How France Saved its Public Transit from Catastrophe

One simple trick to revive a system in death spiral

A SNCF RGP X2700 diesel train running for service in 1970 with the Eiffel Tower in the background. Quelle beauté! (Source)

As Paris burned for revolution in May 1968, France’s elites confronted another crisis threatening to tear its capital city asunder: its buses and Metro were falling apart. Buses became intolerably slow in the gridlocked streets chock full of new Renaults and Peugeot cars. The Metro was old, crowded, and limited in reach in an increasingly suburbanizing Paris. To use a modern transit parlance, Paris was facing a transit death spiral — and they were not alone.

By the end of the 1960s, every major city in France faced declining ridership and growing deficits in a rapidly automobilizing society. The situation was dire: between 1962 and 1968, Paris’s bus ridership fell 37% and Metro ridership 6% — despite the overall city population growing 15%.¹ Other cities faced precipitous declines too: between 1960 and 1967, Lyon’s ridership fell 15%, Lille fell 32%, and Marseille and Bordeaux’s each saw similar declines.² The head of Parisian region’s urban planning spoke plainly of the stakes at the turn of the decade: “if an effort is not made to improve public transport, we are heading for a catastrophe.”³

It may be hard now to imagine such a situation in France. Few countries have a more impressive national patchwork of public transit in cities large and small as France, after all. Paris the capital city is the darling of 21st century city-scale urbanism and the North Star of those who believe trains, buses, and bicycles are the urban future over the privately owned car. Paris’s transit network is mushrooming and thriving; in 2024, RATP (Paris Metro and RER’s operator) registered more than 3.1 billion trips. The regional transit overseer, Île de France Mobilités, is building four new Metro lines as part of the Grand Paris Express super-project.

This super-charged transit system was 50 years in the making. In the early 1970s, under the presidency of Georges Pompidou, France passed a slew of reforms to not only save public transit but make it competitive to driving a car as a mode of mobility. While the positive effects are felt by the sum of these reforms, this post focuses on one particular vehicle which, on its own, has transformed French public transit: the versement transport (transport tax). Introduced in 1971 and now called versement mobilité (mobility tax), this is a payroll tax on employers operating inside an urban region which goes to the local regional transport authority to use for operations or capital projects. This tax is the lifeblood of French buses and trains and the engine of French transit’s current and future successes. Just to put into scale: RATP reported in 2023 that 48% of its annual operating revenues, or 4.457 billion Euros, was generated by this payroll tax alone.⁴ Systral, the agency which manages the transit networks of France’s second largest city Lyon, reported in 2024 half of its operating revenues, or 505 million Euros, came from versement mobilité.⁵

The history outlined below is a short one bookended by two major events in postwar French political economy: the May 1968 protests and the 1973-1974 Oil Shock. Stupefied by the student-labor uprising which nearly toppled the state and pressured by the French Left flotsam in the years after May 1968’s failure, the Pompidou government acted out of urgency, fear, and confusion to rescue Paris’s public transit around 1971. Then came the Oil Shock in 1973 which shook France’s high-growth postwar economy to its core and gave the French public a hard look in the mirror about their energy dependence. To encourage less oil reliance, France expanded recently passed transit reforms, such as versement transport, to smaller municipalities to spur alternative transportation across all urban fabrics of France.

This post, I hope, at least achieves two goals with the reader. First, I want to spell out yet another way a nation in modern times not only rescued its public transit networks but transform them entirely through innovations in funding, governance, infrastructure building, and state capacity. It is rather an interesting thought exercise to compare this post to an earlier post of mine — also from the late 1960s and 1970s — on how Japan rescued Tokyo’s regional rail network.

Second, I hope to bridge a knowledge gap on the concept of a payroll tax as a driver of public transit funding at scale. A regional payroll tax as a funding mechanism for public transit is rare in North America and not often discussed. Two places in the United States already have a transit funding payroll tax — one in New York City, and the other in Portland and Oregon. In the San Francisco Bay Area, a payroll tax was briefly considered in 2024 for a multi-county ballot measure to raise sustainable operating funds for its regional transit network.⁶ But the idea died in the crib under opposition from business associations.⁷ Surprisingly little is known about this funding mechanism in English. I hope this post sparks a greater understanding and further research into this novel vehicle for transformative change.

