ONE TOWN SQUARE: at the intersection of peak oil, climate change, and land use

A recent post observed that vehicle miles traveled (VMT), both nationally and in Oregon, are trending down rather than up. The 2008 peak in VMT nationally has yet to be regained. The question was begging to be asked: if VMT is going down rather than up, is the Columbia River Crossing really needed? And since its financing rests on projections of robust traffic increases over the coming decades, are proponents’ financing plans pie in the sky, or will this project rather prove to be an albatross around taxpayers’ necks?

Unfortunately, the Federal Highway Administration does not contain information specific to either the I-5 crossing or the 205 crossing. Clark Williams-Derry in a post at Sightline Daily notes that the Washington Department of Transportation’s latest Annual Traffic Report does contains information specific to the two crossings.

First, it’s important to point out that the report shows that annual VMT on Washington roads reached a peak in 2007 that has not been regained. And traffic has barely grown over the last decade: VMT in 2010 was a miniscule 0.44% above that in 2000. [See p. 48 of the report.]

Williams-Derry posts this chart showing traffic volume on the two existing Columbia River bridges over the past decade . . .

and observes:

Since the new millennium, though, annual traffic growth has averaged about 0.5 percent.   Even if you exclude the declines in 2008, traffic grew at only about 1 percent per year starting in 2000.That’s for the two highway bridges together.   If you look just at the I-5 span across the Columbia, traffic volumes in 2010 were just a hair above what they were in 1999.   That’s more than a decade with essentially no growth in traffic!!

Traffic volume over the two bridges is down a combined2.2% since the 2007 peak. Traffic volume over the I-5 crossing alone is down 3.1%. [See pp. 67, 161.]

In the face of stagnate traffic volume growth over the last decade and declining traffic volume over the last four years, how many billions are we willing to gamble – faced with peak oil, rising gasoline prices, and a faltering economy – that the recent trend will be reversed and the presumed need for additional road capacity will in fact materialize?

Cities as a whole have been estimated to produce up to 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Thus, decisions on the structure, including the building types, density, location and public transport, establish the long-term frames for the greenhouse gas emissions of a community.

But a new study from Finland – Implications of urban structure on carbon consumption in metropolitan areas – finds that, when it comes to carbon emissions, urban structure doesn’t make much of a difference.  The study looked at dense center cities , where apartment buildings dominated housing and diverse public transport was available; and “rural” cities with a lower density, a high share of detached houses, and weaker public transport. The study considered the effects of density, dominant building type, private driving and income on the carbon consumption.

Surprisingly, the study found the carbon consequences of urban density and dominant building type to be insignificant, based on a life cycle assessment: there proved to be no clear correlation between urban density and carbon consumption. Despite the identified connections between carbon consumption and urban density, it seems that the effect of density on carbon emissions is rather low, and that other factors override the effect.

The researchers seemed to have stumbled upon something they hadn’t anticipated or designed the study to analyze: what really seems to matter is income. As incomes rise, people engage in more carbon-spewing activities:

The rest of the carbon categories, the consumption of goods and services, reflect clearly the effect of income on the emissions. However, this part of the carbon consumption was not the focus of this study, and also cannot be analyzed in depth with the presented hybrid model. The model shows that traveling abroad and the use of services grow as earnings grow * * * but regarding daily consumption, it is not possible to differentiate amount and quality.

One interesting notion about the relation of income and carbon consumption is that emissions seem to grow as income grows, but with decelerating speed. * * * It seems that the share of savings increases rather rapidly as earnings grow.

The slight growth in energy-related carbon consumption found in less dense areas compared to the denser metropolitan core is overwhelmed by the high correlation of income and carbon consumption.

The results of the study may not be directly applicable in the U.S. Consider that in the E.U., the transportation sector generates 20% of greenhouse gas emissions, while in the U.S., transportation accounts for 33% of total greenhouse gas emissions [in Oregon, 34% of emissions are from the transportation sector; in California, 36%]. In Finland and the rest of Europe, the effect of private transport on overall carbon consumption per capita is quite weak when all emissions related to driving are calculated, including car manufacture, deliveries and maintenance of vehicles (the share of fuel combustion of all all emissions related to private transport is 50–70%, the rest being dominated by emissions related to car manufacture and maintenance). Thus, growth in trip generation due to a decline in the density of the city structure has a relatively minor effect on the overall carbon consumption. Here in the U.S., the contribution of fuel combustion to total emissions may be much higher.

