At the core of city life, work hours set the rhythm of daily activities and movement. We are therefore investigating the possibility of staggering the start of the work day in order to reduce congestion at morning rush hour.
Suggestions typically put forward are based on considerations of a tactical nature : it is companies’ schedules which dictate that workers all commute at the same time. Thus, one proposed solution is to promote flexible work schedules. But our observations call this idea into question : in the Parisian region, flexible work scheduling actually magnifies the number of commuters who arrive at work during rush hour.
This paradoxical observation makes it necessary to change the way we usually think of the rush hour phenomenon. Before trying to solve peak congestions problems, we need to understand why does a worker with flexible work hours commute during rush hour. Our thesis adopted a comprehensive approach and focused on daily scheduling demands. It relied on the results of a survey (3202 respondents) and interviews (29).
The main results of the thesis are available in a short video published by the Mobile Lives Forum.
Biography, career
I’m a research officer at the French Ministry for Ecological Transition. Faced with the imperatives of ‘ecological bifurcation’, I’m interested in the paces of life and the temporalities of everyday mobility (speeds, timetables, frequencies, sequences of journeys).
I approach the paces of life and the temporalities of mobility by examining the issues at stake: political, such as ‘temporal prosperity’ and the quality of life in the city; social, such as social justice in the face of the desynchronisation and acceleration of paces of life; environmental, by studying the effects of gains in accessibility, time savings and associated energy consumption.
My research has two main objectives: The first is more epistemological, seeking to combine methodological (mixed methods) and disciplinary approaches in the human sciences (sociology, geography, economics, philosophy) to understand the relationships between the paces of life, the rhythms of the city and the temporality of travel. The second focuses more on ‘action research’ and helping to design mobility and planning policies. It draws on the work of chrono-urbanism and the concept of Sustimability. By focusing on the temporal dimension of ecological sobriety, it suggests new ways of ‘ecological bifurcation’ in the conduct of public action.