Author’s Note

I am thrilled to write this post on versement transport, a topic I learned when I was visiting France two years ago. This post was conceived and researched in part by @kue.glitch.paris, an American living in Paris who everyone should follow on Bluesky, who shared the following local perspective on this topic:

Today's Île-de-France transit shares recognizable problems of maintenance, cost, and governance to other systems around the world. Yet this system is also in a constant state of expansion and modernization.⁸ ⁹It isn't a system struggling to keep its head above the water but rather a system struggling to maintain stability in its evolution to a larger, more modern network. Versement mobilité, however, is that bedrock of stability. It remains central to French transit politics to this day: recent unpopular fare increases in Paris show business interests’ opposition against tax increases at the cost to everyday Parisian riders. But even small increases in versement mobilité rates have prevented crushing fare hikes on the riders without compromising Paris public transit’s quality.¹⁰

When raising the concept of a funding source decoupled from the farebox and instead tied to a region's economic output, I've had some American urbanists brush it off as idealism. But this is a concrete reality to the millions of transit users in French cities. This disconnect is what spurred me to spread the message of this policy.

Despite my extremely limited French, the following documents in both English and French were key in the formation of this post:

• Legal text of versement mobilité, translated in English

• “Interest Groups, Professions and Public Policy Change: The Case of Paris Transport -1968 -1976” (1989) by Andrew Malcolm Webster

• “Discuter, politiser, imposer une solution d’action publique: l’exemple du tramway” (2011) by Benoît Demongeot (in French)

• “Georges Pompidou et l’alternative à l’automobile individuelle” (2010) by Arnaud Passalcqua (in French)

• “Organization of Urban Public Transport in France: Lessons for Developing Countries” (1988) by Slobodan Mitric

Jacques Tati’s imagining of Gaullist Paris in his 1967 masterpiece “Playtime”. Cars, concrete, and glasses galore! (Source)

The Rise and Fall of Gaullist Paris

Between 1945 and 1973, an era of postwar high-growth economy affectionally called by the French as les trentes glorieuses, the automobile was king in France. Car manufacturers such Renault, Citroen, and Peugeot cornered the booming domestic market, especially in the 1960s. Paris’s car ownership population grew 46% between 1962 and 1968.¹¹ The French auto industry lobbied the government under President Charles de Gaulle for new auto-centric infrastructure, proposing for instance 15 new radial highways around Paris and one bank of the Seine River paved into an express highway.¹² De Gaulle’s heir Pompidou served as an avatar of France’s 1960s car mania; the famous lover of the Porsche 356S exclaimed in a speech “we must adapt Paris both to the lives of Parisians and to the needs of the automobile.”¹³

Under de Gaulle’s new French Fifth Republic, Paris was groomed to become the financial center for the capitalist western Europe, which as a region began its long integration towards the European Union. Multinational firms and banks set up offices in Paris — but outside the traditional arrondissements and in the suburbs west of Paris (even before La Defense district was formally conceived) where no Metro service was available.¹⁴ To plan for the Gaullist vision of Paris as a modern, international, sprawling city, the French state created a new administrative region around Paris and its suburbs in 1961 called the District de la Région Parisienne. The head of this District would become the ultimate civil servant on all urban affairs in the capital region, so de Gaulle chose Paul Delouvrier, his right-hand man during the Algerian War, as the director who would report to de Gaulle directly. Within two years with de Gaulle’s blessings, Delouvrier was able to carve out, as British academic Andrew Webster writes, a “dominance of Parisian affairs that Haussmann enjoyed.”¹⁵

