The trend towards " metropolisation " appears to be ineluctable, namely households and activity concentration in great metropolitan areas and correlative decline of small towns and rural areas. The experts' opinions (DELPHI survey) on actions related to different town levels, particularly transport measures, point out how large the gap is between what is desirable and what is likely to happen. Access to high speed networks is considered as a strong condition of urban growth. On the other hand, pricing actions are not considered effective to stop urban development of areas as Paris, logic of growth and heavy economic trends cannot be ignored.
The urban movement of goods remains largely ignored by the institutional and legal framework. No national legislation or case law has so far proposed a clear distinction and organisation of urban freight distribution, resulting in inefficient local policies, which disregard the main environmental and economic issues at stake and prevent freight urban activities' consolidation and professionalization.
In most cases subcontracting relationships in the sector of freight road transport are synonyms of dependency. Even if it is commonly the case, it would be wrong to generalise this analysis too quickly.So the aim of this paper is to highlight the possibility of equilibrium relationships and to underline the variables that a subcontractor should influence to change its situation. The main concept in this analysis is " relative dependence ".
Distance predicting functions are commonly used for estimating road distances in transportation networks. The value of the parameters of these functions depend upon the studied empirical sample of places. In this paper, simulations are performed on a random lattice of 225 points in order to test how far the k-median outputs are sensitive to the way distances are estimated. The lp-distance is used with systematic changes in p (p varying from 0.4 to 9.0). Results lead to useful conclusions for further empirical use of the k-median: location-allocation results are little sensitive to changes in p, especially as far as " reasonable " empirical values of p are considered. The outputs of the simulations are systematically discussed.
The laying of the French south-east high-speed train line has brought about a renewal of the railway, which has been made obvious by the restructuration of stations from the nineteenth century, and by the creation of new stations in urban centre. In some towns, the renovation of the stations and of the access to these stations has encouraged new mutations in the station's neighbourhood. However, thanks to the study of the main towns served by the high-speed train, it has occurred that only a well-thought urban policy might help reinforce the central position of the station area. Such policies look all the more necessary as the high-speed train projects plan the building of new stations at the outskirts of the towns. These new stations would be likely to reinforce rurban poles to the detriment of central stations' areas.