The episode in detail
Lucas Hernandez covers the transport sector at the Haut Conseil pour le climat, the independent body tasked with assessing French public climate policy. Trained as an economist, and formerly with the RATP group, he works on transport decarbonisation using the figures from the institution’s annual report. Those figures say two things at once: transport is France’s top emitting sector, and cycling holds a modest share of the solution.
Where transport decarbonisation stands in France
The Haut Conseil pour le climat’s 2025 annual report addresses the need to relaunch climate action as impacts worsen and steering weakens. French emissions fell by 1.8% in 2024, against 6.8% in 2023. To meet the 2030 targets, the reduction would need to be more than twice what was achieved in 2024.
The Haut Conseil estimates that around two-thirds of the 2024 decline came not from public policy, but from a mild winter and a slowdown in economic activity. In 2023, this non-structural share already reached at least a third. Lucas Hernandez describes a decline that is real but fragile, one that needs structural measures to hold.
34% of French emissions come from transport
Transport is France’s top emitting sector, at 34% of the total, around 125 megatonnes of CO2 equivalent. On top of that come just over 17 million tonnes from international aviation and just under 4 million tonnes from international shipping, counted separately. Cars account for roughly half of transport emissions. Passenger travel by car and van alone makes up just over 20% of France’s emissions.
A rate of decline three to four times too slow
Since 2019, transport emissions have fallen by an average of 1.8 megatonnes a year. In 2023, the decline reached 5.6 megatonnes, close to the rate needed. In 2024, it dropped back to around 1.5 megatonnes.
“Transport emissions, generally speaking, are falling quite slowly. On average, by 1.8 megatonnes a year since 2019. We’d need to go three to four times faster to meet the targets.”
The draft third national low-carbon strategy sets the target: 45 million tonnes to be cut from transport between 2019 and 2030. Of those 45, 7 million tonnes are attributed to modal shift and 5 million to sufficiency measures.
Active mobility rather than soft mobility
Vocabulary matters for anyone working with these figures. The term “soft mobility” can include, depending on usage, carpooling or electric cars, which blurs comparisons.
“I prefer to talk about active mobility rather than soft mobility, because the definition is a bit more precise, I find. It’s about needing human force to move the vehicle, and calling it active also gives it a slightly positive angle.”
The electrically assisted bike falls within this scope. It extends the range of journeys, the speed, and the number of people able to use a bike, making it a complement to the mechanical bike.
What cycling and walking can cut from emissions
In 2019, the national personal mobility survey attributed 26% of trips and 4% of kilometres travelled in everyday mobility to active modes. Cycling alone accounted for 2 to 3% of trips and around 1% of kilometres, a figure the guest gives with caution.
ADEME has put a figure on the potential in two ways. Taking the best cycling policy found in France and rolling it out across the country, local mobility emissions would fall by 15%. Building hypotheses and scenarios from travel patterns, the potential rises to 30%. These percentages cover everyday mobility, excluding long distance, aviation and journeys over 100 kilometres.
The real place of cycling in transport decarbonisation
“Cycling isn’t the main lever for cutting emissions, but it can still play a fairly significant role, on top of being accessible and bringing many other co-benefits.”
Cars account for 80% of kilometres travelled in France. Even with an ambitious modal shift, the fleet will need to be electrified: an electric car emits two to five times less than a petrol or diesel car over its full life cycle. Lucas Hernandez sets out a limit that cyclists rarely hear. Professional travel makes up a third of passenger transport emissions, and most of it happens over trips of 10 to 80 kilometres, hard to cover by bike.
Ten minutes by bike from a station
The way people get to train stations changes the scale of the reasoning.
“It increases the potential use of the train, because within 10 minutes by bike of a station, you draw in far more people than those within 10 minutes on foot.”
The same calculation applies to express coaches. It points to a question of spatial planning that the episode addresses head on: retail zones on the outskirts, employment zones linked by fast roads, schools moved out of town centres. These choices lengthened distances well before Covid, and the tax framework does not yet push to shorten them.
The moments when people change how they travel
A study cited in the episode shows the scale of the untapped potential. More than 60% of employees at multi-site companies, a retailer with its shops or a bank with its branches, could switch sites while keeping the same job and employer. Among them, one in two would gain more than 12 kilometres on their home-to-work commute.
“Modal shift mostly happens around changes in habit. So moving house, or changing job, those are the moments when we rethink how we travel.”
What remains is public responsibility, which Lucas Hernandez places ahead of individual action. Building cycling infrastructure that is safe, accessible and effective is a matter for public policy, and without it people are far less likely to choose the bike.
