Of all the daily activities, it is leisure that generates the greatest distances of travel in the region, and more than 70% of them are made by car. The end of the winter sports season is an opportunity to question travel management to mountain stations. Between environmental crisis and congestion of transport infrastructure, it is necessary to ask whether it is necessary that there is no more snow before giving up skiing. Should we spend the day in the traffic jams before considering another way to go to the station? Should we more widely reconsider our relationship to leisure, bastion of individual freedom?
Among the paradoxes that complicate these issues, we observe that road networks to stations are overloaded during weekends, while low and medium mountain stations disappear due to lack of snow and attendance. The flows of car continues to concentrate towards the same destinations, always more distant, always higher. In French -speaking Switzerland, the Jura and the Pre -Alps are struggling to be attractive in front of the high mountains, both for walks and summer hikes and for winter sports.
The choice of movement mode also seems to be overdeterous. We observe that age, or the presence of children in the household, are more decisive than the income level to explain mobility behavior. Not that the portfolio has no dissuasive role in the use of public transport, but the explanation seems to be elsewhere. Indeed, mountain users rejuvenate in winter – when the hike gives way to skiing – and stations populate children. The consequence is a public transport offer unsuitable in winter to families responsible for business and children, and constraints at slow speeds by relief. Public transport is therefore not very competitive in the face of the flexibility of the car.
In addition, transport structures are struggling to adapt. They have never taken the turn of the massive democratization of winter sports by resting on sometimes century -old networks, and must now make up for this delay while anticipating the turn imposed by climate disruption, which rebels both the cards of the sustainability of transport and the inevitable transformation of leisure in the mountains.
While winter sports were for decades reserved for premises either for premises or at the wealthy, the increase in the Swiss population, the development of roads as well as the popularization of mountain activities have exacerbated the challenges of access to these leisure activities threatened by increasing temperatures. What to do then? Should winter sports become exclusive? Should they last at all costs? Should we accept that they disappear? What to do next?
These questions remain unanswered, as long as no strong decision is made to stem a system that runs to its loss. Constraining the population is never appreciated, and forcing leisure activities is all the more tense. However, solutions must emerge. “Train+package” price bouquets already exist, for example, but they are often too little visible or intuitive and do not resolve the questions of the family practicality deficit, while timid attempts to diversify activities appear without restoring the attractiveness of bass and medium mountains.
The challenge is therefore not to eliminate from the landscape the car necessary for families and rural people, or to close all stations by condemning a regional economy, but to move people who can in public transport and to initiate a proactive policy of diversification of the recreational economy of the mountain. For this, the public authorities must have the courage to experiment, to test and may even be to fail, before no choice is no longer possible and that we cry out of our leisure.