Two years later in 1965, Delouvrier’s District de la Region Parisienne published their master plan of a Gaullist Paris in the Schéma directeur. Aiming to remake Paris by the end of the century, the schéma directeur envisaged brand new cities on all four sides in the Parisian periphery. Clusters of high-rise concrete-and-glass offices and apartments would connect to each other and to central Paris via the automobile. Using forecasts of future travel demands imported from the United States, the plan called for nearly 1,000 km of new expressways.¹⁶¹⁷

Such confidence would be violently shaken in May 1968. A student uprising and a national general strike over the course of four weeks pushed de Gaulle to flee France in its most volatile days. While Pompidou rallied the Gaullist parties to a sweeping parliamentary election in June 1968 (and the Presidency in 1969 after de Gaulle’s resignation), a reactionary verdict to the uprising, the Gaullists’ heady vision of a new French world order centered in the high-tech Parisian suburbs was shattered. Doubt and insecurity “ate away at the Gaullist ideal of modern urban living”. The Gaullists cowered of another May 1968.¹⁸

Urban planning reflected this crisis of confidence. The 1965 Schéma directeur was revised in 1969 to a more modest vision and forecasts — and a growing focus on mass public transit over the individual automobile.¹⁹ Pompidou’s own ministers began to eschew the Gaullist automobile for the humble train and bus. The Minister of Transport spoke of the "asphyxiation of the city” by cars, and his subordinate Director of Land Transport said France would never be able to satisfy individual car owners’ demands for more roads and more lanes. ²⁰ Even the auto-friendly Paris Chamber of Commerce chimed in agreement, stating without a massive effort in transit investment, the region “will endure a severe crisis.” A consensus was building, but more was needed.

Traffic through the Tuileries Garden outside the Louvre, in June 1970. (Source)

“Users Movement” and the Birth of Versement Transport

As the Gaullists retreated from their pre-1968 ambitions, the French Communists and Socialists licked their wounds over the revolution which never came — and where to go next. One offshoot of the post-1968 political climate was the rise of the “users movement”, in which local activist transportation groups rallied to rescue their transit networks in crisis and to democratize the decision-making powers from technocrats to local communities.

By 1970, Parisians users movement groups faced an uphill battle. As transit service suffered, its providers bled more and more money. Between 1962 and 1970, the Paris transit provider RATP saw a 515% increase in its annual operating deficit, due to falling bus ridership and a frozen fare system as part of de Gaulle’s counter-inflation policies.²¹ In 1967, Parisian transit fares almost doubled after a six-year freeze, and steep fare increases were scheduled again in 1970 to further rein in RATP deficits. Parisians felt their fare money stretched less and less, and frustration mounted. A Parisian government survey in the summer of 1970 found 88% of respondents felt the city’s transit systems have deteriorated.²²

New scheduled fare increases in 1970 boiled over angry Parisian commuters into action. Local activist groups organized protests on the streets, crammed into government committee meetings, and bombarded local media with letters and petitions carrying a simple message: paying more in fares for increasingly poor bus and train conditions was intolerable.²³ The users demanded no fare increases, new travel passes, and increased investments in public transit by the national government as the central planks of their platform. Other demands received scattered support, reflecting a disjointed landscape of the post-1968 French Left who rallied for the same cause concurrently but not unitedly.

Two political coalitions led the users movement and embodied that disjointed method of leftist activism: the Communist-backed Cartel and the Socialist and Trotskyite parties-backed Federation des Comites d’Usagers de Transports en Commun de la Region Parisienne (FCU). The Communists, concerned with presenting itself as the national opposition party to the Gaullists and maintaining a strong link to trade unions, sought sweeping nationwide and industrial solutions to the transit issues; meanwhile, FCU’s backers in the socialist Parti Socialiste Unifié (PSU) and the Trotskyite Lutte Ouvrière (LO) fought for full democratization of transport politics and decentralization of decision-making powers on transit issues to local authorities, revealing strong distrust of the central Gaullist regime.

