Transportation faces major stakes, in particular economical stakes (globalization, service society, energy cost increase, scarce infrastructure funding), social stakes (access inequities, mobility for the disabled, road safety, new infrastructure acceptance) and environmental stakes (end of easy oil resources, climate change, local air pollution).

To fix those stakes, public policies seek to curb transport system evolution to be more economically, socially and environmentally sustainable with higher quality. Mobility behavior also change with other, demographical and societal factors. In addition, transportation demand is strongly linked with the land use system. All those dynamics raise important research questions that have been investigated by DEST for many years, and of course is part of the University Gustave Eiffel scientific strategy.

DEST contributes to all three thematic fields of AME department:

• Mobility characteristics and its determinants (mobility observation methods, personal mobility determinants and evolution)
• Characterization and evaluation of impacts (transportation environmental and social diagnoses)
• Mobility policies and land planning (public policy construction process and public debate, transportation policy evaluation, both infrastructures and road safety).

History and location

Laboratory Social and Economical Transportation Dynamics (DEST) (formerly Department Transportation Economy and Sociology) was created by the French National Institute for Transportation and Safety Research (INRETS) in 1985. DEST is now one of the nine laboratories composing Department Planning, Mobility and Environment (AME) created in 2012 at IFSTTAR, now University Gustave Eiffel.

Laboratory DEST is located in Champs-sur-Marne, Marne-la-Vallée, near Paris.