seduced by the results of Rotterdam, which applies it since 2010, Lille is the first metropolis in France to set up an inverted toll. An ecobonus which can go up to 80 euros per month.
by Florence TRAULLÉ (Lille, correspondent)
The congestion of the highway axes which serve Lille during peak hours worsens in the heart of a region where overruns of alert thresholds for fine particles in the air are multiplying. In the first quarter, they were as numerous as those identified for the whole year 2021. Faced with these issues, the European Metropolis of Lille (MEL) has long been interested in the experience of Rotterdam, where around 5,000 trips per day would be avoided thanks to an ecobonus activated by successive periods on targeted axes. Elected officials went to see on the spot and came back convinced that the idea of remunerating motorists so that they leave their car in the garage during peak hours was duplicable in Lille.
This December 17, the MEL therefore voted to set up an ecobonus which will apply, at first, to the two most engorged motorway axes: A1 (Paris-Lille) and A23 (Valenciennes-Lille), who have become a daily hell to enter the city in the morning and leave it at the end of the day. “Change your habits, it reports!” Summarizes the MEL, which primarily targets those that Damien Castelain, its president (without label, se), calls “self-solists”.
To touch an ecobonus of 2 euros per journey not made between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. and between 4:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m., it will be necessary to volunteer and register on an application on which to declare the Non carried out (a plates reading system is provided to make sure). The idea is to encourage motorists to favor another means of transport, such as train or bus, to carpool, to telework or to shift their schedules. Sébastien Leprêtre, the vice-president in charge of transport to MEL, estimates that “with a 6 % drop in traffic on these axes [the] objective will be reached”. Ecobonus will be capped at 80 euros maximum per month (fired to beneficiaries on their bank account through the application).
no unanimity
The MEL, which plans to start the first wave of the deployment of the system in the spring of 2023, with the registrations of voluntary motorists, gives itself nine months from commissioning in September to assess its effectiveness. If it is convincing, it is planned to extend it to the other highly loaded motorway axes: the A22, which comes from Belgium, and the A25 (Lille-Dunkirk).
Ecobonus was voted without difficulty, but it was not unanimous. Rudy Elegeest, the mayor of Mons-en-Barœul, who chairs the Actions and Projects group for the Metropolis, wonders: “Who throws himself into the hell of the saturated A1 if he can do otherwise ? If motorists do, it is for lack of alternative offers to the car on which we must concentrate our means. “A opinion shared by Pauline Segard, leader of environmentalists at MEL, for whom this ecobonus” C ‘is a lot of public money for a very uncertain result “.
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