A 2023 ICCT report, titled “Strategies to Align Global Road Transport with Well Below 2°C,” claims the reduction of car dependence in urban areas could be a significant contributor to the decrease of GHG emissions from transport. Second behind the electrification of mobility, this objective would bear 18% of the effort necessary in 2050 to stay within the objectives of the 2015 Paris Agreement.
Such an objective seems sensible, common sense even, but reality forces to classify it as wishful thinking.
Fact: As a prime example, in the Paris conurbation which is 11 million people strong, surveys regularly confirm that some 50% of daily mobility, home-work-home commuting and local trips to school or shops, rely on cars, propelled by internal combustion engines for the moment. Only 20% are covered by public transport. Worse, car usage has been increasing by 20% in large urban areas since 1990.
Reason: Public transport follows a mostly-radial pattern (suburbs ↔️ downtown), hub-and-spoke, as can be clearly seen in the chart below (downtown Paris is zone 1, the remotest destination in the Ile de France region, a small city named Malesherbes, being some 80 kilometer south). During peak hours, a recent study shows public transport seating offer is five times smaller than necessary on these radial routes.
Of course, there is no surprise in this “historical” pattern of the public transport network, again quite similar to the hub-and-spoke model of mercantile capitalism, optimizing business implementations and routes. From the early trains in the 19th century to the express regional trains of the 1960s, suburban, then exurban, housing development has followed the main thoroughfares linking Paris and the provinces, some of them dating back to the Roman Empire times.
But the location of professional activity has changed in the last decades. Limited to downtown Paris and nearby suburbs for most of the 20th century, it has mushroomed across the whole region, accelerating when industry declined in the 1980s and was replaced by tertiary activities, like shopping centers and warehouses (+ 30 % in the last decade in the Ile de France region). Meanwhile, though, mass public transport (trains) development strategy nearly completely forgot transversal demand (suburbs↔️suburbs), and buses can hardly compete with individual cars for this mobility of everyday. As a result, public transport only accounts for 13% of inter-suburban mobility.
Transport authorities eventually and earnestly started to reconsider this Paris-centric configuration of the network pattern for several reasons, like awakening to the climate change challenge (looking for sustainable mobility solutions) and societal ones:
- Transport is considered the #1 worry, if not the # 1 problem, for Ile de France residents (count your blessings: delays, from technical problems or strikes, lack of comfort, insecurity).
- Rising cost of commuting by car (thanks to fuel cost, a half million Ile de France suburban commuters incur more than 500 Euros each month, one-third of the minimum wage in France).
- Flight to other regions (post-pandemic trend, favored by home-working development).
- Attractivity for new businesses (which prefer to install their premises in suburbs where real estate is cheaper than in downtown Paris).
Heavy solutions have painfully emerged, projects spanning over several years, if not decades, like the Grand Paris Express, a 42 billion Euros, 200 kilometer, 72 stations, expansion of the light rail network to cover some of the additional transversal demand, shown in the figure below.
With a modal switch evaluated at 20%, this project will not eradicate car demand in the region.
Again, reliance on hegemonic solutions, based on Manichean oppositions (mass public transport v. individual car), does not seem the right answer to the sustainable mobility challenge in urban areas, but sure is costly and takes time (decision making, then permitting, then construction, partly underground). A future with several, parallel and local, solutions seems a more sensible approach and will improve the quality of life of citizens:
- Light mobility (biking on safe dedicated lanes), for short trips (Ile de France residents’ average trip is only 4 kilometers, and walking is the most popular mode).
- On-demand or shared light public transport (small buses or vans), especially targeting senior and disabled citizens.
- Inter-suburbs express buses (on dedicated lanes), which could allow a car-to-bus modal switch of 15%.
- Decentralized work locations and work-from-home.
- Redeployment of shopping away from malls and inside densely urbanized areas.
Urban thinkers have grand plans for the future and many of those make sense. Then, politicians, local and federal, have to make them a multi-modal reality. At stake is a significant reduction in CO2 emissions. The above-mentioned recent study evaluates the impact of car commuting between urban zones, more or less ignored by public transport, at 3% of France’s national CO2 emissions. If public transport systems remain narrowly focused on downtown commutes and ignore lateral connectivity, car dependency will persist, and with it, a sizable chunk of CO2 emissions. That is the reality.
Philippe Marchand is a Bioenergy Steering Committee Member of the European Technology and Innovation Platform (ETIP).