The studies’ authors offer a modest suggestion.

When solutions for low-carbon living * * * are searched for, consumption-based assessments of emissions are essential.

Now here’s a truly revolutionary idea: if we are to emit less, we’ll have to consume less. No more growing the economy; rather, we’ll have to shrink the economy. It’s that simple. It’s the economy, stupid.

Evidence continues to mount suggesting that the seemingly inexorable trend of ever-increasing travel on U.S. roads is faltering.

As we noted earlier here, VMT for 2011 are now down 0.1% from last year and are still well below the pre-recession peak reached in 2008.

Truck traffic on U.S. roads is down, too. The Ceridian-UCLA Pulse of Commerce Index, based on real-time diesel fuel consumption data for over the road trucking, fell 0.9% on a seasonally and workday adjusted basis in May, after falling 0.5% in April. The index has now declined in four of the first five months of 2011, and in eight of the past twelve months. As seen in this chart posted at Calculated Risk, truck traffic remains well below pre-recession levels.

Based on an estimate from Autodata Corp, light vehicle sales were at a 11.79 million SAAR (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in May. That is down 10.2% from the sales rate last month (April 2011), although up 1.5% from May 2010. Again, Calculated Risk has posted a great chart showing U.S. light vehicle sales since 1967.

U.S. light vehicle sales remain at levels last seen about 20 years ago, when the population of the U.S. was 50+ million less than it is today – and there were 35 million fewer licensed drivers, as seen by comparing statistics here and here.

The number of cars and light trucks on U.S. roads appears to be falling, as the number of light vehicles scrapped is substantially outnumbering new vehicle registrations. The overall scrappage rate in the U.S. is about 6.1%. There are about 238,000,000 passenger vehicles in the U.S. (BTS data as of 2008 – the most recent data available – not counting motorcycles or trucks with more than four wheels). With the U.S. scrappage rate at 6.1%, about 14.5 million vehicles are being removed from U.S. roads each year.

The U.S. appears to have entered a new paradigm when it comes to oil consumption, as seen in this chart posted at Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis.

As seen in this chart at the U.S. Energy Information Administration website, U.S. oil consumption peaked in 2005.

In 2005, the U.S. burned through 20,802,000 barrels of oil per day. The rate of consumption fell to 18,771,000 b/d in 2009, then rose a bit to 19,148,000 b/d in 2010. Oil consumption in 2011 is faltering again, and is now behind the pace set in 2010.

Maybe it’s not so smart to be squandering billions on new road and bridge projects?

High prices at the pump are once again starting to hurt, if indeed the hurt caused by the 2008 spike has ever ceased.

As fuel prices take a bigger slice of people’s incomes, sales at retailers including Walmart, Home Depot,  and Lowe’s are taking a hit. The housing sector has been the biggest victim of high gas prices, as home prices continue to fall. Existing home sales are again lagging, as shown in this chart from Calculated Risk.

New home sales are seeing record lows.

Jim Kunstler call of suburbia as the biggest misallocation of resources in human history is proving prescient.

As prices at the pump rise, people are again beginning to drive less. The EIA reports that demand for oil products over the last 4 weeks is down by nearly 3 percent as compared to last year, and the recent rise in vehicle miles traveled (VMT) is beginning to falter. VMT remains well below the previous peak, as seen in this chart of the rolling 12-month VMT going back to 1971, posted at Calculated Risk.

In the early ’80s, miles driven (rolling 12 months) stayed below the previous peak for 39 months – a record that will soon be eclipsed.

High gas prices are depressing traffic on the Ohio Turnpike, which recently upped its top speed from 65 mph to 70 mph in April in an attempt to lure more traffic onto the highway. Less traffic, less income from tolls. a portion of the cost of the Columbia River Crossing is projected to be covered by user fees (i.e., tolls). That source of funds will prove fantasy if projected increases in vehicle traffic fail to materialize due to soaring gas prices, leaving taxpayers on the hook.

