Safe, sustainable… but depoliticized and uneven – A critical view of urban transport policies in France

Abstract

This article offers a critical view of the contemporary urban policies undertaken in France in the name of safe, sustainable urban transport strategies. It seeks to show how a spatially and socially selective ordering is under way in French transport planning and policies by presenting an overview of research and empirical results dealing with the narratives and the implementation of these policies. Firstly, urban transport policies were analysed as narratives. Stressing users' individual responsibility and their capacity to adopt economically rational behaviours, and conveying moral injunctions for them to adopt the 'right', safe, healthy, sustainable mobility behaviours, a depoliticized framing of issues characterizes these public policies. Referring to theoretical frameworks related to neoliberalisation as a rationality, our hypothesis is that a neoliberal rationality feeds these policies by ignoring a certain number of macrosocial determinants. Moreover, the use of morality works as a powerful democratic anaesthetic that dissolves any objection. Secondly, we studied how these policies, legitimated by 'noble causes' and depoliticized, influence the organization of traffic in the city, and to what extent they lead to a selective and uneven treatment of urban spaces. While sustainable mobility is frequently presented as a major objective in the field of urban planning for transport and travel, contemporary policies do not seek to reduce polluting modes of travel overall. They rather seek to direct them onto bypass road infrastructures to reduce their negative impacts on the city's main sites. 'Sustainable' policies oppose the car only in certain spaces and for certain uses. With reference to theoretical frameworks related to the entrepreneurial mutation of urban policies, our interpretation is that these policies are part of urban marketing strategies of cities engaged in inter-urban competition processes. These policies lead to an increase in the value and attractiveness of strategic areas of the city, and tend to displace problems (cars, noise, pollution…, and deprived populations) to other parts of the urban territory.

Smart cycling futures: Charting a new terrain and moving towards a research agenda

“…This in particular concerns the innovations that encourage people to save their carbon emissions and calories or contribute their data to help targeted investment in their cities as large infrastructural projects are supposedly too expensive to accomplish. Such findings resonate with existing research relating discourses on cycling and transport in general to neoliberalism (see Schwanen et al, 2011;Reigner and Brenac, 2019;Spinney, 2016). However, for a large share of innovations in our dataset it is the individual who is appealed to, rather than an urban authority, so the focus on individual contribution is to be expected.…”

Maladaptive Planning and the Pro-Innovation Bias: Considering the Case of Automated Vehicles

“…The planning and planning-related literature presents a variety of examples where capital accumulation processes have employed novel and highly ingenuous means to act against the public interest while depoliticizing institutions and downgrading democracy. This body of literature presents multiple theorizations and examples from both urban planning and land use policy (e.g., [38,[62][63][64][65]) and transport planning (e.g., [66,67]). Reigner and Brenac [66] alert their readers to a particularly ingenuous, and subtle, anti-democratic trend to be observed today in transport planning: the tendency to permeate transport policies with moralistic claims (e.g., "to move without creating pollution" or "to move but without harm").…”

“…This body of literature presents multiple theorizations and examples from both urban planning and land use policy (e.g., [38,[62][63][64][65]) and transport planning (e.g., [66,67]). Reigner and Brenac [66] alert their readers to a particularly ingenuous, and subtle, anti-democratic trend to be observed today in transport planning: the tendency to permeate transport policies with moralistic claims (e.g., "to move without creating pollution" or "to move but without harm"). This apparently benign trend is problematic because policies implemented under such moralistic banners are very difficult to contest, even when they are creating significant problems in other, or even the same, moral terms.…”

The Effects of Fare-Free Public Transport: A Lesson from Frýdek-Místek (Czechia)

“…Based on questionable benefits of the FFPT towards supporting the sustainable development in terms of the car-use reduction, for which neglecting the issues of politically embodied transport poverty and inequality is typical [10,54,55], new rationale for FFPT adoption emerged recently. This new rationale understands FFPT not as a tool of the sustainable development to reduce negative externalities of excessive use of cars, but as an urban welfare policy which is opening our urbanities equally to everyone, no matter their income, race, gender, ethnicity, social status, place of residence, or car possession [16,25,33,41,43].…”