Opponents of the construction of the A69 motorway are playing their last card. Monday, June 19, Me Alice Terrasse, mandated by several environmental associations opposed to the A69 (including Attac, France nature environment, Friends of the Earth), must file an appeal for cancellation of the environmental authorization issued by the prefect of Tarn to the administrative court of Toulouse, as well as another appeal against the project to create two lanes for the A680 between Castelmaurou and Toulouse. These two decrees, published in March, had already made it possible to begin the work.
The demonstration of April 22, at the call of the collective of opponents La Voie est libre, which brought together between 4,500 and 8,200 people in the Tarn, did not change the government’s mind. The Ministry of Transport had examined, in January, the highway projects in progress to verify their relevance “in the light of current issues”. But the A69 is not affected because a contract has already been signed with the concessionaire, Atosca, which has started the work.
The thirty-year-old project experienced a strong acceleration under Emmanuel Macron’s first five-year term. The original idea, in 1994, was to widen the national road, the RN126, which already largely provides the Toulouse-Castres link, to two lanes. But in 2010, the public authorities opted for a concession, private and toll motorway. The concession agreement, published in April 2022, gives Atosca the task of building and operating this 53-kilometre motorway for fifty-five years, the commissioning of which is scheduled for 2025. The cost is estimated at 450 million euros. euros, including 23 million in public money.
Locally, the project is controversial: is it a “21st century, virtuous highway” or a “symbol of what should no longer be done”? Update on the main arguments developed.
“This highway is vital” to restore attractiveness to the south of the Tarn, where 200,000 inhabitants live, half of whom live in the Castres-Mazamet basin, according to Christophe Ramond, socialist president of the department. Like other local elected officials, he relies on a survey by the Tarn Chamber of Commerce and Industry according to which business creations increased more between 2013 and 2023 near Albi, a city linked to Toulouse by the motorway, only near Castres.
However, the public inquiry report on the A69 assures that “no concrete demonstration [of a favorable economic impact] is presented nor any costing evaluated” in the project. Atosca has certainly advertised about a thousand jobs, but only at the time of the works.
Researchers from the National University Institute Champollion, in Albi, recently denounced the employment argument, assuring that “territorial planning research has never shown that the creation of a transport infrastructure was automatically synonymous social and economic development for the territories concerned”. Maxime Genevrier, professor of town planning associated with Lettres Sorbonne University, explained to France 3 that the creation of this highway would “generate developments, of course, but outside the city centers” and that Castres would become “more than today a suburban town in the Toulouse region”.
On its site, Atosca ensures that journeys between Toulouse and Castres will be “reduced from twenty-five minutes (off-peak hours) to thirty-five minutes (at peak hours)”. But this theoretical time saving is based on very optimistic assumptions.
In the impact study, the company retains an average speed of 128 km / h, saying it is based on that of the A68 between Toulouse and Albi. But it does not take into account any slowdowns or the weather (110 km/h in the event of rain). By way of comparison, the National Interministerial Road Safety Observatory (ONISR) estimated the average speed on the motorway at 118 km/h in 2021.
By taking only the 53 kilometers of the future motorway, the theoretical time saving is closer to twenty minutes, according to the various calculations that we have been able to carry out. To achieve a gain of thirty-five minutes, the company takes into account ten minutes of slowdown at the level of the activity zone at the entrance to Castres on the current RN126 without considering that the arrival in Castres by the future motorway can also be slowed down, or that these new lanes are congested at the entrance to Toulouse.
One thing is certain: vehicles that do not want to take the motorway will lose twelve minutes on the Toulouse-Castres route, because the Soual and Puylaurens bypasses, built in the 2000s with public money, will become chargeable. To keep the current journey time, you will have to take the A69 for 11 kilometers by paying 1.40 euros.
For years, opponents of the project have claimed that a motorway is not necessary because the current RN126 is not congested. The impact study refers to traffic “relatively stable in its central part”, with an average of 8,000 light vehicles and 700 heavy goods vehicles each day, and a little denser “around Castres with around 15,000 light vehicles and 1 000 heavy goods vehicles”. This remains a modest flow compared to other nearby cities: Lourdes and its 20,798 vehicles or Albi with its 44,729 passages on the ring road, according to the traffic census in 2020.