A piece I posted a few days ago – How realistic are electric cars? – included a calculation of how much U.S. production of wind and solar energy would have to be increased over the next 20 years if electric cars were to become a significant component of the U.S. vehicle fleet. That calculation was off by an order of magnitude. A more careful recalculation finds that wind and solar generation capacity would have to be increased by a factor of 2,500 – 5,000. The post has now been corrected.

So how are we doing on our project to massively increase U.S. wind and solar generation capacity? This chart posted by Stuart Staniford at Early Warning is not reassuring, at least regarding wind.

The American Wind Energy Association’s Q4 2010 market report reveals that new installations collapsed in 2010.

The Federal Highway Administration’s November Traffic Volume Trends reports travel on U.S. roads and streets rose 1.1% (2.6 billion vehicle miles) for November 2010 as compared with November 2009.

Cumulative travel for 2010 was up 0.7% (19.0 billion vehicle miles) – but VMT is still 1.3% below the peak reached in 2007.

November VMT in the 13 western states was down 0.2%. In Oregon, VMT was down 0.7%.

It’s still too soon to tell whether the 2008-2009 reversal of the previously inexorable upward trend in VMT was just a fluke, and that the upward trend has once more resumed; or whether the current upward bounce is just noise in a new long term downward trend. The long term trends show up better in a chart at Calculated Risk:

The last interruptions in the upward trend in VMT were in the recessions of 74-75 and the back-to-back recessions of 1980 and 1981-82, all associated with disruptions in global oil supplies. This time, the disruption may prove permanent. If so, the downward trend will of necessity also be permanent.

2010 new car and truck sales came in at 11.6 million, up 11% from last year. December sales provided a finishing boost: based on an estimate from Autodata Corp, light vehicle sales were at a 12.55 million SAAR (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in December.

The sales figures by manufacturer for December show that the Big Three’s days of dominance are long gone.

Other 322,595 – 28.2%
GM 224,127 – 19.5%
Ford 190,191 – 16.6%
Toyota 177,488 – 15.5%
Honda 129,616 – 11.3%
Chrysler 100,702 – 8.8%

Recall that GM alone at one time accounted for 54% of all new cars sold in the U.S. How the mighty have fallen. Were it not for the government bailout and bankruptcy, GM would not even be here today.

While light vehicle sales are up a bit, they are still pretty pathetic, as seen in this graph posted by Mish Shedlock.

U.S. light vehicle sales remain at levels last seen around 1991-1992, when the U.S. population was 50+ million lower than it is today – and when there were 35 million fewer licensed drivers, as seen by comparing statistics here and here. Auto sales peaked in 2005 at 17.4 million, then collapsed to 10.6 million in 2009.

Light vehicles are still disappearing from America’s roads and streets at the rate of almost three million vehicles per year. With a scrappage rate of about 6.1% and about 238,000,000 passenger vehicles in the U.S. (BTS data as of 2008 – the most recent data available – not counting motorcycles or trucks with more than four wheels),  about 14.5 million vehicles are being scrapped each year. The average vehicle on U.S. roads is now 10.2 years old — the oldest since 1997 and a full year older than in 2007, before the recession.

Despite the uptick in light vehicle sales, U.S. gasoline demand in December fell to the lowest levels in over five years, as prices at the pump averaged over $3 per gallon. Gasoline demand hasn’t been lower since Hurricane Katrina disrupted Gulf Coast supplies in September 2005. The four-week moving average has been less than the year-earlier level for 15 consecutive weeks.

