Through Mathieu Normand
Published on 7 Feb 21 at 11:06
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For almost a year and the beginning of the health crisis, many Rouen residents have changed their transport. More travel by bicycle, while Rouen’s public transport is less frequented due to a sharp drop in travel, due to teleworking, confinements, curfews or even the closure of leisure and cultural places.
To meet the needs of citizens, and despite the difficult economic situation, the Metropolis strongly wishes to develop its transport offer in the medium term. Details with the vice-president in charge of the issue, Cyrille Moreau.
Soon, traffic sensors on buses
The decline in the use of public transport in Rouen corresponds to a national trend: “Surveys show that 30% of people are afraid to take public transport and, upon exiting covid, seek to structurally modify their mode of travel. We have established in the collective imagination that public transport is a dangerous mode of contamination, but this is not the case. Even if we can dispute the elements, it has been shown that it represents 1% of the places of clusters. “
The impact on public transport has fluctuated according to the measures put in place by the government in recent months. During the first confinement, for example, “travel has almost disappeared,” recalls Cyrille Moreau. “During these periods of confinement, attendance is more generally around 50% of what we have in normal times, against 80% when leaving confinement. “
To adapt to these changes, the transport network tries to adapt in frequency. “We didn’t want to create saturation and clusters, but putting a lot of buses without people taking them is wasting the taxpayer’s money,” says the elected official. In any case, we are always in overcapacity compared to the supply. “
To measure attendance on Saturdays, when transport has been made free, the Metropolis has launched a challenge to ensure that users validate their transport tickets. For now, it is with human counting, the only means of measuring density in buses and trams, but that could change soon.
We are going to experiment with presence sensors to implement attendance indicators on applications. Simple color codes will show whether the buses are heavily occupied before they pass. It will not be cameras, but sensors that allow the density per square meter to be expressed.
Acceleration of projects
These attendance statistics are to be compared with a drop in overall mobility, “which has also been reduced by 10%”, and in which the share of public transport is 12%, according to the vice-president. Cycling, for its part, despite its small modal share of around 1% before the crisis, is the big winner in recent months with an increase in its use of 30%, when the car, for its part, “stabilizes”.
“People who took the buses went more towards cycling or walking. The Metropolis wishes to take advantage of this period of behavior change to accelerate its development projects by working on its networks and user services.
The vice-president does not detail the exact nature of the projects before submitting them to metropolitan elected officials, but explains certain objectives, such as the establishment of secure tracks, separated from cars and pedestrians, and not only “accessible to seasoned ”. The sustainability of the “corona tracks” created during the first deconfinement could take place within this framework.
“We are studying this issue with the mayors of the territory,” indicates Cyrille Moreau. In any case, they will remain as they are as long as the pandemic lasts. These 20 kilometers of tracks remain “a small down payment” compared to the 200 to 300 km of tracks promised during the last elections, and that the Metropolis intends to achieve.
“If we don’t do more, we will regress”
Regarding public transport, the mesh of the network, the quality and frequency of buses will be at the heart of the concerns. One of the next important steps will be to move from a cross network running north to south and east to east, to a “spider web” network. “For that, we will have to work on cross-sections to make travel easier and try to approach the operation of the car with public transport. “
All these projects will have to be launched with a significant drop in revenue linked to the drop in attendance and the shutdown of certain economic activities. “Public transport is financed by the mobility payment, a payroll tax, part of which has been reduced by partial unemployment. “In total, the elected representative assesses the loss of revenue at” around fifteen million euros for the Metropolis, 20 if we include the TCAR [le gestionnaire du réseau de transport rouennais, Ndlr] ».
A situation that the government would not help to deal with. “He gave 23 billion euros to aeronautics and cars, but abandoned public transport. Only RATP and SNCF have obtained aid. We understand a little better why the state has just been condemned as part of the Affair of the Century for its climate action. “
The Metropolis is not disarming, however. For Cyrille Moreau, it’s now or never. “We know that if we don’t do more, we will regress. We must convince the hesitant. “He aims for progress” in the medium term, maximum 18 months “.
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