Economic impacts of Lille's SERM

The case study of the Lille European Metropolis (MEL) aims to explore the spatial, energy, and environmental changes likely to accompany the development of the Metropolitan Regional Express Service (SERM) by 2040. By improving accessibility and encouraging a shift toward public transit, the SERM could influence the location choices of households and businesses, as well as how people organize their travel. The MISTERE project seeks to assess these effects and examine the extent to which integrating the SERM with other complementary policies, particularly densification around train stations and low-emission mobility zones (ZFE-m) could improve its contribution to the region’s decarbonization. The study will thus enable a comparison of several transition scenarios and an assessment of their spatial, energy, environmental, economic, and social consequences.

The study is based on a modeling framework that integrates quantitative spatial economic models (QSE/QSM) with an energy component. These models capture the location choices of households and firms based on accessibility, transportation costs, wages, and real estate prices, while accounting for interactions across different areas of the region. Applied to the Lille European Metropolis, this approach aims to analyze the effects of SERM development on the spatial distribution of population and employment, travel times, and mobility patterns, while incorporating interactions between transport modes and the potential for modal shift. The analysis also considers various policy scenarios accompanying SERM development, particularly densification around railway stations and the implementation of low-emission zones (ZFE). Coupling the spatial economic models with the energy component allows for the estimation of changes in energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions under these scenarios, with the aim of assessing the individual and combined contributions of the SERM and accompanying policies to the region's decarbonization.

• Carlos Gbeteglo
• Moez Kilani

• A synthetic population framework for regional rail appraisal: combining discrete choice estimation and activity-tour simulation on the SERM Lille corridor

  Kilani, M. — ITEA conference (2026)

• Socioeconomic Evaluation of the Lille SERM project An Approach Based on Quantitative Spatial Economics

  Gbeteglo, C. — ASRDLF (2026)