The enforcement of the Luxemburg agreements will not be without consequences on the activity and the results of the European car industry.This article highlights the respective trumps and weakness of the French and German car industries (manufacturers and equipment suppliers) face to the next regulatory requirements.Answers concerning the know-how of the manufacturer towards pollution control systems and the expected impacts of the strengthening of the standards on the research and development activities, the production process and the automo¬bile market are provided.Finally the car pollution problem is examined in the context of the unique European market and more generally within the framework of the international competition.
To improve their planning mechanisms, many agencies responsible for the management of large highway and road networks have resorted recently to pavement management systems built around optimization models. The general tendency in these systems has been to provide planners with a single well-defined optimization model, i.e. with a model in which the objective function and the constraints have been stated once and for all. When the complexity of the issues involved in pavement management is considered one is forced to conclude that this single model approach falls short of fulfilling the needs of decision makers. To remedy this situation, we propose a different approach: provide planners with a flexible decision-support tool which lets them specify themselves the optimization problems which seem meaningful within the scope of the decision-making process.
This paper is focused on the computation of transportation costs in a general spatial economic equilibrium, especially the Tinbergen-Bos model.Some new, more realistic hypotheses are added to the original model concerning the determination of distances between production centers and the location pattern of these centers. A number of simulations are done in order to examine optimal solutions.The interdependency between transportation costs and the optimal location pattern is demonstrated.
We describe spatial distribution of car owner¬ship and of its evolution between the two last censuses (1975 and 1982). Using a mapping approach we study in detail the areas of Lille-Lens and Lyon. Using econometrics, we analyze all the big connurbation areas and a break-down of the whole French territory between homogeneous density areas.The main explanatory factor of car ownership in 1982 at a local level is the social structure of the population. High population densities (low proportion of households living in single houses) and short home-to-work trips are a limit to households' equipment. Competition with public transports have seldom a direct effect on car ownership. It can rather be understood as equilibrium (growing public transport patronage in zones where the proportion of households without car is diminishing very slowly, low dependance between car ownership and social structure in areas with low public transport supply…). In most cases, car ownership modeling works rather well and could be developed for forecasting purposes.
Several legal, economic, political and human factors converge in the elaboration of departmental public transport policies. Thirst, a certain flexibility of the legal framework gives the departmental authorities a rather important freedom of decision making. The departmental authorities are in charge of the public transport organization. Therefore, they must negotiate with its different partners. Moreover their intervention is limited by the potentialities of the interurban transport market and by transporters strategies. At last it is directed by several objectives; most of them rather are constraints than real political choices. The decision making depends on the organizational means the representatives dispose of. To conclude these factors explain the worrying disparities which are characterizing the carrying out of policies.