Transport Information Group

Here are the latest US Government Accountability Office (US GAO) reports about transportation, published in June 2008.

• Coast Guard: Strategies for Mitigating the Loss of Patrol Boats Are Achieving Results in the Near Term, but They Come at a Cost and Longer Term Sustainability Is Unknown. GAO-08-660, June 23, 2008 (56 pages).
  http://www.gao.gov/docdblite/details.php?rptno=GAO-08-660
• Federal Aviation Administration: Efforts to Hire, Staff, and Train Air Traffic Controllers Are Generally on Track, but Challenges Remain. GAO-08-908T, June 11, 2008 (15 pages).
  http://www.gao.gov/docdblite/details.php?rptno=GAO-08-908T

There is a way to finance infrastructure when the National Government does not have enough money… simply rely on the Local and Regional Governments!

A future high-speed rail line extension is planned from Paris toward the west side of France, also known as Brittany, Bretagne in French. As of today, on a regular map of France, Brest, in Brittany, is around 600 kilometres or at least 6 hours driving or 4 to 5 hours by train from Paris. The new high-speed rail link would totally change our country’s map, as it did for the rest of France: Brest would then be at 3 hours from Paris by TGV (see below for project references) and not anymore “that far away”, as represented on the map hereunder. Note that this map was build taking into account the travel time from Paris to the different cities by TGV (French high-speed train operated by SNCF).

Modified map of France depending on TGV time travel from Paris

Source: La Tribune

Financing the project

First things first… Before seeing Brest at a reasonable distance from Paris on the previous map, it is needed to find enough budget to finance the project. After several months and multiple discussions between all Brittany’s local Government officials, they decided unanimously that they would be part of the financing team for this project, bringing €1.1 billion into the Bretagne Grande Vitesse (BGV) project (High-Speed Brittany). (more…)

Near Field Communication or NFC is a technology that has a great potential when associated with cellphones… In Asia, many transit systems adopted this technology and implemented it to ease the access to services related to transit trips, and mostly to intermodal transit trips. The last European Congress on Mobility, held early June in Paris, addressed this issue in an important debate.

French transit authorities (Autorités Organisatrices de Transport, AOT) could benefit from the development of such a technology, that could drastically improve ratemaking and ticketing, but also travelers information (for multimodal trips for example).

Groupe Ulysse: gathering phone operators and transit authorities to develop NFC technology

Both the French cellphone & network operators and transit authorities created “Groupe Ulysse” and are working on the technical and organisational standards to implement and deploy ticketing technology through NFC-capable cellphones. (more…)

Paris launch a waterways transit service

Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoë and Jean-Paul Huchon, President of Paris-Ile de France regional Government innaugurated the new waterways transit service Voguéo on Saturday, June 28, 2008.

Operated by RATP, this new service will link Maisons-Alfort in the Val-de-Marne Département to Austerlitz train station inside Paris city (for more details, please see the map attached).

Voguéo Route

Source: MétroPole, RATP. (more…)

Roissy Carex, a High-Speed Freight Rail project

Since 1999, a group of companies settled on the Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport platform have been thinking and working together to set up a high speed freight rail service. From this idea came a struture, involving several partners:

• Public entities: Roissy Development (Economic Development Agency of Roissy Porte de France), the Val d’Oise Economic Expansion Committee, and the city of Goussainville;
• Private businesses: Air France Cargo, La Poste, and FedEx; and
• The Eurocarex College: composed of Lyon Saint Exupéry Airport Authority, Liege Carex (similar project in Belgium), Eurotunnel, High speed Trains (HST) Cargo Schiphol (Amsterdam Carex), Köln-Bonn Airport Carex, and Londres Carex;

There are also two of the major freight carriers that will soon be members of this alliance (DHL and UPS) and a bunch of associated members (see the complete list on Roissy Carex website referenced below). (more…)

FedEx, worldwide leader in express freight and packages transportation, will finance an extension of its infrastructures based in Paris Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport (Roissy-CDG). This site is the most important package sorting warehouse in France for FedEx and employs around 1,800 people of about 2,500 total in France.

FedEx European hub in will be expanded to meet demands of European businesses: the cost is evaluated at €80 million, financed by Aéroports de Paris, the Paris airports authority (that also operates Orly and Le Bourget airports). The package-sorting facility will be expanded from 49,600 to 72,000 square metres, the whole FedEx plant being 77,000 square metres. On the other hand, FedEx announced it will build a “State-of-the-Art, Environmentally-Friendly Facility” in Cologne, Germany. Construction is expected to be finished in September 2009 in Roissy-CDG airport (started in November 2007) and by spring 2010 in Cologne.

In Paris, this will increase package handling capacity by 31%, from 24,000 to 31,500 per hour. Most of the construction work has been done, some parking areas still need to be built, and then, the package sorting and dispatching system will be installed, by 2009. Since it entered the French market in 1985, FedEx never stopped growing. The company innaugurated its Roissy-CDG hub in 1999, which was, at that time the biggest FedEx hub outside the United States, and already represents a €200 million investment since 1999. (more…)