Mobility aids and social integration.

Summary Mobility has become an important issue and a major objective of public policies for poor households. Research has largely shown that the populations furthest from employment are also furthest from a purely spatial point of view. Often located far from employment areas and experiencing greater financial insecurity, the poorest people have more difficulty finding a job, getting to their place of work, accessing public services or local amenities. Some of the literature has sought to explain this spatial segregation, while others have sought to show its negative consequences and the vicious circles in which it traps poverty. This thesis aims to shed specific light on the mobility assistance provided to disadvantaged households. These aids have been developed in France mainly since the 1990s. Although they take different forms, they have the same objective: to promote the spatial mobility of poor households by facilitating access to individual or collective transport. Their implementation is essentially local. Few studies have attempted to measure the consequences of the development of these subsidies. This thesis aims to shed some light on this point. First, we propose a study of the development of these aids since the 1980s and especially the 1990s, starting with a national impulse, but with very varied local applications. We seek to measure the extent to which these aids have been able to interact with the national welfare system as well as with other local aids provided by the different communities. We show that these aids may have contributed to reinforcing threshold effects and poverty traps that were specific to the RMI mechanism and that led to its replacement by the RSA. We also show that this major reform of national welfare has had a knock-on effect on local welfare, and specifically on transport benefits. The second chapter focuses on an aspect ignored in chapter 1, that of non-use of social assistance. The originality of our work is to focus on a specific form of transport assistance (the Forfait Gratuité Transport in the Île de France region) and to study non-use of this assistance by integrating a double spatial dimension: first, the distance between recipients and the public transport network, which is likely to explain lower use. The second is the influence of the geographical environment and, in particular, of diffusion effects on awareness of and demand for such assistance. The last two chapters propose experimental evaluations of mobility aids aimed at young dropouts who have left the school system and are neither in training nor in employment. For these young people, mobility is central to their hopes of professional and social integration. We first evaluate sixteen different actions proposed by different actors to promote mobility and show a positive effect, although it is contrasted: low intensity aids have less effect than more intense aids. This observation is largely confirmed in the fourth chapter, which evaluates the Voluntary Military Service experiment. The young people selected receive general and vocational training as well as preparation for their driver's license. This extremely intense program, in which the young people are supervised by military personnel, yields impressive results in terms of professional integration and, above all, in obtaining a driver's license. In order for mobility assistance policies to be effective, both in terms of mobility and integration, we can conclude that it is better to concentrate resources on the most vulnerable.