Peri-urban mobility: innovating where solutions are lacking

In the urban fringes, between compact cities and scattered countryside, mobility becomes a blind spot in public policies.
Due to a lack of suitable options, residents of these areas, often experiencing rapid population growth, remain dependent on private cars. However, peri-urban areas are a focal point for crucial issues: equal access to services, combating isolation, reducing emissions, and territorial resilience.
In the age of sobriety and digital technology, how can we think differently about everyday mobility?

Massive needs, still underestimated

Today, peri-urban areas are home to a significant proportion of the active middle classes.
These areas, neither dense enough to justify a structuring urban network nor isolated enough to be considered rural, struggle to find their place in mobility schemes. As a result, solo car use dominates, with well-known negative effects—congestion at city entrances, local pollution, energy insecurity, and a sedentary lifestyle.
Added to this is inequality of access to healthcare, employment and public services, particularly for young people, the elderly and non-motorized households.

Local initiatives that are changing the game

In response to this situation, several local authorities are experimenting with innovative solutions. Ille-et-Vilaine is deploying an integrated system combining regular routes, on-demand transport (TAD), and a MaaS platform accessible in sparsely populated areas.
In the Drôme, local cooperatives operate shared shuttles between villages and service centers, with timetables adapted to the local pace of life.
In Île-de-France, the region is testing the adaptation of integrated transport tickets beyond traditional areas, in conjunction with inter-municipal authorities.

So many examples which show that by starting from real uses and not from urban standards, we can design efficient, flexible and appropriate services.

Multiple obstacles: technical, institutional and social

But these experiments remain isolated, often dependent on a driving elected official or temporary funding. The obstacles are numerous:

• Economical, with a high cost per passenger in low-density areas;
• Techniques, due to the lack of interoperable ticketing or shared booking tools;
• Institutional, due to the dispersion of skills between municipalities, intercos, departments and regions.

Furthermore, digital technology, while promising, faces two limitations: network access (white or gray areas) and the digital divide among the public. Integrating MaaS platforms or DTT via apps requires appropriate engineering, digital mediators, and ongoing support.

For sober, territorialized and co-constructed mobility

The future does not lie in copying and pasting urban models. What we need to invent are solutions. modular, scalable, anchored in the local fabric. This requires an integrated vision between urban planning, transport, public services, but also the promotion of bottom-up initiatives (mobility associations, ESS companies, citizen collectives). Third places can play a key role as points of connection and shared governance. The State, via the TENMOD program or the new State-Region plan contracts, has a structuring role to play in equipping, financing and spreading.

Euromove: a space for building collective responses

Thinking about peri-urban mobility means responding to a strong social demand, but also opening a strategic project for ecological transition and territorial cohesion.
Euromove 2026 offers a unique framework for cross-referencing feedback from the field, promoting good practices and laying the foundations for mobility policies adapted to local realities.
For exhibitors—digital companies, service operators, regional start-ups, and engineering firms—it's an opportunity to position themselves at the heart of this contemporary challenge, where the needs are greatest and the development prospects most exciting.