Given that the number of cars on America’s roads is declining while at the same time oil prices are rising and gasoline demand falling, why are we still obsessed with expanding road capacity with expensive new infrastructure projects such as the Columbia River Crossing and, in Seattle, with the Alaskan Way Viaduct project, replacing the viaduct with a bored tunnel? Taxpayers will be on the hook for these projects, as fuel taxes will never even come close to paying for these projects. The portion of the cost projected to be covered by user fees (i.e., tolls) would prove fantasy if projected increases in vehicle traffic fail to materialize over the coming decades. Local, state and federal governments are already struggling financially, and will be facing increasingly punishing fiscal pressure over the coming years as the faltering of economic growth makes coping with staggering levels of debt impossible. What sense does it make to add to that debt and that burden to build infrastructure that will never be needed as demand for travel is falling?

Kurt Cobb at Scitizen has a great piece on why electric cars are nothing more than a fetish – magical objects which will enable us to maintain our obsession with personal motorized transport while averting global warming and slaying the dragon of peak oil.

Cobb points out, it ain’t gonna happen, for the following reasons:

1. Resource constraints for key metals needed for batteries.
2. The length of time needed to turn over the existing car fleet (around 17 years in the United States).
3. Peak oil, that dooms the widespread adoption of an electric car fleet since global society could soon be dealing with an immediate oil crisis that wouldn’t wait on the slow cycles of new technology adoption.

The challenges facing the widespread adoption of private electric automobiles – such as lack of charging infrastructure, relatively poor performance of electric vehicles for range and acceleration, and a power grid needing massive reconstruction and expansion if it is to accommodate a fleet of private electric automobiles – probably could be overcome if we had decades to work on them. But as Robert Hirsch warned in the report The Inevitable Peaking of World Oil Production (the “Hirsch Report”) back in 2005: when we begin the transition away from oil matters.

• Waiting until world oil production peaks before taking crash program action leaves the world with a significant liquid fuel deficit for more than two decades.
• Initiating a mitigation crash program 10 years before world oil peaking helps considerably but still leaves a liquid fuels shortfall roughly a decade after the time that oil would have peaked.
• Initiating a mitigation crash program 20 years before peaking offers the possibility of avoiding a world liquid fuels shortfall for the forecast period.

We don’t have twenty years, or ten years, or even “now”. Peak oil is now in our rear-view mirror.

World crude oil production almost certainly peaked in 2005. World all-liquids producti0n may have peaked in 2008. Even if all liquids production were to exceed the previous peak, all-liquids isn’t the same as crude oil. Natural gas liquids are not oil, and they contain only 65% of the BTU of oil. Biofuels are much worse. They are, at best, barely an energy source: rather, they are the product of a conversion process of other energy inputs. 2010 may or may not have seen a new high in liquid fuels production, but 85, 86, or 87 million barrels per day today aren’t all crude oil.

As for climate change: Cobb points out that simply replacing current gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicle fleets with ones running on electricity will not even come close to reducing carbon dioxide emissions by enough to prevent catastrophic climate change. We’ll simply be substituting cars powered by gasoline and diesel with ones powered indirectly by coal and natural gas. Replacing coal and natural gas power plants with renewables such as wind and solar is problematic due to their intermittency, and would in any case take decades – and the scale of the task is almost unimaginable.

Cobb concludes we have no option but to let go of our ruinous car culture, rather than try to extend it by making a fetish of electric cars.

A new study suggests that automobile travel may have peaked in the world’s most developed countries, including the U.S.

The study, titled Are We Reaching Peak Travel? Trends in Passenger Transport in Eight Industrialized Countries, looked at eight countries: the United States, Canada, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan and Australia. The authors – Adam Millard-Balla and Lee Schipper, affiliated with Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley – surmise that the inexorable post-WWII trend of ever-growing vehicle ownership, vehicle use and overall travel demand may have come to an end. The authors speculate that highway gridlock, parking problems, high prices at the gas pump and an aging population that doesn’t commute may be contributing factors.

The U.S. appears to have peaked at an annual 8,100 miles by car per capita. Vehicle ownership may have peaked, too, at about 700 cars per 1,000 people in the U.S. — more cars than licensed drivers — and about 500 cars per 1,000 people in Japan and most of the European countries. Car ownership has declined in the U.S. since 2007.

