LOpinion is a big consumer of themes that are as sudden as they are ephemeral. Yesterday, it was planetary overpopulation responsible for the aggravation of the environmental crisis, which took us back fifty years, when the demographer and economist Alfred Sauvy (1898-1990) or the first environmentalist presidential candidate of 1974 René Dumont (1904-2001) denounced the revival of demographic Malthusianism instead of focusing on raising global food production.
In 2022, it is President Macron, in the course of an interview on YouTube, who wants to promote a Regional Express Network (RER) in ten French cities to fight against car traffic jams and polluting mobility. And the regional presidents, like the mayors of the big French cities, hasten to participate in this unforeseen craze, to already wonder who, from the State or the local authorities, will finance these pharaonic investments, before question their realism.
Because the RER does not refer only to the urban planning of the 1960s, when in 1965 the master plan of Paul Delouvrier (1914-1995) of the Paris region programmed a radial network of fast trains uniting, from west to east and from north to the south, the new towns, but to a dense, extended agglomeration, already very populated at the time (more than 8 million inhabitants, nearly 11 million today).
Political runaways
The parameters of urban mobility have however been upset: feminization of employment, loosening of activities and housing, transformations of lifestyles, give less importance and regularity to commuting between residence and work, and promote tangential journeys, from suburb to suburb, more than outlying-centre movements, served by the RER.
Nevertheless: the demographic mass remains over significant distances, justifying regular and fast train traffic, with sufficiently spaced stations. We are far from the mark with the regional metropolises: three lines, 300 kilometers of tracks, fifty-four stations or halts… for 38,000 passengers/day, announces Bordeaux Métropole (South West, November 28), or if we calculate some 700 daily users on average per stop! Enough to ruin any public transport manager, or condemn travelers to long waits on desperately empty platforms for much of the day.
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