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A recent decree published in the Official Journal will oblige “digital travel assistance services” such as Waze, Google Maps and other guidance applications to encourage their users to favor soft mobility and offer less energy-consuming routes.
Messages such as “for short journeys, prefer walking or cycling”, “consider carpooling”, “going from 130 to 110 km/h on the motorway reduces your fuel consumption by 20%” Where “on a daily basis, take public transport”not including the hashtag #MoveLessPollute, should appear on guidance applications or digital travel assistance services. This concerns Waze, Google Maps, Apple Plans, Citymapper, Mappy… as well as road navigation systems embedded in vehicles.
A recent decree published in the Official Journal will oblige digital travel assistance services to encourage their users to favor soft mobility and offer less energy-consuming routes. © Waze
Decree No. 2022-1119 of August 3, 2022 relating to digital travel assistance services published in Official Journal No. 1080 of August 5, 2022 “aims to support, on the one hand, the transition of uses towards carbon-free mobility, by acting in particular on digital travel assistance services, and, on the other hand, to regulate the negative externalities of the use of these digital services”.
Concretely, the government requires that digital players whose vocation is primarily to guide motorists offer more virtuous alternatives to the use of the car, but not only.
© Erick Fontaine / Lesnumériques
In addition to the awareness messages mentioned above, the result of planning a trip — whatever the mode of transport — should give rise to the display of the pollution generated (CO2 emission rate, PM10 particles, oxide nitrogen…). Thus, applications offering multimodal transport such as Citymapper, Bonjour RATP, Google Maps, etc. will have to put “forward the proposals for itineraries with the lowest impact in terms of greenhouse gas emissions”.
When a trip will be made by motorized vehicle on tracks “whose maximum authorized speed is greater than or equal to 110 km/h”the applications will offer “an alternative route taking into account a reduction in the maximum speed of 20 km/h on the portions concerned”.
In addition, the government decided that “the digital travel assistance services will endeavor to offer the user a route avoiding the massive use of secondary roads not intended for intensive traffic, in particular by ensuring that the remaining journey time is reduced by at least 10% compared to the route maximizing the use of non-secondary roads”. A priori, therefore, Waze will no longer take you through small roads to avoid traffic jams.
ZFE, carpooling and bicycle zones displayed
Another change is the obligation to report low emission zones (ZFE) with traffic restrictions according to the Crit’Air sticker. Note that Waze already integrates it when it comes to establishing a route. In the same way, the integrated navigation tools of car manufacturers such as Fiat or BMW are experimenting with the forced switch to electric motorization (on PHEV) when the ZFE is recognized on the route.
Multimodal transport applications should “by December 1, 2022 at the latest, ensure that all data relating to the cycling network, carpooling areas and parking made available on the national access point are integrated” — which is available on the site transports.gouv.fr.
Finally, these same actors will have to “by December 1, 2023 at the latest, ensure that all data on vehicle sharing services, cycles, light mopeds, personal transport vehicles or on foot travel made available at the point of arrival is integrated. ‘national access’.
All these provisions, some of which will come into force soon, were voted in the framework of the Climate law (article 122), a year ago, in August 2021. Beyond the communication and pedagogy operation, it It cannot be ruled out that the massive abuse of infantilizing messages will end up producing the opposite effect on motorists who are systematically caricatured.