The French public authorities mostly don't know the way cities are daily supplied and so they ignore their room to manoeuvre to improve urban fret movements. The analysis of the professional practices of the deliverymen, in urban areas, gives some ideas about efficient policies. In effect, urban logistic mostly depends on the knowledge and the know-how of the deliverymen in the management of different urban temporalities and urban interactions. This article present a socio-anthropological approach based on a survey upon fifty deliverymen we interviewed and observed at work.
California can be regarded as a kind of laboratory of the public policies aiming at reducing air pollution, in particular the pollution produced by road traffic, because it is generally in California that these policies are invented and applied in first. Among the Californian policies to fight against automobile pollution, a central place is granted to the exhaust emission standards imposed to the manufacturers. But, whereas the first standards were universal standards similar to those currently into force in Europe, the new standard is an average standard calculated on the whole of the sales of each manufacturer. While bringing more flexibility than the preceding one, this approach makes it possible to lay down more ambitious objectives.To achieve an increasingly stringent average standard each year, the LEV program (for Low Vehicles Emission) proceeds in three stages: (i) it defines categories of vehicles according to increasingly stringent emission standards, (ii) it imposes a mechanism to force the manufacturers and importers in California to modify the set of their sales by gradually introducing increasing proportions of vehicles of the cleanest categories, with the option of marketable credits for complying with or improving on the standards, and (iii) it requires that a given percentage of vehicles be vehicles of the ZEV category, i.e., Zero Emission Vehicles. Very dissuasive penalties are imposed to the manufacturers who do not comply with the average standard.This […]
The increase in local environmental concerns, growing worries to the effects of climate warming, high financial constraints, acute city dweller awareness regarding free access to the city... In its different dimensions, environmental, economic and social, the theme of sustainable development can be regularly found today when the future of urban transport, of persons or of goods, is alluded to. In France, Urban Mobility Plans, reactived by the 1996 Air and Rational Use of Energy Law, attempt to integrate these aims of sustainable development. But the evaluation tools of such policies are still lacking. How can the sustainable character of urban mobility be judged? Moreover, how can the long-term development of this system be undertaken in such a way as to limit environmental damage at an acceptable cost without losing sight of social equity objectives (i.e. reduction or non increase in inequalities)? To bring forward assessment tools and to help fire debate on these questions, we propose to elaborate a series of indicators, which offer overall coherence regarding these three dimensions of urban mobility. We present here a research carried out to verify the possibility and the usefulness of elaborating these sustainable mobility indicators. It is applied to the Lyons conurbation.