Electric vehicles, coaches and walking to reduce the carbon footprint of transport

This is the kind of telescoping that makes public policies difficult to read. Monday, November 4, François Durovray, Minister for Transport, presented with Agnès Pannier-Runacher, Minister for Ecological Transition, France's roadmap to reduce carbon emissions from transport by 2030. This “clean mobility development strategy” requires unwavering determination, both to electrify the vehicle fleet and transport goods by train.

However, on the same day, Antoine Armand, the Minister of Economy and Finance, was in Brussels, trying to convince his European colleagues not to impose sanctions in 2025 on manufacturers who had not sold enough electric cars. It was also on this day that the SNCF chose to confirm the end of Fret SNCF, the historic operator of freight transport by train. The company, unable to repay 5 billion euros in state aid as requested by the European Commission, will be split into two: Hexafret, for freight transport, and Technis for locomotive maintenance. In the process, it will have sold 30% of its traffic and reduced its workforce by 10%.

François Durovray says, despite everything, he is determined to reduce transport emissions, which still represent 32% of the total. Since transition policies have existed, they have not gone backwards. “Technologies allow vehicles to be more efficient, but these advances are offset by an increase in journeys”notes the minister. From July 2023 to July 2024, they still fell by 3.4%, but this is much less than emissions from industry (− 8.7%) or housing (− 5.5%).

Three main axes

“The French travel a thousand billion kilometers each year, 82% of which are by car or motorized two-wheeler”notes the minister, whose clean mobility development strategy will be annexed to the multi-annual energy program and is the subject of a citizen consultation (on the make.org website) for forty days.

This “strategy” has three main axes. First, better plan cities to make them more dense and bring residential areas closer to places of employment, in order to avoid forced mobility. The second consists of “massify uses”, declines François Durovray, “by putting more people in cars through carpooling” or by developing the « cars express », buses with a high level of service, with reserved lanes, easier and cheaper to deploy than trams, trains or metros. He will present a national plan on this subject at the beginning of 2025. He also maintains the objective of doubling rail transport, a promise of former Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne, but postpones the strategy to achieve this to a later financing conference. On the goods transport side, the government will support the electrification of the truck fleet and wants to develop freight and river transport, which is lagging behind. Without specifying how…

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