They spend a lot of time there without necessarily thinking about it. How do French city dwellers view their daily means of transport, with climate change in the background? This is the question that a Harris Interactive study attempts to answer for Liquid air*, entitled “Urban residents and their relationship to mobility”, which we are revealing today.
First lesson (rather reassuring): “68% of urban residents are already concerned about the environmental impact of their daily travel,” attests Jean-Daniel Levy, deputy director of Harris Interactive and author of the study. An awareness that is logically present en masse among the youngest (78% of those aged 24 – 49), less among the oldest (40% of those aged 50 and over). On the other hand, the same proportion of city dwellers believe that fossil fuels contribute to global warming, are bad for their health and are very noisy.
Difficult to reduce car space
Consequence of these two ideas: two thirds of people who live in cities plan to change their uses in the future to move towards greener transport. But several obstacles remain to lead them to abandon their individual vehicles and move towards public transport. Firstly because they do not necessarily want to change their habit: 35% do not wish to change their schedules, the number of their journeys or the duration of their journeys. And 59% are not ready to reduce the use of their individual vehicle.
On the other hand, public transport does not necessarily have a good reputation. They are considered too crowded (41% of respondents), not reliable enough (37%), too expensive (36%) or too slow (32%).
More than 7 in 10 know about hydrogen
Who should first make efforts to reduce fossil fuels and CO2 emissions? “Intensive” transport, responds in chorus: 70% cite public transport and home delivery of packages, 64% taxis and VTC. Individual vehicles (theirs, therefore) will come later, they say.
Among the solutions that exist today to decarbonize transport, there is hydrogen. More than 7 out of 10 city dwellers have heard of it, but only 3% have gotten into a vehicle equipped with this technology. And here again, city dwellers believe that the effort will be relevant if it is first made by public transport (74%), delivery people (73%) and taxis/VTC (71%). So, with transport running more on hydrogen, half of those surveyed would be ready to travel more.
Today, “urban citizens are unaware of some of the advantages of decarbonization,” believes Jean-Daniel Lévy. For example, a hydrogen taxi does not make any noise, a real bonus in a city where constant noise volume becomes a problem, but something that is often unknown to the general public.
* Survey carried out online from February 2 to 8, 2024, among 1,013 people representative of residents of urban areas of 100,000 inhabitants or more, aged 18 and over, using the quota method.