Here is a study which confirms what we already knew but which politicians and a few oddballs pretend not to see: the car remains the most popular mode of individual travel.
The company Enterprise Mobility, a provider of mobility solutions, questioned the French - a sample of 2,232 people, including 2,002 owning at least one vehicle - about their relationship with the automobile and their travel habits.
The result was not long in coming: 75% of French people need their car to get to work.
Nearly 80% of them use it to visit relatives, go shopping or go to medical consultations.
We can deplore this but it attests to a reality: the further we move from urban centers, the more the car becomes essential to our travels.
The study shows that 90% of residents of rural communities are dependent on their vehicle compared to 66% in the Paris metropolitan area, for example.
By seeing individual mobility through the prism of large cities, our leaders end up having a distorted vision of the movement of the French.
Not everyone lives in Paris, Lyon, Marseille or Strasbourg.
Not everyone can travel by bike or take public transport either.
We are thinking in particular of the elderly and people with reduced mobility for whom access to alternative transport remains complicated.
Cascading delays, rampant insecurity, promiscuity: public transport also has its flaws.
In the provinces, the lack of public transport solutions requires the use of the car.
It remains the safest way to get around.
The automobile is freedom.
We are not dependent on a time or place of departure and arrival.
Even fewer strikers as the recent movement of SNCF controllers has just reminded us.
With the car, we go where we want, when we want.
A freedom that sometimes annoys and that some would like to restrict or even repress.
For having neglected the French relationship with the automobile by lowering the speed limit on the secondary network and increasing the price of fuel, former Prime Minister Édouard Philippe set fire to the powder, triggering the Yellow Vest movement.
Would he be able to repeat such a feat?
The French will have to remember this when the time comes.
Through its study, Enterprise Mobility wanted to draw attention to multimodal travel (the use of shared transport) which represents a solution to reduce the number of vehicles in circulation and the carbon footprint.
According to the mobility operator, a carpooling vehicle represents 22 fewer individual vehicles on the road!