Supporting public policies

Developing, implementing and evaluating public policies are tasks that public bodies perform on a regular basis and IFSTTAR is no exception. It provides scientific and methodological support for drawing up legislation, regulations and the nation’s technical culture through, for example, the role it plays in standardization.

It is active in political decision-making, reviewing the current situation and evaluating the consequences of new policies, one example being the survey of the scientific literature it performed for the parliamentary committee on road safety in 2012. The institute is concerned about societal issues, attentive to the needs of the public authorities (the State and local and regional authorities) and carries out applied research and independent scientific and technical appraisals for them as well as for national and international scientific and professional communities. In this connection, it is worth mentioning the collective appraisal of mobile phone use while driving performed by INSERM and IFSTTAR. The Institute also supports initial and in-service training in order to increase stakeholders’ expertise.

It is involved in defining national and international research programmes and evaluating responses, as witnessed by its involvement with PREDIT (the national land transport research programme) and the ANR (the National Research Agency).