By Julie Braka
While a majority of employees still go to their place of work by car, how can new mobility spread and dethrone auto-solism?
How can they be opportunities for companies to reduce their costs or improve the quality of life of their employees? What are the obstacles to their practices and why are they a source of concern? Thanks to the testimony of Badr Hjiaj de Klaxit and Jérémie Giniaux-Kats, an associate lawyer at Metalaw and expert in digital and social law, we tried to provide some answers to these burning questions during our last breakfast with the Maif Start-Up Club.
The paradox of the scooter
Ghislain Delabie, an innovation specialist in the new mobility sector, initiated the discussions by citing the example of a company with which he worked.
The company hosted a one-day event during Mobility Week during which they wanted to offer fun demonstrations of electric scooters for participants and employees of the site. Impossible, however, to put this in place, because the practice of the scooter was simply prohibited by the rules of procedure. The site manager argued that if an incident happened, he could be held responsible or even go to jail depending on the seriousness of the facts. Faced with these risks, this demonstration never took place either on the site or in its surroundings.
This somewhat funny anecdote made it possible to launch debates on the adaptation of companies to a paradigm shift in terms of employee mobility.
Car sharing and company car
Strongly encouraged by the public authorities, the practice of carpooling, particularly on the commute to work, is seen as a way of overcoming many everyday mobility problems: congestion, pollution, accessibility, cost, parking, accident. However, this practice still encounters many obstacles. The potential users, whether passengers or drivers are still marginal.
Companies, although aware of the benefits of carpooling, still come up against technical and legal aspects.
One of these obstacles is fairly well illustrated by an advantage valued by employees: the company car The practice of carpooling with this type of vehicle is more complex than with your personal vehicle. As Badr Hjiaj recalls, carpooling in France is strictly defined by the transport code and one of the fundamental criteria is the absence of profit.
In the case of carpooling with a company vehicle, the question of cost-sharing with the passenger (s) is called into question by the fact that the driver does not ultimately contribute financially to the costs of the journey or to those of the vehicle maintenance.
In this configuration, the participation that the driver then receives from the passengers does not serve to finance the journey costs and becomes an income.
Jérémie Giniaux-Kats, added by recalling that carpooling with a company vehicle must be the subject of an explicit authorization from the employer. In fact, the Klaxit platform even allows this characteristic to be specified (5% of users at Klaxit), but this remains declarative and there is an “a priori of trust”. In addition, under the GDPR, they are not authorized to transfer this information to the employer. Jérémie Giniaux-Kats adds that by virtue of the principle of loyalty, in the context of proof of carpooling, the user must be informed beforehand of the monitoring of the data, all the more when this may harm him.
However, as Ghislain Delabie reminds us, one cannot deny the advantages brought by the use of company cars for carpooling and for passengers. It makes it possible to increase the matching of the offer, to improve the quality of the journey with often much newer vehicles and the psychological aspect of the moral responsibility of drivers towards passengers pushes them to be more careful.
If the case of the company car may seem a little technical and marginal, it illustrates the difficulties encountered by carpooling to spread. Between technical issues, limited financial gains and time constraints, Badr Hijaj concludes that carpooling cannot develop in any case without financial incentive.
The future Orientation Law on Mobilities
Generally, internal company rules, but also taxation and the legal framework do not encourage “virtuous” or alternative mobility. The rather pragmatic employees have no personal interest in refusing an advantage like the company car. The company benefits from tax advantages and increases its attractiveness. The future Orientation Law on Mobilities (LOM) currently under discussion in the Assembly and the Senate and which will succeed the LOTI law (Orientation Law on Inland Transport) of 1982, can it change this paradigm?
One of the evolutions proposed by the LOM is to extend, the Transport reimbursement (50% of the price of the package at least) to the whole territory. This is currently only compulsory for employees in the Ile-de-France region. For the rest of France, this advantage remains optional and its application depends on the goodwill of the company. According to the latest speeches by Elisabeth Borne, the Minister of Transport in charge of the LOM, there is a desire to extend, within the framework of the Sustainable Mobility Package, this obligation to the whole territory.
The case of the sustainable mobility package
The future Sustainable Mobility Package is good but still does not take into account the reality of intermodality and multimodality. Under certain conditions, an employee can request both the cost of his transport package and his subscription to a self-service bicycle service. On the other hand, the new Package will still not allow the cost of the different modes to be combined on the same journey. A somewhat improbable choice in front of the mainly Ile-de-France public for breakfast.
The use of public transport on a daily basis remains a very minority practice nationwide.
As a member of the public points out, according to a recent study by INSEE, only the Paris region and Greater Lyon have a daily public transport use rate of more than 20% for employees.
However, intermodality and multimodality are part of the evolution of practices.
The new mobility offers have opened up a range of possibilities, where before there was only room for single mode.
Today, an employee to get to his workplace can use several modes on the same trip. Thanks to the development of relay parks, many motorists now also travel part of their journey by public transport. Others combine bikes and trains or even put their bikes on the train when still others can be self-employed one day and carpoolers another. Their mobility adapts in space and time.
Encourage new mobility!
It also means developing the labor code, adapting it to better take into account the modes of travel and the situation of the workplace.
“It is necessary to offer advantages to compensate for the loss of comfort” suggests Jérémie Giniaux-Kats.
Tax exemption for new forms of mobility, like that granted to the practice of cars, could be a way of encouraging employers to push their employees towards these practices.
They too must get out of the paradigm of the car and this requires a change of posture in the face of cycling by their employees. Indeed, there is a reassuring side for the company that its employees travel by car. They are less fragile there than on a bicycle or scooter. However, it is necessary to remember that if the bicycle certainly has a higher accidentology, recent studies show that its regular practice allows in the long term to reduce the number of work stoppages by having a positive impact on health and condition of employees.
The case of the electric vehicle
In the case of professional use, whether for a company or service vehicle, there is the question of home charging. Who finances the terminal? Where can it be installed? Who can use it? In what conditions? And this is where things get really complex. By interacting with an HR manager present in the public, we discover that today that each decision must be taken on a case-by-case basis. They depend on many factors over which the company has no control, such as the type of accommodation (individual or collective), status (owner or tenant), the organization of the car park, relations with the condominium unions, etc…
New mobility complicates the processing of home-work trips. They lead companies and the State to ask themselves new questions and to change the way they conceive of mobility.
To conclude, Jeremie Giniaux-Kats rightly reminds us that planning mobility is also planning immobility: telework, workspaces outside the walls of the company… a whole field of reflection that companies must invest to put mobility adapted to the 21st century.
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This post was previously published on OuiShare.net where the content of the website is licensed under Creative Commons BY-SA 2.0 France.
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