prejudge the complementary, but probably different, measures that will need to be taken with regard to business or long-distance recreational mobility; the latter often requires use of the same infrastructure as that used for daily mobility, infrastructure that is also used for the transport of road freight.