These views had a downstream effect. The Cartel introduced the idea of an employer payroll tax to cover employees’ transit passes, sought higher investments toward transit construction (built by labor unions, of course), and called for the government to write off RATP’s deficit. They however shied from any policies restricting car access into cities. The Communists strongly supported car production in France and believed the transit crisis was the government’s “insufficient provision to facilitate new styles of living” — or, car owners and transit riders could coexist in Paris. ²⁴ The FCU, however, was totally opposite the Cartel’s view on cars. The FCU decried the “tyranny of the car” as destroyers of the urban environment and proposed the closure of central urban areas to private cars, tighter parking restrictions in cities, and urban tolls for cars driving into the city. ²⁵ FCU’s fight against the tyranny of cars extended to the tyranny of centralized government; they campaigned to strip the central government from its transport decision-making powers and giving it to autonomous, local, elected bodies, where they will weigh and legislate their populist demands, such as more public sector housing, limiting private development in city centers, and freezing land prices.

While rarely working together, and often antagonistically, the Cartel and FCU provided an effective two-pronged pressure campaign against Pompidou and his Gaullist administration. The Cartel energized suburban, working class voters (often car-owners themselves) frustrated at the state of Parisian transit but weary of far-left inner-city politics.²⁶ The FCU mobilized middle-class arrondissement voters still energized from the barricade fights from May 1968 and encouraged them to create their own autonomous transport users’ committees, which at its height in November 1970 reached sixty.²⁷ The Cartel were more effective at organizing mass protests, such as 30,000 people marching through central Paris in November 1970 against a fare increase scheduled for January 1.²⁸ And it was the Cartel’s proposal of an employer payroll tax that would filter through the noise and into the lawmakers’ ears.

In March 1971, the Pompidou government announced it would introduce a tax on all employers in the Parisian region to pay for transit. As Communists pushed for the payroll tax, Gaullists too warmed up to the idea on three fronts: that employers need to pay more accurately for the “true price” of having its employees commute via transit; that it would be politically convenient and popular among the electorate to target and tax a small voting bloc (medium-to-large sized businesses); and that a tax collected by the central government is far preferable than decentralization as demanded by FCU.²⁹ Perhaps more surprisingly than the pro-business Gaullists’ growing sympathies to a payroll tax was the “muted and ineffectual” response from the business community towards a tax on themselves. While small businesses and manufacturers in Paris were resistant to the tax, the large financial banks and corporations supported the idea. They were generally eager to back their close ally Pompidou, a former bank director at Rothschild, and his government’s vision of building new transit networks throughout Paris, especially expanding the under-construction Réseau Express Régional (RER) train network to their ritzy corporate oasis west of Paris. Perhaps most importantly, the business community have not forgotten May 1968. Like the Gaullist politicians, they were terrified of setting off another public unrest. The Cartel, FCU, and the users’ movement made visible through ongoing protests how mad Parisians were about public transit. Nonstop protests at the time from the users’ movement, woman’s liberation movement, and anti-Vietnam War protests, among others, kept the elites on knife’s edge, including Pompidou, who confided to advisers these protests may just be a harbinger of another May 1968 that will bring him down like his predecessor de Gaulle.³⁰

By May, the versement transport bill was introduced in Parliament as a payroll tax of up to 2% on all employers with more than nine employees in and around Paris. The versement moved along the legislative ladder at the same time as a larger infrastructural investment package known as the Sixth Plan, which included expansion of the RER, extensions to the Metro, bus lane constructions, and a wider bus network reorganization in Paris. ³¹Despite light resistance from centrist parties representing small businesses, the bill breezed through Parliament, signed into law on July 12, and was to go into effect in the next year.

A man on a bicycle with a message on his back: “Please, some gas?” (Source)

The Oil Shock and the Psychological Shock

By 1972, the coalition which fought and stirred for the passage of versement transport seemed to have settled down. The Cartel and FCU faded fast following the flurry of government reforms in 1971, losing steam without its central rallying cry. The Cartel, for example, formally disbanded in September 1971. But the activists who cut their teeth with the Cartel or FCU help usher in a new era of “community politics” in France, during which local action groups banded around housing, environmental protection, and other salient issues.³² The days of de Gaulle’s grand, centralized, and shadowy schemes — such as Schéma directeur and its promise of 1000 new kilometers of highways in and through Paris — was over.

