I came across an interesting journal article the other day – entitled Are We Reaching Peak Travel? Trends in Passenger Transport in Eight Industrialized Countries by Adam Millard-Ball and Lee Schipper. It is an interesting examination of an issue that I’ve been looking at in my analysis of recent traffic trends on roads in New Zealand – the idea that perhaps we’re shifting away from the decades long process of people travelling more and more each year. Here’s the abstract:
The general trend for the 20th century was that as time went on, and particularly, as the population got richer, they travelled more and more. The most basic reason behind this was that as incomes grew, people were able to afford more cars and airline tickets, and therefore travelled further and further. The graph below highlights this relationship for a number of industrialised countries:
Most of the graphs above do show a bit of a tailing off’ at the higher levels, showing that perhaps there’s a level of GDP per capita beyond which we don’t actually see the increases in travel activity that are visible with earlier increases. The article considers recent fuel price increases as a potential cause of this trend – although according to its calculations not the whole reason:
The same trends appear true for car ownership, although once again it seems we’re in the fairly early phase of any ‘slowing down’ so it’s difficult to know whether the trends are permanent:
So what does this all mean? Well there are two big “elephants in the room” out there when it comes to transport policy: peak oil and climate change. What the data outlined above is potentially indicating is that the rising price of oil, plus other factors which suggest market saturation of vehicles, may mean that travel levels are lower than previously expected – helping us both minimise the impact of transport-based CO2 emissions on climate change and also slowly reducing our reliance on oil: which is likely to be a very good thing if oil becomes extremely expensive in the future.
In a sense, perhaps the market mechanisms are starting to work a bit: the higher price of oil weaning us off travelling further and further each year and buying more and more cars. This is why I think our best argument for investing in public transport at the moment is not the potential for oil to cost more in the future or for us to need to reduce CO2 emissions: but rather that we need to respond to choices people are already making, to use their cars less and ride the bus or train more.
It’s all about this:
Spending the vast majority of our transport budget on a part of the system with declining use, and constantly cutting funding for a part of the transport system with vastly increasing use is ignoring all the signals that form part of a longer term, fundamental shift in our transport system. It is just plain stupid.
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The key thing to watch for in all such analyses is the inflection point. The place where a continuing trend changes. Why? Because simply getting your ruler out and extending any trend to infinity is almost always wrong. What does NZTA and the MoT routinely do? Extrapolate ever increasing traffic and travel growth from pre 2007, funny that. They are so committed to this that even 4/5 years of conflicting data is ignored, and they are supposed to be hard headed engineers, not emotional ideologs. Confirmation bias is everywhere. They see what they expect ( or are told to see) and ignor the rest as a temporary aboration.
Important to remember that this rule is also true for those who are in a panic about the growth of China, say, they see a recent trend and project it uninterrupted into the future. Bound to be wrong, the only constant is change. And mature trends are the most likely to be about to change.
We are clearly at a transition point from the late 20thC trends to a new paradigm in transport modes. Someone want to tell
Sorry cooking as I write and didn’t finish the last sentence (pumpkin, porcini, pea, and panceta Risotto) Someone want to tell the minister that he is completely and totally wrong and investing in the wrong mode, and worse even stealing money from the needed one ‘going forward’ as those business types like to say.
At the risk of sounding like the transport minister (for which I apologize), I do think the stagnation of vehicle use may be temporary, albeit lasting for a few more years to come. If you look at the US, oil consumption is decreasing, but vehicle use doesn’t have a matching reduction. This is because more and more people there are buying more efficient cars, and a million drivers have bought hybrids.
In NZ we have not embraced fuel effecient cars as much as they have in the US. Hybrids are almost non existent. This is because most of us don’t buy new cars, but rather hand-me-downs from other countries. We don’t as yet have lots of second hand hybrids coming on the market.
When NZ catches up on usage of fuel effecient cars, and people here start taking hybrids more seriously, they’ll discover that motoring can be much cheaper, and a gradually annual increase in use should return.
