The Evolution of Modeling of Urban Transport in France, 1960–2005

The modelling of intra-urban mobility uses explanatory models developed by experts in transport planning, and is applied to a local territory on behalf of public authorities in charge of all or part of the local transport network. The expansion of French unimodal models (the DAVIS model for roads and the TERESE model for public transport) was part of the development of a dichotomous institutional organization of transport from 1960 to 1990 involving the territorial services of the Ministry of Infrastructure and then the intermunicipal public transport authorities. The latter were belatedly given the role of organizing the whole urban transport system, while the mobilities of city dwellers were shown to be multimodal, as revealed by the success of tram systems. This led at the beginning of the 2000s to the mass adoption of foreign multimodal models in place of the two unimodal models.