Speaker
Description
The growing protests against road projects in France reflect a changing attitude to mobility and speed. The high-profile case of the Toulouse-Castres A69 is just one example of the fifty or so local protests that have now come together under the banner of the national coalition "La Déroute des Routes".
As far as transport policy is concerned, these changes in perspective remain largely ignored. Socio-economic assessments of projects continue to place a significant monetary value on the benefits of speed, often to the detriment of environmental impacts.
In the most recent report (2018) on the reduction of the permitted speed to 110 km/h on motorways, the time lost represents a cost of €1,145 million to society. The environmental benefits (less fuel, pollution and CO2) are estimated at only €474 million . The balance is clearly in favour of maintaining the 130 km/h speed limit. In the opposite direction, the same logic applies to acceleration projects such as the western bypass of Rouen. The benefits in terms of time savings (€1,352 million) outweigh all other considerations and "theoretically" validate the merits of the project . The legitimacy of a transport infrastructure is therefore based almost entirely on the supposed time savings for the population. This is a real myth, a sleight of hand based on the magical transformation of speed into time savings .
In the long run, fast transport does not save time, but space. People use speed gains to travel further, not to "save time" . So, strictly speaking, neither time nor money is saved. The concept of the value of time used by economists, and the assumptions that underlie it, are thus at the heart of the controversies surrounding the benefits of high-speed transport infrastructure .
This paper attempts to deconstruct the monetary value attached to the supposed time savings made possible by transport. It will show that it is no longer 'scientifically' possible today, in the industrialised countries, to promote new transport infrastructures in the name of the 'general interest' (general appeal?) of time savings. This paper is based on the results of exploratory research on the slowing down of travel speeds and lifestyles , funded by ADEME (the public agency responsible for developing ecological transition policies in France), and on more than a year's work for the General Inspectorate for the Environment and Sustainable Development (the policy monitoring department of the Ministry for Ecological Transition) to update the values of time in France.
Biography
I’m a research officer at the French Ministry for Ecological Transition. Faced with the imperatives of ‘ecological bifurcation’, I’m interested in the paces of life and the temporalities of everyday mobility (speeds, timetables, frequencies, sequences of journeys).
I approach the paces of life and the temporalities of mobility by examining the issues at stake: political, such as ‘temporal prosperity’ and the quality of life in the city; social, such as social justice in the face of the desynchronisation and acceleration of paces of life; environmental, by studying the effects of gains in accessibility, time savings and associated energy consumption.
