Intermodal Policies in Territorial Planning

Special Report: Transportation Policies and Territorial Planning
Interchange Stations in Urban Transit
By Cyprien Richer
English

This work examines the role of the interchange station in 14 PDU (urban travel plans) in conformity with law SRU. This article proposes to look further the way the French AOTU (urban transport organizing authority) think about the interchange station in the context of PDU development. One wonders whether the interchange station, beyond their participation in the “phraseology” of planning procedures, can constitute a new tool for the local public action or not. For that, a “deconstruction” of the PDU speech is carried out to inclu- de/understand if the interchange station incarnate problems of space and intersector integration in procedures which are supposed to implement these stakes.
Concerning the space question, the analysis shows that the interchange station and the intermodality seldom appear in the PDU like vectors of interfaces between the institutions. Following the change of statute and perimeter of the AOTU, the projects of interchange station seem rather to be a tool of identification of the Community territory. At the intersector level, the PDU hardly identify “territorial nodes” which could be the support of the interface between town planning and transport. The PDU rather indicate their intention “to support the urbanization near lines of collective transport” as if the multiple joints of the networks did not have a particular role to play in the structuring of the territory.
With final, the results of this research insist on the fact that, in the spirit of the PDU, the interchange station seem especially associated with construction with an “insular” model of city, while being used sometimes as a filter (via the Park-and-ride), sometimes as increaser accessibility in the center of the agglomeration and at all the scales.

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