Versement transport was the first tax of its kind applied solely to the Parisian region. The tax was encouraging before passage, forecasting for first gross revenue in 1972 of 1170 million Francs — substantially higher than RATP’s 1970 record-high annual deficit of 768 million Francs.³³³⁴ But its immediate performance was staggering. Between 1972 and 1982, the percentage of operating revenues generated by versement transport jumped from 17% to 28%, and the proportion for rider fares, other contracts, and advertising fell from 52% to 41%.³⁵ The tax did not just shake up transit coffers; it shook up transit agencies in Paris to grow something of a backbone. The bureaucrats running RATP and the national railway agency, SNCF, finally had a reliable revenue source divorced from political influence in versement transport. It also gave them precious breathing room to propose plans and programs which may have been too radical before.³⁶ In 1973, versement transport in its second year was already deemed a success, so much so the French Parliament expanded it to other urban regions with more than 300,000 people and granted cities outside Paris powers to create an urban transit organizing authority (AO) to administer the tax.³⁷

France’s new interest in public transit would enter a new era later that year in October when Arab oil-producing countries embargoed petroleum to states supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur War. While France was not directly embargoed, France — 80% of its energy supply came from imported oil — was left severely exposed by the threefold jump in gas prices due to a sudden drop in supply across Western Europe.³⁸ On November 30, Prime Minister Pierre Messmer announced a series of bans to conserve France’s energy reserves, such as a ban on illuminated advertising or lighting in shop windows at night., no television broadcasts after 11 p.m. on weekdays, and speed limitations for vehicles.³⁹ Pompidou stressed to his cabinet that any major actions on transport, such as vehicle speed limitations, will need first a robust development of public transit.⁴⁰

Across France, the Oil Shock rippled not only materially but also as a “true psychological shock”.⁴¹ Although automobiles made up a fraction of France’s national energy consumption, the disillusionment of owning a car fueled by cheap gas shook the French electorate. Questions about energy reliance on imported oil and potential future scarcities dogged the political discourse of the time; the slogan “In France, we don’t have oil, but we have ideas!” dominated the airwaves.⁴² In April 1974, Pompidou died in office, and a snap presidential election was called. The centrist candidate, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, echoed his predecessor Pompidou’s priorities. He promised public transit improvements were his second-highest priority as President and that France’s second cities like Marseille and Lyon would see the same improvements granted to Paris under his watch.⁴³

Following Giscard d’Estaing’s win, his government passed four new transit-related reforms from 1974 to 1976 which ushered further public transit development in Paris and the rest of France. The first two impacted non-Parisian cities: in 1974, the versement transport was further expanded to all urban regions with more than 100,000 people and the tramway made its return as a viable mode of public transport after its nationwide abandonment in the 1930s. In February 1975, Transportation Minister Marcel Cavaillé wrote to mayors of eight medium-large cities in France to consider rebuilding a tram network in their city and, in return, be eligible for national government financing. The “Cavaillé challenge” was ignored by most mayors at the outset, but this sparked France’s returned love affair with the tram in many of its cities, including Paris, Lyon, Bordeaux, Nantes, and Marseille, which continues to this day. ⁴⁴

The next two reshaped Parisian transit forever: in 1975, the carte orange (Orange Card) was introduced as the first unlimited transit pass for the region, and in 1976, the District de la Region Parisienne was promoted into the Île-de-France Region, giving it the autonomy to hold regional elections and have discretion on its infrastructural budget. With the Orange Card, riders could seamlessly transfer between the bus, Metro, and RER without needing to pay a fare each time, as it had been done previously. Within the first six months, 900,000 Parisians applied for the Orange Card (the precursor to the current Navigo Pass), far exceeding planners’ expectations.⁴⁵ The creation of Île-de-France Region helped quash growing tensions between local and central authorities emerged during the planning and construction of the RER network. The Region status, akin to a province-level authority in France, gave the local authorities broad autonomy on how the region could build and operate its public transit network.⁴⁶ Further legislations in 1979, 1982, and 1983 clarified the roles of the urban transit organizing authority (AO), the local/regional governments, and the central government to facilitate contracting, financing, and transit management. In sum, these legislations formalized France’s new “hybrid” system of transit governance: large-scale visions animated and guided by the central government, and the decision-making and financing for these projects made locally.⁴⁷

