Methodology

Overview

This project aims to structure and analyse the qualitative data submitted as part of the Ambition France Transports national conference, dedicated to the financing of transport infrastructure. Held from May to July 2025, the conference gathers over 50 stakeholders—from local authorities and parliamentarians to user groups and private sector actors—to help redefine sustainable, long-term funding models for French mobility infrastructure.

The contributions, known as cahiers d’acteurs, are unstructured textual documents (in French) reflecting a wide range of viewpoints. The objective of this project is to convert these submissions into a structured, analysable format using AI-assisted processing.

Step 1: Data Collection

A total of 179 download links for public submissions were scraped from the official conference website. https://conference-ambition-france.transports.gouv.fr/cahiers-dacteur-deposes

The documents, originally in PDF and DOCX formats, were converted to plain text using automated parsing tools to allow for consistent downstream processing.

1.1: Conference Themes and Strategic Priorities

Below are the four official themes of the Ambition France Transports conference:

  • Le financement des mobilités du quotidien par les autorités organisatrices des mobilités (AOM) dans les territoires et le financement des SERM
    Financing of daily mobility by mobility organizing authorities (AOM) in the territories and financing of SERM

  • Le financement des infrastructures routières
    Financing of road infrastructure

  • Le financement des infrastructures et services de transport ferroviaire
    Financing of rail transport infrastructure and services

  • Le financement du verdissement du transport de marchandise
    Financing the greening of freight transport

These are the three strategic priorities referenced throughout the analysis:

  • Régénérer et moderniser les réseaux
    Regenerate and modernize networks

  • Augmenter l’offre de transports pour répondre aux besoins de mobilités croissants des Français et poursuivre l’aménagement de nos territoires
    Expand transport services to meet growing mobility needs and continue territorial development

  • Accélérer la transition écologique des mobilités
    Accelerate the ecological transition of mobility

Step 2: Structuring Contributions with Azure OpenAI

Two distinct prompts were used with Azure OpenAI to extract structured information from each actor submission:

2.1. Contribution Structuring

A templated prompt was designed to extract the following fields in strict JSON format:

  • Titre – Inferred or explicit title
  • Organisation – Name of the submitting organization
  • Thematique principale – One of the four main conference themes as above
  • Sous thematiques – Up to three key ideas tied to the main theme
  • Mots cles – Up to 10 representative keywords
  • Resume contribution – Concise summary in French, with references to key priorities and transport modes
  • Resume anglais – English translation of the summary

The system was instructed to handle missing or uncertain information gracefully using "inconnu" or "non précisé", and to avoid hallucinating any details not explicitly present in the source text.

2.2. Strategic Priority Extraction

A second prompt was used to identify:

  • The most urgent strategic priority, selected from the priorities above
  • The main transport category discussed, selected from:
    • Ferroviaire (rail)
    • Routier (road)
    • Maritime / fluvial (waterways)
    • Mobilités actives (active mobility)
    • Autre (other, with description)

The responses were strictly parsed as JSON to ensure downstream compatibility and reproducibility.

Frontier Economics