French communes grouped through organising authorities have been assigned responsibility of transport policy by Loi sur l’organisation des transports intérieurs (30th December 1982), which entered into force shortly after the decentralisation reform of the 1980s. They used their new powers to develop underground networks (in Lille, Lyon, Marseilles, Rennes, Toulouse) and modern tramway lines (in Angers, Aubagne, Besaçon, Bordeaux, Dijon, Grenoble, Le Havre, Montpellier, Mulhouse, Nantes, Nice, Orléans, Reims, Rouen). Plans de déplacements urbains, which have been compulsory since 1996 in conurbations of more than one hundred thousand inhabitants, are an opportunity to carry out a first appraisal of these strategies based on the improvement of the public transport offer. These policies, referred to as supply-side policies, do not allow to reach the objective set by Loi sur l’air et l’utilisation rationnelle de l’énergie (13th December 2000) in terms of the reduction of automobile traffic (in order to improve air quality and fight against climate change).
Many French cities then used their Plan de déplacements urbains as a basis for producing multimodal strategies which relied on the interconnection of various transport networks (train, underground, bus), took into account all active means of transport (walking, cycling) and were based on differentiated management for parking (various standards depending on the level of public transport availability, park and ride facilities near underground and tramway stops, pricing). This support for surpassing the sectorial approach of transport was strengthened by the quest for better linkages between urban planning and transport: the return on public investment requires that new underground or tramway lines are above all planned in areas where urbanisation is to be intensified. Similarly, the promotion of a sustainable city relies on better access to public transport. Gradually, Plans de déplacements urbains became an important part of the territorial planning process which also dealt with economic development, the organisation of urbanisation, the valorisation of the environment and of landscapes.
The three case studies presented in this brief look at cities (with a population of 500 000 to 3 million) which have developed innovative and bold strategies for transport management in the past thirty years. All three cities reflect the change from policies aiming at improving public transport offer to policies based on multimodality which build on the links between urban planning and transport. However, the content of the mobility strategies also depends on the territorial planning contexts which are specific to each of the three metropolitan areas. The Lyon conurbation has been government by a communauté urbaine since 1996 and the search for a better coherence in urban planning and transport has essentially relied on an improved linkage between planning documents (InterSCoT, Schéma de Cohérence Territoriale, Plan de Déplacements Urbains and Plan local d’urbanisme intercommunal). The Lyon conurbation benefits from the elaborate set of territorial and sectorial planning systems. However, the weight of Grand Lyon in the metropolitan governance raises issues when it comes to implementing strategies through projects. In Grenoble, the territorial plans which have been produced since the 1970s deal with a vast area (in which several intercommunalités are found) and the strategies have been general rather than specific. Plans de déplacements urbains have a high degree of autonomy and have prefigured a way of organising the conurbation and imagining contract-based solutions (urban planning and transport charters, contrats d’axe) which allow to reconcile points of view at the communal and intercommunal scales. The Geneva cross border conurbation, which sits on two countries, does not exist from an institutional point of view. Local actors have worked on the production of informal frameworks, which deal with territorial planning (Projet d’agglomération du Grand Genève) and mobility strategies. In the latter case, consultation and negotiation are the only possible way to reach shared objectives.