Environmental upheavals 2nd lecture amphitheatre 2 26 March 2pm-4pm

Conference by Julien MILANESI
Traffic forecasts and the imagination behind major transport infrastructures and mobility

Summary
The June 30, 2018 edition of the business newspaper “Les Echos” offers a feature on artificial intelligence and mobility. One of the central issues that these new technologies should address is posed in the opening article: “the doubling of |global| mobility demand by 2050” . Although there are many unknowns related to global warming, resource scarcity, and even social change, which may lead to a nuance in this vision of the future, this forecast is treated as a given, and is not discussed in the rest of the articles. We shall see here that this hypothesis of increased future mobility, although it is now being discussed and partly called into question by recent observations of road traffic, still profoundly structures the forecasts of government departments. As Chateauraynaud and Debaz remind us, “to say the future is, in many situations, to project past series, endowed with an inertial force” (Chateauraynaud and Debaz 2017:, 143), and we will look here for this inertial force in the imaginary of the acceleration of the speed of modern societies that Rosa explores in his work on acceleration (Rosa 2013).

Conference by Aurélien BIGO
Historical perspectives on CO2 emissions from transport in France from 1960 to 2017

Abstract
The presentation will focus on the past evolution of CO2 emissions from transport in France (1960-2017), and on the potential of 5 evolution factors to reach the objective of carbon neutrality by 2050: the evolution of transport demand, modal shift, vehicle occupancy, vehicle energy efficiency, and the carbon intensity of energy (decarbonisation issue). Although the scenarios in the future rely heavily on the last two technological factors, they have proved insufficient in the past to reduce emissions, while the major factor has been transport demand, an issue that has been little mentioned in the public debate. Finally, the historical evolution of this demand for mobility (expressed in kilometres travelled) will be examined from the point of view of travel speed, a key factor given that travel times remain relatively stable over time.