Travelling less to travel better!

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

Mobility

For the Mobile Lives Forum, mobility is understood as the process of how individuals travel across distances in order to deploy through time and space the activities that make up their lifestyles. These travel practices are embedded in socio-technical systems, produced by transport and communication industries and techniques, and by normative discourses on these practices, with considerable social, environmental and spatial impacts.

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Teleworking

The remote performance of a salaried activity outside of the company’s premises, at home or in a third place during normal working hours and requiring access to telecommunication tools.

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Lockdown

The lockdown measures implemented throughout 2020 in the context of the Covid-19 crisis, while varying from one country to the next, implied a major restriction on people’s freedom of movement for a given period. Presented as a solution to the spread of the virus, the lockdown impacted local, interregional and international travel. By transforming the spatial and temporal dimensions of people’s lifestyles, the lockdown accelerated a whole series of pre-existing trends, such as the rise of teleworking and teleshopping and the increase in walking and cycling, while also interrupting of long-distance mobility. The ambivalent experiences of the lockdown pave the way for a possible transformation of lifestyles in the future.

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