Bike in front of a tram at Place de la Comédie in Bordeaux -

Mickaël Bosredon / 20 Minutes

  • An Ifop opinion study on the habits adopted by the inhabitants of Bordeaux Métropole during the health crisis was presented on Tuesday.

  • 22% of commuters, who make daily trips, have changed their habits in connection with the Covid-19.

  • Among them, half want to perpetuate their new habits.

    An opportunity to promote soft modes of travel for the Bordeaux metropolis.

A bad for a good ?

The Covid-19 epidemic and the restrictions taken to control it have changed the travel habits of the French.

Some have turned to clean mobility that public policies want to encourage.

In order to better understand these new behaviors, the metropolis of Bordeaux commissioned an opinion study from Ifop entitled "the mobility of the inhabitants of Bordeaux metropolis at the time of the Covid-19" (

see box

), of which the main lines were returned on Tuesday.

Unsurprisingly, in the third most congested city in France, car use has declined since the Covid crisis.

It was the usual mode of travel for 57% of the inhabitants according to the last survey dating back to October 2018 and it is that of 50% of them, in February 2021. Cycling and walking have increased by 2% each.

The Metropolis would like to take advantage of this momentum to perpetuate “good habits”, linked to the use of soft transport.

"If we reduce car traffic in the city by 10%, we improve the quality of traffic by 50%", underlines the president of the metropolis Alain Anziani (PS), to show the importance of the issue.

10% of commuters ready to make a lasting change

According to the Ifop study, the health crisis has caused a change in practice for 22% of commuters (users who travel daily).

"And half of them (48%) would be ready to perpetuate this change of habit, especially those who have chosen public transport and walking", underlines François Kraus, director of the Politics and News pole at the 'Ifop.

Thus, we can estimate that the pandemic will have a lasting effect on around 10% of commuters, a significant figure when we know the difficulty of changing well-established behaviors on a collective scale.

64% of working people and students who travel daily (or commuters, who represent 57% of the sample) want to change to soft mobility and 28% to public transport.

We also note that a third could also switch to motor vehicles, showing that the car is still a clearly preferred mode of travel.

How to convince them to switch to the bicycle or the tram?

It appears that it is often the users of public transport who switch to cycling.

And to help them take the plunge, the survey shows that more tracks need to be developed and made safe.

Men are overrepresented among Bordeaux cyclists and ifop explains this phenomenon by a fear of verbal and physical attacks from women when traveling on two wheels.

Commuters who use the car and who could switch to public transport are asking for more security in trains, shorter waiting times (they were reduced due to the curfew) and better interconnections.

If the Bordeaux tram network is one of the most dynamic in France and the share of cycling is increasing, the car remains essential for many inhabitants of the Metropolis.

Almost one in two (45%) uses at least one motor vehicle every day in the metropolis, with strong disparities between the inhabitants of Bordeaux and those of the most remote municipalities.

The health crisis could have been a trigger for new virtuous mobilities and the Metropolis does not want to miss the opportunity to encourage them to prepare the “world after”.

Bordeaux

Bordeaux: Tramway, cable car, Rue Bordelaise… We are starting to see more clearly on certain hot issues

Bordeaux

Bordeaux: Bouygues will finish work on the Simone Veil bridge for delivery in 2024

Methodology

An opinion poll on "the mobility of inhabitants of Bordeaux metropolis at the time of Covid-19" was conducted by Ifop from February 9 to 15, on a representative sample of 1,500 people living in the 28 municipalities of the 'agglomeration. 

  • Coronavirus

  • Public transport

  • Aquitaine

  • Bike

  • Mobility

  • Covid 19