All urban regions eligible for versement mobilité taxation in France as of 2024. (Source)

The French Transit Revolution

For French transit, it took less than a decade from flirting with catastrophe to enjoying a “transit renaissance”.⁴⁸ Between 1975 and 1984, France’s public transit registered a 50% increase in trips served and a 60% increase in vehicle-kms offered.⁴⁹ Since 1974, France has constructed 28 tram networks (with three more coming) and brand-new Metro systems in Lyon, Marseille, Rennes, Toulouse, and Lille. And in the Paris/Île-de-France Region: nine of 13 previously existing Metro lines have been extended, and Metro Line 14 (with four more incoming), all five RER lines and 14 tramway lines have opened since 1974. Very few countries in the world have expanded its urban transit networks as much as France in the past half-century.

As researcher Slobodan Mitric writes, the adoption of the versement transport was “probably the single most important element reviving French transit.” Renamed and expanded to versement mobilité in 2019, the tax now extends to all municipalities or commune with more than 10,000 people. The current tax also have a higher threshold, applying to employers with more than 11 employees instead of nine, and new businesses are exempt for the first three years. In the smallest level of government eligible for versement mobilité, 0.55% of payroll wages are levied from the employers. The taxation rate rises depending on population and metropolitan area; Paris maintains the highest rate in France at 2.85%, short of the maximum rate allowed by the central government of 3.20%.

Even after fifty years of existence, versement mobilité continues to evolve and generates controversy in France. The 2025 budget by the central government has granted for the first time for regions outside Île-de-France to levy versement mobilité. The reactions from regional presidents have been mixed. Some supported the expansion as a new way for France’s rural regions to improve their transit networks and combat climate change. Others rejected it even before its offer, claiming this tax is yet another burden on struggling businesses in their constituency.⁵⁰

Can versement mobilité work elsewhere outside France — perhaps in the United States? Mitric, who wrote his paper on versement transport in 1988, may claim no, considering he labeled it a “flawed tool” and not one for recommending to export to other developing countries.⁵¹ Payroll taxes for transit funding already exist in the United States but the rates are fractional compared to French cities with the most robust transit networks. In Oregon statewide, employers pay .1% of their wages to transit funding. In the city of Portland, Oregon, an extra .82% of wages is taxed on top of the statewide payroll tax to fund their network, Trimet — generating $515 million in revenues in 2024.⁵² In New York City proper and the surrounding counties in the state of New York, the Metropolitan commuter transportation mobility tax is on a ladder scale. Its highest rate is .6% for employers operating in the five City boroughs whose quarterly payroll exceeds $437,500 — almost one-fifth of Paris city limit’s 2.85% rate and near identical to France’s very lowest rate reserved for rural towns.

What sets New York City and Oregon’s transit apart from its French counterpart is not entirely the taxation rate. A transit system does not require a robust payroll tax to survive and thrive, and many other countries outside France has built successful transit systems in their cities without the need of a payroll tax. But the unique thread that sets the success stories apart is the political will to take risks, try new ideas, and give transit networks broad latitude to do what is necessary to improve service and quality. The success of versement transport did not happen in a vacuum; it was rather the stabilizing core within a flurry of reforms and capital works to inject French public transit new life during the 1970s.

