Has the Industrialized World Reached Peak Travel? 314
Harperdog sends this excerpt from Miller-McCune:
"A study (abstract) of eight industrialized countries, including the United States, shows that seemingly inexorable trends — ever more people, more cars and more driving — came to a halt in the early years of the 21st century, well before the recent escalation in fuel prices. It could be a sign, researchers said, that the demand for travel and the demand for car ownership in those countries has reached a saturation point. 'With talk of "peak oil," why not the possibility of "peak travel" when a clear plateau has been reached?' asked co-author Lee Schipper ... Most of the eight countries in the study have experienced declines in miles traveled by car per capita in recent years. The US appears to have peaked at an annual 8,100 miles by car per capita, and Japan is holding steady at 2,500 miles."
One wonders... (Score:4, Interesting)
A shift in the US from suburban material culture, where car transport is essentially necessary, and that necessity is self-perpetuating through the cultural and infrastructure spending priorities it creates, would be big news.
A shift from buying at bestbuy to buying at bestbuy.com might well drive down the number of car-hours/year; but would be fairly uninteresting. Ditto with things like Netflix and Amazon and pay-per-view cable movies and whatnot...
Re:Far from it... (Score:4, Interesting)
Travel is constrained by the carrying capacity of roads and junctions. If investment in these does not keep pace with demand for capacity, then the demand is throttled by the negative effects of congestion. As population density increases in some region, it becomes harder (disproportionately more expensive) to increase the carrying capacity of roads in proportion - the number of choke points increases and congestion increases. The low density exurbs have no such problem, except when it comes to commuting to a high density downtown...
Apples-Oranges (Score:5, Interesting)
When I've seen peak oil discussed, usually they are talking about total oil output and not per capita consumption.
Re:Travel time maxes out (Score:3, Interesting)
Here in Seattle, for example, we still don't have a real mass transit system. Metro insists on taking half of it's bus routes through the down town corridor for reasons which make sense to nobody outside of their planning committee. Meaning that if you're not going downtown you're almost certainly going to need to make a transfer. Good luck going east or west or around downtown.
We were going to get a subway system several decades ago, but antitax nutters talked us out of it. More recently we were going to get a monorail system, but after several yes votes the nutters finally managed to get a single no vote to kill the project. Over the next decade we're finally going to be getting a single light rail line which goes from the airport pretty much to Everett.
The point there is that we haven't seen any improvement in mass transit, traffic itself is at least as bad as it was when I was a kid. No wonder folks aren't wanting to spend time traveling about on a daily basis.
Travel has purpose. (Score:4, Interesting)
We travel to see stuff. Modern media has made much of that superfluous.
We travel to get stuff. Having stuff show up is less time wasted. Instead of going to buy tools, for example, I shop online and they show up. I can mix Ebay, Craigslist, and new vendors while I fap to pr0n and surf Slashdot.
We travel to see people. It's now more convenient to chat with a world of friends without bothering to meet in person very often.
We travel to learn stuff. Now information is at our fingertips.
Travel was a hassle before the TSA fondle-fest. Fuck travel.
Awaiting next revolution (Score:5, Interesting)
Peak travel is an interesting concept but it applies only to a given technology level. My own situation is an example. I live in Texas and have family on both the East and West coast of the US. I would also like to vacation in Florida, Maine, and Northern California. But with 2 small children and the TSA increasingly repressive, I simply don't travel much beyond a one-day driving distance.
That would change instantly if fast, harassment-free transportation were available. That used to be the airlines, and it could be fast rail if it weren't for the fact that excessive govt regulation and problems getting right-of-way means that it will never happen. But we're one transportation revolution away from me making coast to coast travel plans fairly often, because that is where I would want to go if there were reasonable transportation options.
