Knowing how to travel is useful, but travelling isn’t necessarily useful

Clearly, knowing how to locate yourself in space (especially in unknown territories), how to use public transport or even how to drive are skills that make life easier and make you more independent and confident. Sociologists such as Vincent Kaufmann at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne have shown that having various mobility experiences (traveling, moving homes, etc.) enables people to acquire such skills, to adapt easily to an unfamiliar environment and especially to manage increasingly intense work-related journeys.

Obviously, having a driver’s license gives you the autonomy to organize your daily life: going shopping, not relying on another family member to get around, accompanying children or dependent parents, going to work, etc. However, can we still say that knowing how to travel helps you find a job? Unfortunately, we just don’t know. The success of policies aimed at facilitating mobility to find jobs is not being monitored by government or researchers: instead, it is the act of passing the driving test itself, rather than the effect this permit has on its recipient’s subsequent job search that is being studied. Indeed, it is assumed that this effect must necessarily be positive. However, this assumption perversely helps to normalize the view that an entire region or even the whole country are one large pool of jobs into which everyone can dip without worrying about distances. This encourages significant daily mobility between home and work, and even compels people to unwillingly uproot and move to a different location. As a result, over time, the French (and their employers) have internalized and accepted the injunction that they must “travel to succeed.”

This is a problem in more ways than one.

Mobility is tiring

Firstly, because those who travel the most for work suffer the consequences: fatigue, stress, weakening of social and family ties. These effects are well documented by researchers such as Stephanie Vincent at the LAET lab (Laboratoire d’Aménagement et d’Economie des Transports) and Emmanuel Ravalet at the University of Lausanne[^1]. Secondly, because leading a “mobile life” isn’t necessarily in line with French people’s aspirations: even though we travel more and more (10 hours per week on average in France including 4 hours just for work)[^2], eight in ten people want to slow down, almost one in two people want to live and work in greater proximity, at the scale of their neighborhood[^3], and the rest don’t want to travel more than thirty minutes.

Travelling less to reduce CO2 emissions

Beyond corresponding more faithfully to the aspirations of a majority of French people, a policy change would have the significant benefit of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which conventional transport policies fail to achieve[^4]: responsible for 30% of national emissions, transport is the largest CO2 emitter in France and is still not under control. Given the climate emergency, it would be common-sense to stop encouraging unbridled mobility, and in particular work-related trips which account for 45% of weekly distances travelled by French people. Especially since we know that the more we travel for work, the more we travel in other areas of life as well (social activities, sport and leisure, etc.).[^5]

Adapting territories to our lifestyles, not the other way around

Finally, in today's society, knowing how to travel is important, but having the opportunity to travel well - that is to have chosen and pleasant mobility practices that rely more on low-polluting modes of transport - is better.
The goal is to give French people the means to be mobile all the while limiting their CO2 emissions (use of public transport, active modes or carpooling), but also to be more immobile when they desire it (more local lifestyles, working close to home, teleworking, etc.). If the lockdown allowed French people to experiment with alternative rhythms of life[6] and to change their relationship to travel, travelling well is clearly only possible if we realize that it’s the territories that must adapt to our desired and sustainable lifestyles and not the other way around. Public policies must stop making mobility and car use the main variable to accommodate other activities - especially work - in a territory that is deemed unchangeable.

At a time when Covid has made us rethink the localization of strategic jobs, this is an unexpected opportunity to reconsider land use planning and the relationship between employment pools and labor pools, to facilitate access to services close to home and to secure active and shared modes. We can start by commuting less to work, whether by increasing the use of telework or the possibility of exchanging jobs as proposed by JobiLX, and by reviewing the goals of mobility assistance policies so that they better match people’s aspirations.

[^1]: Research Job Mob, Forum Vies Mobiles, 2014. [^2]: National survey on mobility and lifestyles, Obsoco, 2020. [^3]: Aspirations for mobility and lifestyles, Forum Vies Mobiles, Obsoco, 2016. [^4]: Reducing the carbon footprint of mobility: what are the right policies for France?, Forum Vies Mobiles, 2020 [^5]: National survey on mobility and lifestyles, Obsoco, 2020. [^6]: Survey on the impacts of the lockdown on French people’s mobility and lifestyles, Forum Vies Mobiles, Obsoco, 2020.