It won’t take long. The French are already feeling the consequences of the war in Ukraine on their fuel bills. The invasion launched by Russia on February 24 caused a boom in oil prices. The effect is particularly strong on the price of diesel, of which Russia is a major exporter. As a result, during the weekend of March 12 and 13, most service station signs displayed prices above 2 euros per liter.
To measure the repercussions of these increases on the daily life of the French, franceinfo has calculated the average fuel cost of a month of home-work journeys (see the methodology at the end of the article). These round trips “represent nearly 30% of French car trips“, according to the economist Frédéric Héran.
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These calculations are established according to the municipalities of residence of the assets, so as to highlight the disparities between the territories. The result, visible on the map below, shows the difference, in euros, in the cost of a month of home-work journeys, between 2022 and 2021, for workers in each municipality in metropolitan France. Everywhere, these monthly fuel expenses are on the rise and the national average is approaching 100 euros, as of March 14. The difference over one year exceeds 36 euros in half of the municipalities of France and Corsica. It crosses 46 euros in 20% of them.
The distant peri-urban area is bearing the full brunt of the rise
It is about forty kilometers from urban centers that the municipalities most affected by the rise in fuel prices are concentrated. The phenomenon is clearly visible around Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lyon and Strasbourg. Evidenced by the red circles that surround these cities on our map.
The town of Belin-Béliet (Gironde), which has just over 5,000 inhabitants, is a good example. In this small town, the car is used by more than 90% of working people to go to work and half of the inhabitants drive at least 80 km round trip per day for these journeys. This is explained by the attraction of the Bordeaux conurbation, located 50 kilometers away but accessible in 50 minutes by motorway. In addition, 71% of residents drive a diesel vehicle, a fuel whose price has increased faster than gasoline. As a result, the monthly fuel budget jumped by 69 euros over one year, placing the municipality among the 3% with the highest increase.
“These municipalities located about forty kilometers from the big cities are in strong developmentdetails Bernard Jullien, transport economist at the University of Bordeaux at franceinfo. There are people from the lower middle classes who move away from the big cities to be able to afford a house that they cannot afford near the cities. In return, they do a lot of kilometres, often with old cars, because they don’t necessarily have the budget to buy a new one.”
The phenomenon also concerns the Paris region, but the peri-urban municipalities most affected by the rise in prices at the pump are further away, at least 60 kilometers from the capital. “These are often people who work in the suburbs but live in the distant suburbs, on the borders of Île-de-France”, says Bernard Jullien.
Major cities less affected
Contrary to their distant periphery, the big cities are rather spared by the rise in prices. The fifteen municipalities with the most assets, and therefore the most populated, are among the 15% least affected. And the 60 cities with more than 25,000 workers are all among the 30% of the least affected municipalities. For these city dwellers, the increase in the monthly fuel budget over one year is around 19 euros, against more than 36 euros nationally. In Perpignan, Dijon, Clermont-Ferrand or even Paris, the average increase does not exceed 15.50 euros monthly.
This is explained by the generally shorter distance traveled to get to work in these agglomerations. In these 60 municipalities with more than 25,000 workers, half of the inhabitants travel less than eleven kilometers to get to work, while the national median is close to twenty kilometers.
The possibility of doing without the car is also much greater in these cities: while this means of transport is used by 90% of the population to get to work outside urban centers, this figure drops to just under 60% in big cities. Nearly four out of ten inhabitants are therefore not at all affected by the rise in fuel prices to go to work in urban centres.
Cross-border workers pay a high price
Some border areas stand out in dark red on this map, especially near Luxembourg and Switzerland. As INSEE explains, this is where the most cross-border workers live.
At the Luxembourg border, in the north of Meurthe-et-Moselle and the north-west of Moselle, there is a high concentration of municipalities very affected by the rise in fuel prices. The city of Sierck-les-Bains, for example, saw the fuel budget for workers increase by nearly 60 euros. Near Switzerland, the east of the Doubs also concentrates municipalities very marked by soaring prices at the pump. Pontarlier is one of the 20% of municipalities most affected nationally, with an increase of more than 47 euros.
As Bernard Julien explains, “cross-border workers in Switzerland or Luxembourg often benefit from a significantly higher salary and it is therefore profitable for them to drive more to be able to access this job”.
The war in Ukraine drives up the bill
Analysis of the evolution of the fuel cost of travel to work shows that the bill has increased since January 2022. According to data aggregated by franceinfo, at the start of the year, the cost of a month of travel to work exceeded 86 euros per working person in half of the municipalities of metropolitan France, applying the prices at the pump of January 1, 2022. As of March 14, the bill rose to more than 115 euros in these same municipalities, an increase by almost 34%.
The effect of the war in Ukraine is particularly palpable, as shown by the theoretical variation in the cost of a month’s worth depending on day-to-day pump prices. The curve below represents the evolution of this bill for all assets in mainland France.
However, the trend was already towards a gradual increase throughout 2021. Starting from more than 60 euros on January 1, 2021, monthly expenses per worker crossed 75 euros in October and November. But these increases remained moderate in the face of the surges observed since the start of 2022. As of January 31, the average cost of a month of home-to-work travel already exceeded 80 euros. The outbreak has been even more severe since early March. The bill exceeded 90 euros on March 9 and approached 100 euros on March 14, the date of the last readings studied in our simulation.
Methodology
This work is based on the database of mobility flows of “home-work trips” for the year 2018, published by INSEE. This database, compiled from the results of the population census, provides the list of the municipalities of residence and work of the entire active population aged 15 and over and having a job, as well as the mode of transport used for commuting.
From this base, we have isolated working people aged 15 to 64 exercising a full-time activity, residing in metropolitan France and who use a motorized vehicle with two or four wheels to travel between their home and their place of work. . We then traced the road routes from municipality to municipality using the online tools of the OpenStreetMap collaborative mapping project. In total, nearly one million routes have been calculated and reported in kilometer distances. We ruled out very long distance journeys (more than 100 kilometres).
For cross-border workers, only journeys to Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Monaco could be calculated. INSEE does not provide the list of work municipalities in Spain or Italy for workers residing in France. These are therefore not included in our calculations.
We then established the average consumption of cars by municipality. For this, we relied on data from the Ministry of Energy Transition, in particular the annual traffic report which gives the average consumption of the different types of vehicles per kilometre. We then weighted these figures according to the composition of the car fleet by municipality, that is to say the share of petrol, diesel or electric vehicles. We can therefore establish how much a car or motorcycle consumes on average unleaded or diesel fuel per kilometer per municipality.
Prices at the pump were calculated using daily readings published in the form of a database by the Ministry of the Economy. This database is made up of feedback from service stations, which are required to communicate their prices when they sell more than 500 m³ of fuel per year. Outlying prices were discarded and values were smoothed over seven days to smooth out daily variations. Motorway stations have been removed. For each year, only the stations having published updates each month were retained.
In accordance with a recent INSEE study on the territorial disparity in fuel prices, we have also grouped service stations according to their degree of rurality. Prices are generally lower in urban areas than in rural areas. Depending on the population density of the intercommunity in which they are located, each service station has therefore been classified as “dense” or “sparse” territory. Then an average daily price was calculated for each of these two density categories at the departmental level, so as to apply the prices of stations located in urban areas for people who live in a rural area and who go to work in an urban area. .
The calculation of one month’s fuel expenditure was finally established by counting 22 days worked per employee, at the rate of one home-to-work round trip per day and per employee.