As France’s railway strike enters the third month — services are suspended two of every five days until the end of June — carpooling has emerged as the best alternative to most affected commuters. The state-owned French National Railway Company (SNCF), reeling under a debt of €46.6 billion ($54 billion), is at the heart of French daily life with around 3.8 million passengers travelling in 11,000 trains. Unions are in a standoff with the French government over the proposed labour reforms and opening up of the sector. Plans are afoot to put new hires on contracts and phase out special SNCF contracts, which allow employees to retire at 52, benefit from automatic annual pay rises and 28 days of paid annual leave. As the strike drags on, carpooling services such as BlaBlaCar and IDVroom say there’s is a surge in their users.
“There were 3,50,000 new members on BlaBlaCar in April, which is equivalent to the city of Nice. Over 2 million used the platform in a single month — the capacity of more than 4,000 TGV trains,” said Robert Morel of BlaBlaCar. This writer recently used carpooling services during a 143-km journey from Paris to Reims, Champagne, for €10. On the high-speed TGV trains operated by SNCF, the ticket cost for the distance would have been €20-30. Though carpooling takes an hour longer, there aren’t other well-priced options available on strike days.
According to a 2011 SNCF report, competition in the domestic passenger market was actually with private cars, the main mode of transport. In 2017, there were 32.1 million registered cars in France, a ready market for carpooling and car-sharing services. In France, revenue in this segment will grow from $642 million in 2018 to $1.04 billion by 2022, estimates market research portal Statista. IDVroom, SNCF’s own carpooling service that was launched in 2014, has over 6,70,000 users, with 1,50,000 new sign-ups since the beginning of the strike.
Google searches for “covoiturage”, or carpool, reached a peak on April 3, as the strike and protest marches brought the country to a screeching halt with only one of six TGV trains operating. On that day, traffic on BlaBlaCar — which has 14 million users in France — increased by six times, with over 23,000 new sign ups, the highest in its history. On every strike day, the number of people using the platform has doubled, Mr. Morel said.
Complementary service
Harish Sriram, a Paris-based product manager, was travelling on one of the strike days and was stranded 490 km away in Strasbourg. “Carpooling was the only way to reach Paris,” he said. Mr. Sriram’s carpool host admitted that he had joined the app only to help people through the strikes.
“Carpooling is a not just an alternative to public transport but also complementary,” said Eléonore Gérard of IDVroom. However, more cars has certainly meant congestion on roads. “When the strike was at its peak, I worked from home. Carpooling was simply not an option due to traffic,” said Marc Fontaine, 44, a software engineer in Paris.
According to Sytadin, which monitors real-time traffic in Île-de-France, the region saw over 400 km of cumulative traffic congestion on a single day in April. In the face of the labour reforms and the 2020 deadline of EU’s Fourth Railway Package, which aims to increase competitiveness by creating a single market for railways, the fate of SNCF may certainly not be the same. But carpooling services are definitely making hay while the sun shines.
