Mobile futures through present behaviours and discourses

In mobility studies, the purposes of scientific methods are generally the description and better understanding of the present and the past. There is a gap between such approaches and the need planners have to orientate action toward the future in the short, medium or long term. To fill this gap, researchers have to use and project their knowledge toward the future. This chapter then proposes to present some learnings on past and present behaviours and discourses on mobility. On the basis of such elements, it becomes possible to think about mobile futures. That is what I propose to do in the final part, with the presentation of three scenarios on mobile futures, based on a research financed by SNCF in 2015 for the Paris climate conference COP21. The point here is not to forecast mobile futures, but to think about possible futures and policies to accompany or avoid them