Exploring the rebound-effect of information technologies on mobility systems: clues for a blueprint (original) (raw)

It is commonly expected and announced that the information and communication technologies (ICTs) will relieve an enormous pressure from the transport investments and constraints in the future as less people should be inclined to travel (instead of "tele-doing" things) and less goods (in particular documents and written material of all kinds) should be released in the traffic. Environment will look better, regional development and flexible options for learning and working can finally be in our agenda. This idealised perspective is exactly the contrary of what we can observe in most ICTsupported domains. As a matter of fact, our own research as well as other studies, in various areas, show that ICTs appear to play boosting role for mobility, building upon various development patterns, globally identified as the "rebound-effect". Beyond any form of ingenuity, it seems but urgent to understand and document this process, its features and stakes. The domains in which we have carried out research, providing supporting results for the above-mentioned observation, are in particular: home automation and telematics, e-work, elearning, e-voting, e-publishing (with main focus on personal mobility issues) and (for freight) the influence of ICTs on transport enterprises. These mapping and documenting of cross-fertilising features and stakes should also lead to understand better the future of this issue, not only from the environmental point of view, which is often the claim for leveraging the hope that ICTs will diminish mobility (and therefore to restore a more realistic picture on this battlefront) but also economic (mobility is a resource and asks for organisational creativity) and societal points of view (let us consider in particular the pervasive or ubiquitous information technology horizon). Our presentation aims at building upon our existing results and current debates in the matter, and at point out some key perspective for this problematic's close future, with special attention paid to both internal and external implications for transport.