Atosca expects 10,300 vehicles per day as soon as the A69 enters service, then 12,000 in 2045, which is still quite low for a motorway. “This is primarily intended to secure journeys, provide comfort and save time,” retorted Atosca CEO Martial Gerlinger, interviewed by Le Monde. Traffic on the RN126 would be down sharply with between 2,000 and 4,000 vehicles per day, according to these projections. Unless the creation of a new axis leads to induced traffic, by increasing the total number of users.
Opponents of the project believe that the existing national road could have been redeveloped. In December 2016, fifteen communities (Teulat, Lacroisille, Appelle, etc.) carried out a pre-study envisaging several developments of the RN126, such as the creation of a third lane in Verfeil (Haute-Garonne), the removal of crossroads at lights and the creation of a buried passage in Saïx (Tarn). The budget was estimated at 179 million euros, half that of the current project. But it would have been assumed by public finances, while the A69 will be financed mainly by the private sector.
According to the public inquiry, “the proof that no road alternative was better was not really provided”. For the members of this independent commission, the choice of the motorway “is only really justified by the insufficient will of the State and the local authorities to raise the necessary funding for the complete development of the RN126, yet decided and committed from 1994 to 2007”.
Another track mentioned, the strengthening of the rail link between Toulouse and Castres (one hour ten minutes journey), was swept away in the last prefectural decree authorizing the work.
“This file is in contradiction with the national commitments in the fight against climate change, the objective of zero net artificialization and zero net loss of biodiversity”, had also concluded the National Council for the Protection of Nature, by issuing an unfavorable opinion in September 2022. A month later, the Environmental Authority also issued an unfavorable opinion, judging the project “anachronistic in view of the current challenges and ambitions of sobriety”. But these two opinions were only advisory.
Beyond the increases in CO2 emissions linked to the increase in speed and traffic, 343 hectares of high-yield agricultural land and natural land will be artificialized by the project. Atosca calculates differently, distinguishing between 110 artificial hectares, corresponding to the asphalt pavement, and the rest of the land area of ??the highway (talus, merlons, shoulders and others), qualified as “green outbuildings”. Ecological corridors should be created there, but these areas will have lost their agricultural use.
Atosca has planned so-called “ERC” (avoid, reduce, compensate) measures aimed at recreating the destroyed environments elsewhere on an almost equivalent surface. But the public inquiry report stresses that they will not be able to compensate for “heavy and definitive consequences” of the project such as the loss of agricultural land, the landscape and sound impact and the cutting of the territory.
“We are at the latest standard of what is done in terms of highways today”, defends the boss of Atosca, who ensures to replant five trees for each tree “impacted” by the site. The company assumes the felling of two hundred trees, but the figure is disputed by The way is free. “The dealer refers only to aligned trees protected by the environmental code, says Thomas Digard, member of the collective. Atosca forgets to mention the trees of the properties impacted by the A69, those planted along streams and fields and those concerned by the clearing authorization of the prefectural decree. We would be a thousand felled trees away. »
The La Voie est libre collective denounces “a highway for the rich”, explaining that a round trip between Castres and Toulouse will cost 17 euros. For a thermal car, it will indeed cost 6.77 euros for Castres-Verfeil on the A69, to which is added 1.70 euros for the A68 between Verfeil and Toulouse. Or 8.47 euros one way. The future A69 reaches a price of 12.77 cents per kilometer, which places it in the category of the most expensive motorways in France.
Atosca CEO Martial Gerlinger says electric vehicles will get a 20% reduction. For home-work-home users, the subscription should reduce the cost to 11.52 euros per working day between Castres and Toulouse, or around 230 euros per month. The public inquiry report had expressed reservations because of the high toll cost compared to other journeys to Toulouse: 4.30 euros from Castelnaudary (Aude) in 2022 or 5.70 euros from Pamiers (Ariège).
“The fact that the user supports almost all the financing of the project is unfair”, writes the commission of inquiry, which recommended lowering the price of the toll of the A69 by at least a third, by making bear the effort “by the State and the communities”. This reservation was however considered irrelevant in the prefectural decree which launched the work.