Giving up Vehicule Ownership in the City: Digital Mobility and Neighborhood Life

Varia
By Jean-Michel Deleuil, Emmanuelle Barbey, Antonin Sintès
English

The property of a vehicle has a lot of constraints in terms of maintenance, parking and costs. This can cause a bad appreciation of the car as mode of travel. To the point that some people finally choose to drop their car and to change their way of moving and living in the city. Alternatives to the car are multiple in dense cities : those are more or less flexible, efficient, comfortable or expensive, according to the motives, the distances or the needs to travel. Traditional modes of transport, eco-friendly modes, public transports, trains or taxis are not the only alternatives to cars anymore. New systems are coming up : carpool, car sharing, car rental between individuals or mutualisation.These mobility changes modify the relationship to the city and the daily life of families, who are actually looking for a way of improving their quality of life by using new moving practices. Indeed, when the property of an individual car is not felt as a factor of autonomy but an alienation, renouncing allows to rethink the daily life organisation and to invest the urban time and space in an other way… at least in the city centre, where the alternative modes offer is dense enough …

Keywords

  • car
  • mobility
  • carpool
  • car sharing
  • car renting
  • dense city
  • “dévoiturage”
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