MOROCCO IS ACCELERATING! feature - Alstom

Fabienne Keller,
Senator for the Bas-Rhin.
1979: École polytechnique.
1979: Corvette Captain French
Navy Reserve.
1984: École nationale du génie
rural, des eaux et des forêts.
1985: Master of Arts in Economics
(Berkeley).
1985: Responsible for managing
the French cereal market
at the Ministry of Agriculture.
1988: Responsible for fi nance
for the agriculture and fi shing sector
of the Treasury Department
of the Ministry of Finance.
1989: Managing Director
Crédit Industriel d’Alsace-Lorraine.
1996: Managing Director
Crédit Commercial de France.
2001: Mayor of Strasbourg
and President Deligate of
the Communauté urbaine
de Strasbourg.
2005: Senator for the Bas-Rhin.
Some two billion passengers come and go
each year in the 3,000 stations of the French
network (ref. box page 30). A fi gure that
is even higher if one includes non-travellers,
but a fi gure that is diffi cult to ascertain
for the entire country. Measurements carried
out at Lyon Part-Dieu, for example, show
that 40% of the people in the station are not
there to take a train. For Fabienne Keller,
this station, located in the heart of
a business district, is also a stopping-off
place for shopping and services.
Stations – and in particular major stations –
are more than just rail centres:
“The notion of a ‘major station’ does not
refer to the station’s size but above all
to the meeting, in addition to rail, of different
modes of transport. The major station
therefore always combines intermodality
and a service offer that aims to make
waiting time both agreeable and productive.”
In a station such as Strasbourg, a town
where Fabienne Keller was the Mayor
for a long time, we therefore
fi nd very high-speed, mainline and regional
line rail transportation, plus regional
and intercommunal transport by bus,
tramway or metro, and not forgetting bicycles,
less encumbering than cars. “Lastly,”
she recalls, “we also fi nd people on foot,
who are often forgotten in stations. In fact,
the main priority in developing stations
should be the person with reduced mobility,
the person on foot with their luggage,
gentle modes of transport, such as bicycles,
then collective, urban and interurban modes,
taxis, car sharing, carpooling and, last of all,
the individual car occupant who leaves,
when he parks at a station, a 16 m 2 mark.
This order of priorities should dictate
distances to the major station’s platforms:
bicycle ranks are placed nearest,
then short-term parking and car sharing,
taxis, with collective access very close
and then, further away, parking space
for individual parking.” �
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