The maritime transport of Corsica profits from a system of public utility since 1976. Beyond its positive effects on quality of the transport supply, this system showed important gaps with the passing years. Among those, its collective cost seems most obvious. The drifts observed cannot be dissociated from the organization imposed on the system. In particular, the concomitant application of monopolistic exploitation and public subsidy supported an economic context carrying perverse effects. It encouraged the principal actors of the system to privilege the search for private income and to be unaware of the preoccupation with productive effectiveness. The recent integration of competing logic in the system seems able to partly correct this type of anomaly. It can contribute to reduce the production cost of the service of transport without necessarily involving a loss of quality. But a more satisfactory organization cannot be obtained only by using this competing impulse. Institutional modifications must also be decided so that the cost of the system of territorial continuity can be controlled.
In Constantine, as elsewhere, the crisis in public transport, the social development of its inhabitants and the need to be mobile lead to the growth in private car ownership and in other forms of transport, both formal and informal, which further aggravate urban traffic problems, mean interminable traffic-jams on a daily basis, which paralyse the economic and social lives of the citizens of Constantine. The application, after the events of 1988, of a new policy, deemed to be too “liberal”, and the consequent emergence of predatory competition from the public sector on the tight urban road network, bring the city close to anarchy and further penalise those living in the outer suburbs, where there are few roads and poor infrastructures. Besides the transports become problematic as soon as we have to move towards another district. The fact that the transport and traffic system is dysfunctional is partly due to the sectorial nature of various decisions, and a further cause is the physico-spatial factor. In Constantine, bottlenecks are generalised. Indeed the city is paralysed by more and more urban traffic and by thousands of transiting vehicles, both light and heavy. Following the progress of the crisis in the urban traffic (different modes), we see the future design of the city of Constantine.
More functional mix within our cities, long-lasting goal of urban planning, could induce more closeness between homes and workplaces of households and thereby shorter car-travel distances. The idea is not new of course but very few studies in France have attempted to measure car-traffic decreases that would occur if households lived in fact closer to their workplaces. One must recognize that the issue is rather awkward and is surrounded by scientific controversies. Some researchers argue that households’ residential choices are no longer motivated by commuting distance minimization and consequently, urban politics seeking to bring households to a location closer to workplaces are useless. Other researchers believe that increasing supply of affordable housing nearby job centers would efficiently help reducing “car dependency” and allow higher accessibility to job market for workers. Using a simulation model, our research aims to measure the car-traffic savings that would potentially induce a decrease in distances separating households’ residential location from their workplaces in the Ile-de-France region. More precisely, we are attempting to answer the following questions: How much car-kilometers would be saved if all households located within x minutes of their workplaces? Is the existing housing supply allows this relocation of all households within x minutes of their workplaces?
The analysis we submit in this article rests on the UITP (International Association of Public Transport) database -“The millennium Cities Database”- which is based on a 100 city urban transport systems data collection. Data concern demography, urban structure, transport networks, mobility, impacts on the environment, etc. The analysis shows the gap between intensive versus extensive profiles of urban transport systems. After which we assess the role of the main variables on the public transport modal share that is both the geographical and the economical conditions on the one hand, both the characteristics and the performances of the transport systems on the other hand. We propose an econometric analysis of the public transport modal share. To conclude, this analysis highlights the key features in favour of the urban public transport use which allows questioning the risk to the “European mobility” to slide along “American mobility”.
We present an application of duration models to data from a contingent valuation survey eliciting willingness-to-pay to avoid a non fatal road accident. This survey was concerned with young French drivers, with different social characteristics and driving behaviour. While some drivers accept to contribute, other people choose to pay nothing. The approach of duration analysis allows treating the problem of zero values as, in the present case, the latter are not assimilated with negative willingness-to-pay and so does not express a negative variation of the respondents' welfare. We analyse the probability of exit from the "zero-risk situation" and detect the principal factors influencing it.
The research aims at the estimation of the relative importance and value for freight shippers of qualitative factors that characterize transport solutions: service frequency, transport time, reliability of delivery, carrier’s flexibility, and safety. A stated preference methodology is applied with a sample of preference orders among hypothetical transport solutions stated by a set of Belgian freight shippers. These solutions are defined by their cost and the above qualitative factors. The econometric technique is the one of conditional logit adapted for handling preference orders. It is applied to the global sample, but also to sub-samples classified according to the transport distance, the goods’ value, etc. This analysis shows that qualitative factors play an important role in the choice of a transport solution, and that their relative importance varies very much according to the categories of firms and transports.