Geoff your views are anecdotal, and you’re missing the consistency of the change in the data across the OECD [better understood as Importistan- net oil importing countries]. The mechanisms are various but the change is real and it’s source is resource depletion. Activity in all economies is energy applied, and that energy must come from somewhere. What we are seeing is the decline in availability of the most useful source of energy that underpins our whole civilisation. This manifests itself not in the sudden absence of fuel but rather as a decline of easy money. Energy is money. The amount of energy now required to secure the energy that our society and economy is built around is steadily growing and substitutes are not easy to find. Especially as our current government is throwing what little credit we still have at trying to pretend that nothing is changing…. Time is here to invest everything we have in restructuring the economy, and therefore society, to an electricity based more steady state backbone. Not easy, but there is a lot to gain, and a lot easier here in NZ than places like the UK.
We won’t change Joyce’s mind because his actions are based on an unexamined faith based view that the 20th century economy and power structures must be maintained. One highway at a time. Like the Tea Party he will only stop when he has destroyed the very thing he believes he is sustaining. Still, as the Chinese say, The coals glow brightest just before the fire goes out. I believe we are witnessing the last great push of this world-view. Change is here and we can go with it or try and fight it and then it will happen to us, much more painfully.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8126
Ignoring Geoff’s point, because I largely disagree with him (NZ’s vehicle fleet is much more efficient, Geoff compares two data series, but refuses to engage with the rest).
I will say that as air travel has become more available and more convenient, you would expect to see driven miles plateau. What is interesting in NZ is that regional driving has decreased, in all main centres. Obviously, you can’t fly from the city to Waitakere.
…or Japan: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/15/us-japan-power-analysis-idUSTRE76E1ZF20110715
One of the reasons people are driving less will be the fact that remote communication is now so easy, and cheap – the internet, mobile phones, etc.
But getting back to my point – oil consumption in the US has dropped by a third, much of it from motor vehicles, yet driving there has not dropped by anywhere near that amount. The huge uptake in hybrid cars, and people driving smaller vehicles, is a greater uptake than we have seen in NZ. Eventually NZ drivers will start to do the same to a greater degree.
Geoff, I think that you’re again overstating things (I hope I wasn’t rude in my first comment). There are very few countries which can draw lessons from US data, simply because it’s so far from everywhere else. The efficiency of their vehicle fleet is very low, so there’s room for dramatic improvement in response to high oil prices – a drop in mileage and then a bounce. Europe and Japan already maximise efficiency, and therefore have less room to move. New Zealand is in the middle, but closer to Europe than the US. If we see a large uptake in hybrids during the next 15 or so years then there’s room for further increases, but I don’t see this being quick or dramatic.
And that’s assuming that fuel prices are the major motivator in driving practices. Obviously they’re one, but they don’t outweigh all others.
Yes George is right, there has been no ‘huge uptake in hybrids’ in the US. First they have always had a hugely inefficient fleet and second there has been a big recession, these two facts explain their energy contraction. But the real issue with the US is that unlike NZ they actually still have quite a lot of their own hydrocarbons, especially if you include Canada. This explains the price spread between West Texas Intermediate, which is a local US delivery price and Brent which is an international market price.
The US can power down and be self sufficient relatively easily if they stopped insisting on pouring the stuff down the drain. Idiots like the Tea Party somehow equate wasting fuel with being American so maybe that won’t happen till it runs out, but if they only got their heads out of their arses about this things needn’t be so bad for the US, aircon and all. Europe and Japan however have very little left, especially that the UK pissed the North Sea resource away pathetically. Norway has been more prudent and has a smaller population, Denmark has powered up on wind which it balances with the Norwegian and Swedish hydro capacity- clever. NZ has a huge advantage in renewable electricity [Hydro and Wind being a perfect mix + Geo= Nirvana.], easy arable land, and low population but is governed by idiots with no idea where we are….. If the twats in charge could only see that the future is electric, especially in transportation, and no I don’t just mean expensive inefficient, and currently unavailable cars, I mean proven mass transit trains and freight, well, we might be getting somewhere.