In France, reflections on road systems today stress a ranked view of infrastructures. Such a viewpoint integrates into the mesh of networks roads that carry heavy traffic and more protected areas laid out according to traffic-calming principles.

National policies are naturally sector-based. This means that special systems are implemented in favour of safety, the environment or the integration of the handicapped in cities. They are in France under the authority of particularly ministries and are implemented by technical services with limited authority. Obviously, local action quickly exceeds the framework of sector-based actions, as it deals with a complex system within which individual and collective regulations are at work.

Several studies have analysed strategic design for travel networks. Beyond the institutional or political quarrels, this type of planning (the PDU is the French LTP) does not result in a rational, linear approach that leads to the laying down of actions responding to objectives defined jointly, but rather proceeds by constructing an “overall project” through the aggregation of various elementary “operational projects”.

In these pragmatic approaches, the planners stop focusing on questions of travel and the functional layout of public spaces to take into account the diversity of values and objectives that dominate urban layout. The design of a tramway and the implementation of a 30 km/h zone have determinants that go beyond their functional characteristics alone. They are part of a new way of imagining the city and contribute to a more qualitative approach in which transportation becomes an urban component among others.

Because I am interested in these questions, my research has progressively led me to look into the transformation of functional approaches to layout – notably of public spaces – into more sensible, multi-criterion approaches integrating what is often referred to with the very generic term of “urban quality”.

These questions are based on various comparisons between European situations in the context of the European DUMAS project (Developing Urban Management and Safety), COST Action C6 (Town and infrastructure planning for safety and urban quality for pedestrians) and the SEGUR research project (Intégration de la Sécurité dans la Gestion Urbaine), then MISTRAL (Aménagement et Intégration de la Sécurité dans la gestion Territoriale) at INRETS.

My visit to London aims at finding differences between our two countries, eg differences between know-how, practices and techniques. My first assumption is that a strong tradition of pragmatic and rational public policy in UK leads to other kind of actions than the French strategy for reducing the number of accidents.

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