Mobility trajectories: A key concept for thinking about and supporting changes in travel practices?

In a context of social concern around the conditions for a transition to more sustainable mobility, this article presents the notion of mobility trajectories. This notion refers to the different practices of daily mobility carried out by an individual during his life and to the way in which these practices are linked and evolve, viewed as a continuum and not as a series of breaks without links to each other. It considers that the different characteristics of an individual’s daily mobility form a system capable of being recomposed over time, and postulates that the evolution of this mobility system obeys an intelligible order whose logics and dynamics of evolution can be represented. In order to explore the contours and potentials of this notion, we offer a work of graphic representation schematizing the evolution of modal choices of individuals throughout their lives and the different factors behind their changes in practices. Using this representation, we show that the notion of mobility trajectories enriches the understanding of changes in mobility practices over the short time of the test of a new mode of travel, but also on the scale of the biographical trajectory of individuals.