Nacima Baron, the thinker of rail
Audio 02:30
Empty train tracks at Gare de Lyon, Paris (illustrative image).
REUTERS / Gonzalo Fuentes
By: Marina Mielczarek
7 mins
Meeting this week with a Transport thinker.
Since her adolescence, Nacima Baron has been interested in train stations!
But beware, the stations in their XXL dimensions!
Extra large!
This researcher at the Laboratoire Ville Mobilité Transport in Paris studies connections in cities around the world.
In France, the French rail network, the SNCF, has just hired him for a mission: to redesign the stations of tomorrow.
She talks about it with Marina Mielczarek.
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: You are an extraordinary person!
Your head contains the entire map of French railways ...
Nacima Baron:
For me, my passion for trains, but above all for stations, goes through poetry!
The station is a place of passage where we project ourselves.
It is the home of nobody and everyone at the same time.
An extremely timed place and at the same time where you sometimes wait a very long time.
All these paradoxes interest me.
You are now a researcher on urban mobility, therefore a specialist in city life. The station, you say, is the way to escape ...
Me first!
I arrived in Paris by train, on a rainy day, by the way, with the map my mother had bought for me.
We remember these very strong moments when we are a teenager, a young student.
The station is the way to leave one city to go to another.
Until 2025, in parallel to your work in the Station chair at the École des Bridges, you will work for the State and the SNCF by rethinking the stations of tomorrow ...
France, 50 years ago, had twice as many stations as today.
So a large number have closed.
My job is to study ways to avoid these closures.
I travel all over the world to compare our French system to other foreign models.
For example, in Ireland, they are very nostalgic for very small stations.
They preserve them.
The walls are not destroyed and the trains go slowly but ensure the connections.
Italy is also a country you mention. How do you develop a station like the Italians did?
By making it a living space and services.
This improves the security of the station and especially of the station area.
This is how we can share.
A station can house a cultural center, a social center.
In Britain, it may seem anecdotal, but the installation of pianos in stations has helped sociability.
The challenge is to rehabilitate these neighborhoods without increasing the rental price in this area.
And Africa? In your work, you often cite the example of African trains. They don't always have real stations to stop ...
Yes !
Africa is fascinating because many countries in West and East Africa are in transition.
Their railway heritage dates back to colonial times, it should be known and recognized the suffering caused.
Today, their challenge is to make the transition from freight transport to a passenger transport economy.
However, here again, it is necessary to know how to adapt to local specificities.
A station in Senegal will not necessarily look like a station in Côte d'Ivoire.
There may be walls, but not necessarily.
It can be a fleeting gathering place.
Which African countries are well engaged in these transformations?
Senegal, Ivory Coast, but I am also interested in public transport in Chad, Morocco, Gabon.
Never forget that for young people and the general population, traffic for studies and work is a factor of economic success.
My message is as follows: a useful station will be a station where, for example, one can find books, where schoolchildren and people in general can obtain information, see and do different cultural, sporting or other activities.
Building, investing in stations and the train also means preserving the environment?
Obviously!
In Africa, along with the sun, solar energy has enormous potential.
You have to learn to recycle resources and waste.
Let's not forget that a train reduces the number of cars and trucks on the roads.
In cities, motor vehicles pollute more than the rail.
And Africans faced with traffic jams with often recycled cars are particularly exposed to toxic particles, which are bad for health.
You work with the United States, particularly for Washington State. President Biden has decided to revive the country's transport and infrastructure, to innovate in the railroad and American roads. Was it high time?
Yes !
In his day, President Obama had invested in high-speed rail and streetcar.
Biden has a very broad vision: he wants to reconcile the two Americas, that of large rural areas and those of large cities.
But also the rich and the left behind, the poorest.
By the way, is that the core of your work in upstate Washington, DC with a streetcar?
Perfectly, in Washington, I work on a streetcar line on the outskirts, called "Purple Line", "the purple line".
It will link the districts of the East, with a recent immigrant population, very poor, to the North-West, a much richer area.
To ensure that this new line does not drive out any population, we must avoid the explosion in the price of rents.
The second bet is to manage to maintain the small ethnic trade: that the immigrants already installed do not lose either their habitat or their shop.
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