Mobility without borders: Geonexio conference urges new approach for interurban travel

The forum pulled together researchers, policymakers and operators to press an agenda around four ways forward: map demand, assemble multimodal packages, secure realistic financing and measure results.

The scale of interurban travel is large. “When you look at the census, it concerns three million people in France and it’s one in ten active workers,” Anne Aguilera, director of LVMT, told the conference.

Typical one-way interurban commutes cluster around 30–40 km and remain overwhelmingly car-based.

That combination of distance and spatial dispersion means any fixes limited to this or that city will be enough to shift behaviour.

Delegates argued that new data tools are essential to start planning differently. Pascal Chambreuil of Orange described how anonymised mobile-network logs and other digital traces create a far richer, dynamic picture of presence and flows than static residential registers.

“These are truly massive datasets,” he said, while noting strict GDPR limits and anonymisation procedures.

Planners can use those flows to size services to actual catchments and their needs, replacing political reflexes that design services around municipal or departmental borders. Brigitte Bariol-Mathais of the Fédération nationale des agences d’urbanisme underlined the governance mismatch that frays service offers at boundaries.

On the service side, the CERM concept, integrated regional express packages of rail cadence, car-express coaches, fast buses, feeders and on-demand links, emerged as a practical blueprint, not to be applied rigidly.

Speakers pointed to Strasbourg’s rail cadence gains as evidence that frequency and reliability unlock modal shift: “When you have four trains per hour to get to Strasbourg, why would you even want to take your car?” asked Franck Leroy, president of the Agence de financement des infrastructures et des transports.

But delegates were equally clear that where densities are low, lower-cost solutions, car-pool corridors, express coach corridors, targeted demand-responsive services, often give more value for money than trying to replicate urban transit models.

Public transport rarely balances its books on interurban corridors; sensible packages therefore need capital and operating support during adoption.

Delegates tabled pragmatic mixes: redirecting a modest share of transport-related receipts, negotiating employer co-financing on workforce corridors, and using national and EU capital instruments for fleet and station upgrades. Leroy used the fiscal imbalance to underscore the scope for reprioritisation.

Political barriers remain the hard constraint. Multiple authorities, differing procurement rules and fragmented fare systems make cross-border and cross-municipal services awkward to run. Instead, services should be offered at basin scale.

Pilots must also be accountable. “It is vital to be able to monitor developments over time to get an assessment and experience feedback,” said Jean Coldefy, Geonexio’s scientific advisor.

Participants insisted that evaluation of ridership, modal shift, emissions and unit costs be baked into funding decisions; only projects that demonstrate measurable impact should be scaled.

France has its own contours, a dense rail legacy, strong regional agencies and large peri-urban belts, but the technical agenda will resonate across the EU: where commuter belts stretch beyond city limits, services must be planned to functional travel patterns, not administrative maps.