Connecting the Digital and the Ecological Transitions

Carpooling and car sharing can reduce the environmental impact and cost of travel, the annual savings for an individual ranging from a few hundred to over 3,000€.

However, despite innovations brought by new actors, these practices continue to make little headway in the short-distance segment and are also struggling to break into sparsely populated areas (rural areas, outer suburbs, small cities, etc.). User access to a mix of transport solutions, including collective transport, and the efficiency of collaborative mobility platforms requiring a large number of users, are recurrent and particularly strong issues in these areas.

Until recently, public authorities have poorly integrated these new actors into their mobility policies. However, they have a vital role in featuring the articulation between collaborative mobility and other modes of transport.

A public strategy for collaborative and sustainable mobility could be based on six pillars: communication support; tax clarification; road system planning; experimentation; better governance; public funding. These pillars should be mobilized to varying degrees based on the territory types, the last pillar proving to be quite important in sparsely populated areas.