Paradoxically, we are living in a time where data has never been so abundant. The concepts of “smart city” or “smart city” have saturated public discourse for over a decade. However, when it comes to designing public spaces on a daily basis, a large part of investment decisions are still made blindly.
Whether creating a new bike path, pedestrianizing a city center or managing access to a sensitive natural area, local decision-makers are running up against an invisible wall: the lack of objective perspective on what is really happening on the ground. Very often, urban or natural development is based on intuitions, complaints from very vocal residents, or obsolete theoretical models.
This deficit in Land usage data is not just a technical detail. This is a major strategic flaw that leads to inadequate investments, unresolved conflicts of use and premature wear and tear of infrastructure. Understanding why this data is lacking is the first step in rethinking the evaluation of our local public policies.
Most local authorities think they have sufficient data to manage their territory. They are based on household-travel surveys, INSEE statistics, statistics from INSEE, GPS data from navigation applications, or even on the boundaries of telecom networks.
This information is valuable, but it suffers from a fundamental limitation: it offers a macroscopic view. Mobile phone data, for example, is excellent for quantifying tourist flows across a region or department over an extended weekend. On the other hand, they are completely unable to tell you whether visitors are taking the North Coastal Trail or the South Trail, whether they are traveling on foot or by bike, and at what specific time the saturation of a specific junction occurs.
For their part, declarative surveys or occasional manual counts (carried out over half a day by agents posted at a crossroads) only provide an instantaneous photograph, often biased by the weather of the day or by an exceptional event.
The real need of a community is not to know how many inhabitants own a bike, but to measure the real and continuous intensity of use of a specific section, day and night, on Tuesday in November as well as on Sunday in November and Sunday in the middle of August. It is this local granularity that is sorely lacking in the appeal.
The lack of continuous measurement in the field generates three blind spots that directly penalize territorial management.
The first concerns the inability to objectify overattendance. In natural areas or tourist sites, human pressure is often treated from the angle of “feeling”. Residents complain of a suffocating influx, while economic actors are calling for more visitors. Without accurate counting of real flows, the community navigates by sight. It then risks taking disproportionate measures (such as the total ban on a site) or, conversely, allowing the irreversible degradation of biodiversity or roads to continue.
The second blind spot is the underutilized layout syndrome. The history of urban planning is marked by deserted mineral public squares and bike paths drawn in the wrong place. A layout designed on plan without a detailed understanding of the “lines of desire” — these natural paths spontaneously taken by users — is likely to miss its target. Without prior data on the soft mobility habits of a neighborhood, the risk is to invest hundreds of thousands of euros in infrastructure that no one will use, thus fueling the cynicism of taxpayers.
Finally, the third blind spot lies in the invisibility of conflicts of use. Soft mobility has transformed our city centers and our greenways. Pedestrians, cyclists, scooters and motorized vehicles now live together in confined spaces. When an accident or tension occurs, the absence of differentiated data (knowing how to distinguish the share of pedestrians from that of bicycles on a shared axis) prevents a calibrated response from being provided. We then legislate urgently, without understanding the real dynamics of flows.
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