Here’s the abstract:

Projections of energy use and greenhouse gas emissions for industrialized countries typically show continued growth in vehicle ownership, vehicle use and overall travel demand. This growth represents a continuation of trends from the 1970s through the early 2000s. This paper presents a descriptive analysis of cross-national passenger transport trends in eight industrialized countries, providing evidence to suggest that these trends may have halted. Through decomposing passenger transport energy use into activity, modal structure and modal energy intensity, we show that increases in total activity (passenger travel) have been the driving force behind increased energy use, offset somewhat by declining energy intensity. We show that total activity growth has halted relative to GDP in recent years in the eight countries examined. If these trends continue, it is possible that an accelerated decline in the energy intensity of car travel; stagnation in total travel per capita; some shifts back to rail and bus modes; and at least somewhat less carbon per unit of energy could leave the absolute levels of emissions in 2020 or 2030 lower than today.

Unfortunately, in the U.S. most of the potential energy and emissions savings from more efficient vehicles were wiped out by consumers’ preferences for larger, more powerful vehicles.

The study calls into question transportation models predicting steady growth in travel demand well into the future. If travel has indeed peaked, there may be no need for the expensive new infrastructure projects – such as the Columbia River Crossing – now on the drawing boards.

With December providing the finishing kick, U.S. passenger vehicle sales are expected to total 11.6 million for 2010, up from 10.4 million in 2009. December is typically a relatively strong sales month, but it’s unusual for yearly sales to peak in December.

Still, the number of passenger vehicles on U.S. roads is still declining, as auto and light truck sales remain below the replacement rate. According to the latest data available, the scrappage rate remains at 6.1%.

Overall scrappage rate = 6.1%

With about 238,000,000 passenger vehicles in the U.S. (BTS data as of 2008 – the most recent data available – not counting motorcycles or trucks with more than four wheels), that means about 14.5 million vehicles are being scrapped each year.

A scrappage rate of 6.1% is consistent with the historical trend – but the scrappage rate has been declining over time.

At the projected 2010 level of vehicle sales, the scrappage rate would have to fall to below 4.9% before the number of passenger cars on U.S. roads would stabilize.

In 2008, 13.2 million new vehicles were sold, while in 2007 sales were 16.1 million. U.S. passenger vehicle sales peaked in 2000 at over 17 million – the trend has now been down for a decade.

Strong December sales were lead by an uptick in truck sales and luxury cars.

But last week, gas prices crossed the $3 mark for the first time since October 2008. Gas prices are up 4% from a month ago and up 16% from the $2.585 average a year ago. As seen in this chart posted by Stuart Staniford at Early Warning, gasoline prices are following oil prices.

John Hofmeister, the former president of Shell Oil, is saying Americans could be paying $5 for a gallon of gasoline by 2012. Deutsche Bank is forecasting a spike to $125/barrel by 2012 – the price spike to be relieved only by a collapse in demand similar to what the world experienced in 2008.

Stuart Staniford at Early Warning isn’t so sanguine – he thinks we might have to see oil prices in the $150-$200 range before we again see an oil shock leading to a collapse in demand.

If gasoline prices keep rising, how long can it be before automobile sales – and especially sales of fuel-inefficient big cars and light trucks -take another hit?

The Federal Highway Administration’s October 2010 Traffic Volume Trends reports vehicle miles driven in October were up 1.9% compared to October 2009.

Travel on all roads and streets changed by 1.9% (4.9 billion vehicle miles)
for October 2010 as compared with October 2009.

Travel for the month is estimated to be 259.5 billion vehicle miles.

Cumulative Travel for 2010 changed by 0.6% (16.0 billion vehicle miles).

Cumulative estimate for the year is 2,514.1 billion vehicle miles of travel.

The moving 12-month average VMT remains below 2006 levels. The future will reveal whether the 2008-2009 reversal of the inexorable upward trend in VMT was just a fluke, and that the upward trend has once more resumed; or whether the upward bounce is a fluke, and that the long-term trend is now downward.

In the 13 western states, the increase in VMT was less than in other regions.

Calculated Risk notes that in the early ’80s, miles driven (rolling 12 months) stayed below the previous peak for 39 months. Currently VMT has been below the previous peak for 35 months – another record that will be broken soon.