French Expert Shares Keen Perspectives on Creating Smart Living Spaces and Transportation Systems

Jean Poulit’s long, distinguished government career in France, mainly as a transportation and urban planner, gave him unique insights into where and how far people will travel for work, recreation, and shopping. In Connecting People While Preserving the Planet: Essays on Sustainable Development, a new ESRI Press book, Poulit presents his vision of building intelligent and healthy living spaces and transportation systems to protect the environment and spur economic growth.

Poulit’s methodologies and findings show how people’s travel behavior affects the economy, job opportunities, and the environment. While Poulit focuses on France and the European Union, his wealth of knowledge should prove illuminating to futurists, transportation officials, urban planners, government officials, and environmentalists worldwide.

Poulit writes that four in-depth transportation surveys conducted between 1976 and 2001 in France provided data about the number of trips people took daily and the distances they traveled by foot, on public transportation, and in motorized vehicles. The results showed that they’re reaching newer and more far-flung destinations to shop, seek better jobs, and enjoy nature because of improved transportation systems, even though they spend about the same amount of time in transit as they did more than 20 years ago. In turn, this generates more wealth for a country, he writes.

Though it runs counter to popular belief, even clogged freeways and packed commuter trains are very useful, generating nearly half a nation’s wealth by interconnecting people and facilitating exchanges of know-how between them, Poulit says. And, according to the author, access to natural spaces, such as parks, rivers, beaches, and mountains, is increasing constantly, creating greater well-being.

Poulit also discusses transportation’s negative effects on the environment and makes a case for improving mass transit, adding bullet trains, and combating the greenhouse effect by promoting vehicles that rely on hydrogen and fuel cells.

Poulit’s book was originally published in French in 2005 by Bourin Éditeur, Paris, under the title Le territoire des hommes: La création de richesse, d'emplois et de bien-être au sein d'une planète préservée (The Territory of Men: The Creation of Wealth, Jobs, and Prosperity in a World Preserved).

The inventor of Bison Futé (Smart Buffalo), a system that alerts travelers to avoid traffic jams during peak vacation travel, Poulit served in many important French government posts. He was director general of the Public Development Authority in charge of developing Marne-la-Vallée, a new town on the eastern side of Paris that includes Disneyland Paris. As head of the French Agency for Energy Saving, he initiated La Chasse au Gaspi (Chase Waste), a national energy conservation program.

Today he is vice president of international affairs for the Association Française de l’Information Géographique (AFIGEO). He also works as an independent consultant, focusing on urbanism, transport, and geographic information system (GIS) technology.

Internet: www.esri.com/esripress