1500 participants at the World Conference on Transport Research in Toulouse

More than 1500 participants gathered for four days in the heart of a vibrant forum for the exchange of ideas among scientists, industry representatives, policymakers, and educators from around the world. Among them, five researchers from TSE presented their work. Here are their impressions of the event and the research they shared there.

In his view, “Europe is absent from the tech sector and increasingly so from biotech.” Insufficient investment, poor sectoral allocation, and overly political governance: the frontiers of AI, autonomous vehicles, and smart supply chains are shifting toward the United States and China. 

The transportation sector, in particular, is moving toward a system of taxation on emissions—whether direct or imported. These policies are essential, but Jean Tirole highlights their limitations: “The CBAM aims to prevent carbon leakage, but it does not protect European exporters and is complicated to implement.” Jean Tirole asserts that European values, by definition, entail collective choices whose demands we must recognize and whose costs we must bear.

The Foundation also hosts the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST), whose mission is to foster dialogue across disciplines. Faced with the major challenges of transportation—decarbonization, artificial intelligence, new forms of mobility, and infrastructure resilience—no single discipline can, on its own, provide all the answers. The deeply interdisciplinary nature of the WCTR, which brings together scientific communities with complementary expertise—notably engineers and economists—thus fully reflects this second mission of the Foundation. 

As for automobiles, the major challenge remains congestion. The ideal solution would be usage-based pricing; traditional congestion tolls like London’s could eventually give way to GPS-based systems, enabling dynamic pricing similar to the evolving model in Singapore. The question remains regarding the political acceptability and the impact of such taxes on inequality. These two issues must be addressed separately. 

Recent studies show that the effect on inequality is limited: the impact of these urban tolls depends less on household income than on their actual dependence on cars. In the case of London, the effect was even very positive for low-income households, which benefited from reduced congestion on untaxed peripheral roads. As for political acceptability, these measures always create both winners and losers—though there is actually a majority of winners if the tax revenue is redistributed to households. Ultimately, however, the ideal approach is to reinvest revenue from road tolls to increase the density and modernize public transportation services. 

Isis spoke at the session titled “Can We Save the Climate Without Data and the Economy?” The discussion focused on what kind of transportation data exists and how to use it to understand travel patterns and predict the impact of public policies. What connections exist between medium-sized cities and metropolitan areas, and what does this tell us about modal shift? What does experimental economics teach us about mobility pricing strategies aimed at promoting this modal shift? 

On this topic, Isis shared her experience using survey data to estimate models predicting the impact of congestion pricing on individuals and on traffic congestion. She also discussed the possibilities opened up by digital data, such as GPS traces, which fall under the category of so-called “floating mobility data.”