Travel

Abstract

These results can be integrated into the calculation of economic speed. Thus, from the standpoint of a car-owner earning three times the minimum wage (24 euros per hour), driving a car by yourself for a trip within Paris, at a private cost of 25 cents per kilometer, corresponds to an economic speed of 96 km/h. With one hour of work, this person can buy a 96 km trip. This result explains why the use of cars in urban areas persists. However, if it is a diesel car, the public cost of which isn’t covered by taxes, this amounts to 6.81 euros per kilometer, which equates to a social cost of 7.06 euros. By analysing this in relation to the hourly wage, we get a socio-economic speed of 3.4 km/h 6 . It is therefore understandable why most big cities seek to reduce or even eliminate diesel cars. There is therefore a huge gap, in urban areas, between the individual perception of economic speed and the collective measure of socio-economic speed. In this case we come back to Ivan Illich's harsh observation on cars. Given the social costs they require, the socio-economic speed of cars in an urban setting, from the community’s point of view, is much lower than the economic speed is for the individual user. It’s worth noting that even for electric cars, the socio-economic speed in urban areas barely exceeds 10 km/h. In general, public policies are therefore focused on reducing the supremacy of cars in cities, regardless how they are powered. Socio-economic speed thus becomes a valuable indicator for collective mobility choices (Crozet 2013). There are indeed other cases where socio-economic speed is much lower than economic speed, such as some high-speed railway projects (LGV, for Lignes ferroviaires à grande vitesse) that would require significant public subsidies for low volumes of traffic. The ticket cost (about 10 cents/km) could end up being 5 times lower than the social cost (50 cents/km). For a person earning twice the minimum wage, while the economic reduce safety costs, but also, in dense areas, of noise and atmospheric pollution. The same applies to all regulations such as vehicle safety inspections or CO² emission thresholds. In the same vein, prioritizing collective transport or active modes in urban areas is another way of pursuing this goal of reducing the environmental impacts of mobilities. But public policies don’t call into question the general trend to increase the economic speed of different modes of transport, and therefore more generally to increase mobility. Given the commitments we made in the Paris Agreement and considering other impacts such as the degradation of biodiversity or the shrinking of available farmland, we will unquestionably have to take far more binding measures that challenge the very idea of a steadily growing economic speed. This could mean heavily taxing kerosene, or implementing congestion charges in major cities or steadily increasing the price of fossil fuels... Yet this simple list of suggestions is enough to show that such a change of course is unlikely in the short term. Socio-economic speed remains largely ignored. For cars, just as for taxis, public transport, TGV trains or airplanes, the current mindset is to do things low-cost, not to lower the economic speed!