Groupe Chronos

The Time Collaborative

The night is part of the great conquests of our time. Ten years ago the SNCF launched the slogan "take the time to go fast," and the oxymoron has lost none of the absurdity in its contradiction today. Thanks at first to the innovation of electricity, the night has become and extension of everyday life. However, the abuse of the nightlife in the work domain disrupts the biological balance, health and even life expectancy. Time no longer stops. In the city, the subway-work-sleep rhythm (metro, boulot, dodo) demonstrates the feeling of living in continuity, in the seamless. This can be seen with growth rate of e-commerce. Cellular phones and the Internet allow for permanent access to information, to place orders 24 hours a day 7 days a week. French transportation experts have observed that the time shift is a natural tendency for individuals to save time and establish a sense of comfort. This movement, experts say, should be encouraged.

This concept has not escaped transportation operators. When I buy at TGV ticket, I'm buying a time, performance, and quality of transportation. The same is true with a phone subscription or an airline ticket. On the operational side, when I sell time, I have an interest in smoothing the flow of traffic to the same logic as that which governs the flow of automobiles. This leads us straight to the concept of yield management. With ever-changing fare schedules, airlines encourage the distribution of travel in time by watching the occupancy rate. Further considering the time differently, the SNCF's TGV now offers night services, extending to people what has long been used to transport goods. As Swatch's ad campaign stated in 1996, "Time is what you make of it." This emphasizes the empowerment of individuals and practices of accountability by enabling regulations over which they largely have control. The question that arises is to know at which point of the disintegration of time can be an opportunity to build new time regulations.

Read the full article in French