In terms of sobriety, it is difficult to do better than the Citiz seat. A very banal townhouse on an equally banal avenue in Strasbourg. Once through the front door, a large (nice) dog welcomes you, ahead of the owner, Jean-Baptiste Schmider. On the wall of his office, the founder of one of the main French car-sharing players has pinned an A4 sheet on which is written the raison d’être of his company: “Citiz aspires to a sober and cooperative society, where individuals share goods and services to allow everyone to move in the respect of the planet and the preservation of resources. »
Citiz is the story of a group of friends who, in the early 2000s, became aware of the constraints of the cost of their car. And decide to do otherwise. “I had a car, but I used it so little that I forgot where I had parked it, says Mr. Schmider. The third time I went to pick her up at the pound, I said to myself: “enough”. » The beginnings were very amateur (a few vehicles, a key cabinet, an on-call telephone), to culminate, two decades later, in 1,700 cars, 60,000 users in 160 French towns, all coordinated by an application developed point by in-house developers.
Taken for nice “fadas” twenty years ago, the adventurers of Citiz are now seen as pioneers in a world and a country where the climate emergency and ecological planning are the order of the day. However, mobility is a major lever for changing the situation in terms of climate impact. This is particularly true in France, where it is the leading source of greenhouse gas emissions, namely 135 million tonnes (excluding international air links) in 2019, or 31% of the total. Cars and vans account for 70% of these 135 million, followed by trucks (23%), planes (domestic flights only, 4%), two-wheelers (2%), boats (1%) and trains (0.3%).
Above all, transport is the only sector to have increased its CO emissions2 compared to 1990. The curve shows a decade of sharp rise until 2000, then a fall for five years, due to the introduction of biofuels, and, finally, stagnation for fifteen years. The driving energies of mobility are oil and fossil fuels for 92%, biofuels for 6% and electricity for 2%, the vast majority consumed by train.
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