Grandstand. Echoing the New Deal launched by Roosevelt in 1934, the European Union has been developing a Green Deal since the end of 2019 to follow the trajectory of the Paris agreements. The parallel drawn between these two programs deserves to be discussed, however, as the issues have evolved over nearly a century: it is no longer just a matter of reviving growth and job creation through an ambitious policy of new infrastructure , but to transform the very infrastructure of our economy, to make systemic sobriety possible.
From this perspective, each sector has its own challenges. The transport sector is of course strategic: the high emissions it produces call for a fundamental transformation of the sector. To make the transition a success, it is necessary to imagine new public action strategies that take into account the capacities for action of the various stakeholders. This is why we have carried out, in partnership with Ipsos, a survey to better understand the aspirations of the French people regarding low-carbon mobility.
In summary, the survey reveals a clear tension between the wish expressed by a large majority of French people to carry out the carbon conversion of their mobility and the difficulty of taking concrete action: if 91% of French people declare that they would like to be able to reduce the ecological impact of their daily journeys, 73% of those questioned consider it difficult, if not impossible, to do so.
More specifically, 51% of motorists say they would like to be able to do without their car in their daily journeys, but that it is impossible. Finally, public transport is the first sector in which to invest according to respondents (46%).
Transformation of highways
In view of these results, the public and private investment needs appear colossal to achieve systemic sobriety in mobility by focusing on both infrastructure investment and vehicle electrification. These observations call for a renewal of our conception of the New Deal under the double constraint of budgetary and planetary resources.
The retrofit consists of reconditioning a thermal vehicle into an electric vehicle
This is why we are proposing a “Renew Deal”, refusing the tabula rasa with poorly controlled ecological, social and economic consequences and by affirming the urgent need to reinvest what already exists in order to meet the climate challenge. The first two axes of this strategy are the massification of retrofitting and the transformation of motorways into public transport infrastructures.
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