Questions to Louis Nègre, president of France’s GART

Louis Nègre is president of GART

European Mobility Expo will be opening in a few weeks’ time; what would you like to say to our visitors?

After a 2020 edition held entirely online, the whole of the public transport and sustainable mobility community will be gathering in Paris: politicians and officers from mobility authorities, operators, manufacturers, service companies, and industry experts. We’re expecting large numbers of people at the exhibition, coming to find out all about the latest innovations and attending the topical talks that we’re organising together with UTP. These will be open to all and free of charge, the idea being to allow everyone to learn more about current issues and achievements in mobility. There’s no shortage of topics to be discussed – not least, the broad policy objectives for transport set out by whoever is President of France for the next term of office. The European dimension will also be a focus of debate: the EU is providing funding for energy transition and transport infrastructures. During the three-day event, we’ll be looking at the various instruments made available by the EU to support local authorities in this respect.

European Mobility Expo will also be an opportunity to highlight the seven proposals made by France’s Transportation Authorities Group (GART) promoting mobility, published ahead of the country’s presidential elections. Can you tell us more about those?

Drafted in consultation with our members, the seven proposals are entirely relevant to the current and future challenges our country is facing. Today, all of us are being impacted on a daily basis by a significant rise in energy costs affecting our purchasing power, and by a climate challenge whose environmental costs are threatening to become ever more irreversible. Building more sustainable mobility is a way of addressing both these concerns. With that in mind, the seven proposals we’ve put forward encompass strategic, environmental, and economic issues. Details of the proposals, and their supporting grounds, can be found on the GART website. One of them is a call for a major financial commitment on the part of national government to promote everyday mobility with fresh investment of €5 billion over the next five years: €3 billion to develop mobility offerings, including active mobility, and €2 billion in support of the conversion of all vehicle fleets to lower-emission alternatives.

Energy transition will feature widely in the programme of talks on the second day of the event. What is GART doing in this respect?

We welcome France’s national low-carbon strategy, and are wholly committed to the EU’s Fit for 55 policy. Local authorities are fully engaged in ‘greening’ their bus and coach fleets, as can be seen from the amount of related investment: €1.2 billion in 2021-2022. The international situation makes this strategy all the more essential.

In its capacity as the national representative of mobility authorities, GART also seeks to identify pragmatic solutions that make sense given the realities of each local situation. For instance, when it comes to ecological transition, we stepped in to adjust the government’s interpretation of how the EU Directive should be transposed, with the result that medium-sized networks (which are not in a position to apply the Directive at an acceptable cost to local authorities) will be exempt during the transition phase.

The fact is that the advent of biofuels will enable us to hasten the end of our dependency on fossil fuels. To achieve this, GART’s position is that during the transition period, BioNGV – natural gas produced by anaerobic digestion rather than fossil fuels – offers an immediately accessible technology, in particular for smaller transport networks.

Unfortunately, contrary to electric and hydrogen-powered vehicles, BioNGV-powered vehicles don’t qualify as very low emission vehicles under existing law. We believe this should change, and have therefore made that one of our seven proposals in support of mobility. Counting BioNGV as very-low-emission energy would make it easier to green fleets. At the exhibition, there’ll be an opportunity to discuss this in detail on the morning of 8 June, which is devoted to energy transition.