Territorial Coherence Scheme: defining the future of the Greater Paris Metropolis

The Greater Paris Metropolis develops major planning documents that organise the urban dense area for the coming years in areas such as transport, nature in the city, risk prevention, ecological transition, housing or digital. All these strategic frameworks depend on the same frame of reference, which is the basis of this planning. This is the Territorial Coherence Scheme (SCoT), our master plan which is the instrument for defining and aligning all metropolitan policies.

The Sustainable Development and Planning Project, a core document of the SCoT, which constitutes the metropolitan project, defines the strengthening of accessibility for all places by public transport and forging links between territories as one of the 12 priorities of the SCoT. It is also a matter of action for air quality, the transformation of modes of movement and the calming of public space.

In the Greater Paris Metropolis, public transport is the mode of travel the most used in front of walking and car. However, the service of the public transport and active modes is not uniform throughout the territory and participates social and geographical imbalances, including access to employment, training, health facilities and services.

It is essential to rethink the intermodality of travel, to develop mobility services for the benefit of active modes (factors for improving population health) in public spaces, including road and motorway infrastructure. Given the density and importance of the magistral network in the metropolitan area, which ensures national and international traffic issues, the transformation process must be gradual and adapted. The SCoT’s ambition is to reconcile the two approaches.

The development and complementarity of transport modes are therefore major challenges for the Metropolis, both in terms of combating climate change and improving the quality of life. As such, the Grand Paris Express is a structuring project that will facilitate the daily journeys of many metropolitans by connecting all the territories of the Greater Paris Metropolis.

In response to this guidance, the SCoT shall, inter alia, lay down provisions to:

• Create the “city of the quarter hour” by supporting major transport infrastructure projects, such as the Grand Paris Express, so that all places in the metropolis are accessible by public transport.
• To promote sustainable mobility by creating the necessary conditions for the development of active modes, intermodality and shared modes. This includes transforming major roads and urban infrastructure (motorways, RN, RD...) into urban boulevards.
• Promote marketability by adapting public spaces to pedestrians and people with reduced mobility, reducing urban outages and nuisances, and reducing the car’s place in the city.

The SCoT Guidance and Objectives Document, which is the regulatory and enforceable part, prescribes a set of rules that contribute to the achievement of these objectives:

• Fitting-out operations must be an opportunity to structure the viaire network and to accommodate all mobility and multiple uses ;
• The qualitative urban integration of structuring motorways and national roads needs to be improved. The transformation and requalification of the other major roads (ex-RN and RD, peripheral boulevard) into “urban boulevards of Metropolis” are encouraged. The objectives are: soothing traffic; multiple uses (collective transport, active modes, pedestrians and persons with reduced mobility); plantings and embellishment of spaces.
• The reduction of urban cuts through the construction of bridges, infrastructure crossings and watercourses,
• The development of intermodality, and the integration of new mobility services (carpooling, shared mobility, charging stations, bicycle parking, etc.) in the public area, in existing car parks, around railway stations, and at the crossing points of networks (large crossroads, interchanges, airports, etc.).
• The development of routes for active modes.
• Support for the development of the daily use of bicycles through the creation of a structuring metropolitan cycling network; the development of calmed traffic areas (zones 30, meeting areas); an offer of bicycle parking in public and private spaces.

Municipalities and other intercommunalities will have to implement the SCoT requirements, including in their local scale plan, and adapting them in the light of local specificities and specific territorial contexts.

Images: SCoT, Métropole du Grand Paris