In France, adopted actions in the name of the protection of the environment prioritize more interdictions and do not enough appeal to innovation. Low emissions zones have been instituted in several big cities and the circulation of vehicles which are not complying with some criteria have been forbidden. The sale of vehicles with thermal engines will be prohibited from 2035. At last, homes which need energy consumption above some levels will be impeached to be rented.

But the putting into application of these measures will arouse strong oppositions and it is not sure that they can be maintained. Atop of that, their effect on the reduction of the greenhouse gas emissions will be very slow because the renewal of the number of cars as of the number of homes to renovate will take decades. The adoption of innovative solutions in the sectors of urban mobility and goods transportation could bring significant results much more quickly along with getting a stronger support of the concerned population and enterprises.

The first example is about traffic in the big cities. The current strategy, not only in Paris, consists, through the reduction of the surfaces dedicated to vehicles, in dissuading users and encouraging them to take other transportation modes. But the digitalization of the society has leaded to increase the sales through internet and so to the augmentation of the deliveries, the traffic jams and all the kinds of pollutions which are resulting from it. The generalization of electric mobility will not solve the problem because the substitution will be very slow and the pollution will gather into the atmosphere. In Paris, where this policy has been put in place, to the opposite of the announced objectives, the air quality has continued to deteriorate. We could add that the lost time due to the traffic blockings has a cost.

Yet a major innovation is available: the instauration of a connected signalization system allowing to optimizing the red lights functioning and to increasing the traffic fluidity. At the origin, they had been invented in order to allow vehicles to intersecting themselves and pedestrians to crossing quite safely. But their functioning mode takes into account neither the amplitude of the traffic at a given time nor the presence or not of pedestrians or of vehicles at the crossroads. Then, to stay stopped when no pedestrian is approaching to cross or when no car is at the crossroads constitutes a pollution, an energy consumption source and a lost of time when the vehicles on the street are staying when the way is open.

We live now in a connected society, with, every day, the put at people and enterprises disposal of objects allowing them to measure and so to optimize their consumption behaviors, thanks to their mobile phone and to protect their health with bracelets. The used techniques take profit from the progress realized thanks to artificial intelligence. It is quite possible and low costly to apply these techniques to signalization systems in urban areas in order to optimize the red lights working.

The light will remain green in the absence of pedestrians and when no vehicle will be there to cross the way. The “red-green timing” will be programmed during the day according to the traffic previous measures and adjusted in order to promote circulation fluidity. Each red light will be so equipped with captors and connected to a software which, in real time, will adjust its working. Costs are low. Local authorities will have identified the main traffic jams points and will order the installation of the necessary equipment. Everyone will be a winner thanks to saved time, to the reduction of the energy consumptions and to the improvement of the air quality, without that the users safety is affected. The red lights will progressively function as robots.

Merchandises and raw materials transportation has known these last decades two major innovations, natural gas liquefaction which has allowed to supplying the countries which were separated from the fields by oceans and the development of containers. In the first case, the connection to the existing networks did not generate special investments. To the opposite, containers were much more difficult to transport on the rail tracks and have contributed to make the merchandises transportation swinging to the roads. Rail transport market share is so reducing year after year and represents today only 8% of the traffic, which causes a saturation of the roads network and their degradation to which it must be remedied with costly works, along with a growing pollution coming from the particles emitted by the truck engines and from greenhouse gas emissions.

Travel has been revolutionized in France by the High-Speed-Train. Its success comes from the chosen technical solution, new tracks allowing high speed with trains which can circulate both on the new and the old ones, but, then at a normal speed. Another solution had been studied, the Aerotrain and the State had hesitated a long time. But it was not well adapted because it was limited to the travels between two destinations connected with the new infrastructure. The point is less relevant regarding containers transportations because they arrive in a harbor where they are unloaded to be transferred to the carrier logistic platforms. Two solutions are then possible, the construction of special rail tracks with wagons designed to receive containers or the Aerotrain formula. It is the second one, due its much lower cost and its low occupation of the territories, which could be the object of deeper studies.

The track would be built above the ground and the containers would lay on a continuous electric conveyor belt. The stoppages necessary for the loading and the unloading would be synchronized and determined for a fixed in advance number of containers. The loading would be operated in a dedicated site inside the arrival port, completely mechanized. The unloading will be operated on the conveyor belt inside specially conceived logistic centers.

A first pilot track could connect Le Havre harbor which receives three million containers each year and a new platform located at the North or at the West of Paris where they would be received by the carriers which will sort their goods content and send them to their clients. It would be saved on a 200 kilometers distance everyday thousands of trips. Synchronization would be automatic under the survey of controllers. If the experiment is convincing, new tracks, with one or two ways, could be built and they would relieve the road traffics toward France North and Western and Eastern South.

Nobody had forecast at the end of the Seventies the success of the High-Speed-Train to the point that the Barre government in 1980 made the works on Paris-Lyon line stopping and forbid any new project. We know what’s happened after. The costs of the investments were by large compensated by the advantages granted by this new transportation mode. Regarding merchandises, the stake is quite as economic as environmental because the road transportation is a major cause of pollution. That will also allow to solving the forecasted workers scarcities in that sector.

Redlights connected and special tracks carrying millions of containers every year definitely constitute projects which will be better welcomed than fines threat.