I want to end by circling back to a place which this blog has spent far more time examining than France: Japan. In the late 1960s, the Japanese National Railways (JNR) financed much-needed expansions in Tokyo’s regional rail through a risky scheme which backfired and added to its already mounting debt. JNR was dissolved and privatized in the 1980s largely due to this debt. Like France, JNR also weathered the political and economic storms of its own labor uprisings and the Oil Shock. In response to similar events, France went in a different direction than Japan, opting to tax its businesses to finance these expansions and modernizations. Without fully realizing at the time, France paved the roadmap for a novel way to grow and maintain a world-class transit network while not giving up its public sector character. It remains to be seen if any countries may follow this roadmap.

1. Webster, A. M. (1989, October). Interest groups, professions and public policy change. London School of Economics and Political Science. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/1194/1/U048724.pdf , p. 95

2. Demongeot, B. (2011, March 30). Discuter, politiser, Imposer Une solution d’action publique. Université de Grenoble. https://theses.hal.science/tel-00650746/file/30345_DEMONGEOT_2011_archivage.pdf.pdf, p. 133

3. Webster, p. 96

4. https://www.iledefrance-mobilites.fr/decouvrir/financements

5. https://www.lyoncapitale.fr/mobilites/tcl-malgre-les-critiques-sytral-mobilites-confirme-la-hausse-du-versement-mobilite

6. https://transformca.org/we-still-have-a-path-to-an-excellent-regional-transportation-measure-with-your-help/

7. https://x.com/seamlessbayarea/status/1817990984128762246

8. https://www.grandparisexpress.fr

9. https://www.ratp.fr/mf19-metro-nouvelle-generation

10. https://actu.fr/societe/transports-en-commun-en-ile-de-france-valerie-pecresse-fait-passer-les-entreprises-a-la-caisse_60511215.html

11. Webster, p. 95

12. Mitric, S. (1988). Organization of Urban Public Transport in France. Transportation Research Record 102. https://onlinepubs.trb.org/Onlinepubs/trr/1988/1202/1202-015.pdf, p. 113

13. https://fabricofparis.com/2020/04/07/transport-that-never-was-the-motorway-craze.html

14. Webster, p. 52-53

15. Webster, p. 70-71

16. Webster, p. 74-75

17. Webster, p. 90

18. Webster, p. 89

19. Webster, p. 83

20. Webster, p. 90-91

21. Webster, p. 110

22. Webster, p. 117

23. Webster, p. 111

24. Webster, p. 114-115

25. Webster, p. 116

26. Webster, p. 116-117

27. Webster, p. 119

28. Webster, p. 118

29. Webster, p. 130-131

30. Passalacqua, A. (2019, December 17). Georges Pompidou et l’alternative à l’automobile individuelle. Université Paris Diderot. https://hal.science/hal-02415372/document, p. 5

31. Webster, p. 141-142

32. Webster, p. 121

33. Webster, p. 110

34. Webster, p. 142

35. Webster, p. 146

36. Webster, p. 147

37. Demongeot, p. 146

38. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S030626199700055X

39. https://www.cvce.eu/en/obj/oil_crisis_in_france_30_november_1973-en-9d4040f5-5a3b-424f-979e-929e574ca88e.html

40. Passalacqua, p. 9-10

41. Demongeot, p. 166

42. Demongeot, p. 167

43. Demongeot, p. 169

44. Boquet, Y. (2017, June 15). The renaissance of tramways and urban redevelopment in France. Université de Bourgogne. https://cejsh.icm.edu.pl/cejsh/element/bwmeta1.element.ojs-doi-10_1515_mgrsd-2017-0005/c/articles-2046910.pdf.pdf, p. 7

45. https://www.leparisien.fr/paris-75/paris-75005/le-passe-navigo-a-tarif-unique-est-deja-un-succes-15-09-2015-5094721.php

46. Passalacqua, p. 8

47. Mitric, p. 114

48. Mitric, p. 113

49. Ibid.

50. https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2025/03/11/le-versement-mobilite-un-nouvel-impot-sur-les-entreprises-qui-divise-les-presidents-de-region_6579251_823448.html

51. Mitric, p. 119

52. https://trimet.org/budget/pdf/2024-adopted-budget.pdf