In the current climate, defining priorities between large transportation projects, which include high speed lines, is not favourable to the improvement of rail access in urban peripheries. Using the example of the Pyrénées-Orientales, department located in the Southern tip of France bordering Spain, this essay aims at highlighting the special interest in rail service for urbain peripheries. Due to uncertainties about the realisation of the Montpellier-Perpignan high speed section and about the night train service - that might be an alternative to high-speed trains to access the capital - the department experience the deterioration of its intercity railway access for medium and long distance trains. Beyond considerations specific to the rail system, the example of the Pyrénées-Orientales enables us to identify a set of frames of reference used to defend the rail service and learn about the representations the local stakeholders have concerning it and the effects they impute upon it.
The European railway policy continues to promote competitiveness and attractiveness through competition. Italy is a specific case as being the only European country to organize an “open-access” head-off competition on its all high-speed rail (HSR) network between the incumbent public operator and a totally private newcomer. This article examines the reasons why this competition is a major market initiative and highlights the actors' strategies and the early outcomes. Italy reveals that the open access competition in the HSR market is technically feasible and socially desirable on a large scale, mainly because of the positive consequences for passengers. The analysis of the success factors shows the importance of the level of access charges in widening the profitable field of entry. The large public funding of the high-speed network, but also the strategy of the new entrant and the incumbent, play an important part in these results. The pluralities of levers involved, but also their particularity, question their transferability. The results available do not yet give a definitive and indisputable answer to the question of whether or not HSR operators reach a long term economic equilibrium in an open access competition.
The paper aims to shed light on the determinants of choice for new forms of mobility or new modes of transport. More precisely, we focus on transport mode choice between coach and carpooling for long-distance trips in France. To do so, we perform a discrete choice experiment survey in which attributes reflecting elements of comfort and flexibility are introduced in addition to the conventional price and time attributes. The survey conducted among a small number of individuals who had already experienced coach and/or carpooling made it possible to collect 405 observations of choice. These data make it possible to infer values of time for the users of the modes by estimating econometric models. These values of time are significantly different since the carpoolers’ value of time appears at least twice as much as that of the coach users. Thus, at the sample average point, an individual's willingness to pay to save one hour on travel time is €4.27 per hour for coach users compared to €10.53 per hour for carpool users or €6.23 per hour compared to €15.28 per hour respectively depending on the functional form chosen for the conditional indirect utility.
The French National Carbon Strategy (SNBC) aims at reducing the CO2 emissions of the transport sector by 30% in 2030, when compared with 2013, and by 70% in 2050. This paper analyses the room for manoeuvre regarding daily mobility in order to contribute to this aim. The framework is a “reasonable” world, where local governments might bring pressure on residential location choices of new anticipated populations on the one hand, and mobility choices by favoring some travel modes on the other hand. In this reasonable world, policies such as moving house for existing population or restraining daily mobility intensity, whether destinations or out-of-home tours, are deliberately denied. Three contrasted areas are studied: two peri-urban areas around Lyon and Strasbourg on the one hand, one densely populated area, Lyon’s conurbation, on the other hand. We show that scenarios combining control of vehicle unit emissions and new travel mode behaviors based on ridesharing and bike use including e-bike would arrive at SNBC targets. All levers don’t have the same impact on emission reduction: various alternatives of the new population housing location have low stake regarding emissions from now to 2050. Moreover the social and political cost of “guiding” the new population residential location choices limits the relevance of such a policy.