for Jean Viard, “It corresponds to a fashion for intelligent tourism, we want to go on a trip, we don’t want to pollute”

Traveling at night has become fashionable again. What should we think about it in relation to our lifestyle? Decryption with sociologist Jean Viard.

Residents of Rennes are demonstrating today to demand that a night train pass through their station. Some did the same in Brest last week, and we saw this same type of demonstration in Nancy, or even in Lyon, last month. Movements supported by environmental associations like Greenpeace, very often, while night train lines have also recently reopened: Paris-Bayonne, Paris-Aurillac, Paris-Berlin.

franceinfo: How can we explain this renewed popularity of the night train in France?

Jean Viard: You always have to be relative, the number of people who take the night train has doubled. We went from approximately 350,000 to 700,000 between 2019 and today. But there is also a question of number of lines. We restored 129 cars, to be completely precise. Afterwards, there were 122 million TGV customers the same year. So we have to keep the orders of magnitude to realize that the night train is a demand. Moreover, the night trains all leave Paris to go south. It has a little weekend feel to it.

The second thing is, basically, why had we stopped the night train? We stopped it when we launched the TGV in the 1980s, when low-cost flights were cheaper than night trains. And then because there were also security problems, there were several cases of women being attacked, rapes, there was a feeling of insecurity, so all that added up. And then the values ​​of the 80s were the speed and the development, obviously, of the automobile. So we wanted to go fast, we wanted to go far, etc.

And we have changed worlds. Even if most people do not take the night train, but it is growing, we are in an era marked by the question of ecological impact, the night train is much more ecological than the plane, obviously, by the fact that slowness, which refers to Pierre Sansot and his praise of slowness, already goes back 30 years, but slowness can be seen as a positive principle.

The night train is operational. I leave Paris around 10 p.m. I arrive at 6 a.m. in Toulouse or Venice. I won a hotel night, I slept. And then maybe I met people, had coffee, etc. It’s a meeting place. On a plane, you don’t meet anyone. So it’s a trend. But as always, let’s be careful. It’s a trend of big cities going to big cities, for an extremely urban population.

But the Paris-Berlin night train, for example, was abandoned in the 1980s. We see it coming back today. For you, does the night train correspond to the spirit of the times now, and more to the past?

Yes, of course, it corresponds to new requirements, it corresponds to the fact that there are also more and more tourists, and therefore the fact of going to Berlin for example, let’s not kid ourselves, these are trains with a lot of tourism and weekends, so it corresponds to a fashion of intelligent tourism, of people who actually try, such as the development of outdoor campsites, etc.

There are new passions that are linked to our lifestyles. We want to go on a trip, we don’t want to pollute, so how do we manage that? We can see very clearly that the plane, within the French space, has decreased, but not at the global level, there it has increased. The French, when they want to go everywhere, they take the plane, but in France, they tend to take the train.

The SNCF has never had so many customers, and they would have more if they had more cars. They did not foresee this explosion linked to Covid, so they are physically lacking trains at the moment, they are in the process of remanufacturing at full speed, but I believe that they still need two or three years to have oars.

So if there is a change in mentalities which is extremely profound, and the increase in the TGV public, while it is often more expensive than the plane, or the night train which is actually growing a little, it It’s the same question: how to move in a more ecological way in society. And you know, they also say that people who take planes are often guilty. They do it, but they feel guilty. So I would say that the general feeling of society can be measured in these figures.