I can't be the only one who doesn't go anywhere beyond a 1-day drive anymore, either. If we're at a transportation peak, it is because of artificial suppression of travel due to airport harassment and because of other concerns that could be addressed by the availability of fast and easy transportation. Note that I don't mention cost - I'd be willing to pay quite a bit for quick and hassle free transportation around the country, but it simply can't be done right now.
As a nation, we're quickly heading towards loserville when we can't even manage to use available technology to let people travel freely without harassment. Car, train, and aircraft technology are all available to allow for reasonably rapid transportation, but our car speed limits are where they were 30 years ago, there is still very limited train service in most central and western states, and the govt is doing its best to harass people out of flying commercial air. We suck, and we're doing it to ourselves.
Re:Sheesh, trends don't == natural law. (Score:5, Interesting)
Disagree.
People have more leisure time then they've ever had. When they were farmers they worked 6 days a week (minus sundays) and often from sunup to sundown. Now they work just 5 days a week and 8-10 hours a day. Hence they have free time to watch TV in the evenings, or to travel to the beach on the weekend, something our pre-1930s ancestors never dreamed of.
If driving has hit a plateau since 2000, maybe it's because people simply don't want to. I know I have no desire to hop in my car and drive to the store, when I can just click netflix.com to watch a video, or shop amazon.com and have it delivered to me. I don't even visit the bank now - I just do it all on the internet from the comfort of my chair.
If I didn't have to buy food, I'd probably never leave the house.
Re:Far from it... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Far from it... (Score:5, Interesting)
and a decent yard between us and noisy neighbors who don't share my sleep cycle. Much better to sit in traffic a bit than to live in some city center.
I feel obliged to note here:
while most apartments are cheap as hell and you don't notice this, it is perfectly possible to design apartment buildings so the noise factor (from neighbors) is not an issue. While I've lived in a lot of worse places since, when I lived in Boston, one of my neighbors was a professional violin player, who practiced a great deal, but his playing could only be heard in the hall, not from neighboring units. It was actually almost a problem.... the noise insulation was so good, that the FIRE ALARM went off in the hall, and I could barely hear it in my bedroom.
Sadly, the noise insulation from the outside was not as good, but that was because it didn't have modern windows (which is an easy thing to do in a modern building)
Don't get me wrong, I mostly agree with you. But I felt obliged to note that it IS possible to make an apartment building which gives its tenants privacy, even if only so that people would know to look for one if they're stuck in the city.
Re:Far from it... (Score:4, Interesting)
Howdy, neighbor!
I recently moved from up around Lamar and Rundberg (still own a house there -- renting it out until the market gets better) down to the new (built in 2005) condos on East 6th and Pedernales.
It's a great place -- big gated courtyard (the dog has more room to run than he did in the backyard of the house), cheap to maintain ($176/mo HOA fee includes everything but electricity -- Internet, gas, water, waste, maintenance, etc -- and my electric bill is down by more than that $176/mo)... and the walls are thick enough that when I ask my neighbors if my dog barking annoyed them, they tell me they couldn't hear a thing. (I'm inclined to believe them -- they also own dogs, and I never hear their pets bark except from the hall... so either everyone but me has a silent pet, or we have really good noise insulation). Right now I commute by bicycle (or the train, if I'm feeling lazy) to work up around Northcross and Anderson (~9 miles each way), but I have a few friends with jobs in the middle of downtown, so there's a very good chance that next time I'm looking for work I'll be able to find something with a short east-west commute.
More to the point, though -- it was cheap. Sure, the new square-downtown highrise buildings are as expensive as you'd expect -- and sure, East 6th used to be the ghetto -- but it's totally possible to buy a place "downtown enough" for under $150K.
Of course, I don't know your circumstances -- for me, it was resigning from Dell that freed me to move here -- but the point is that if you haven't even looked at whether there's anything downtown because you're expecting everything to run $400K+... go ahead and look again. You might be surprised.
Re:Far from it... (Score:4, Interesting)
Huh. See, I'm sitting here in a high-owner-occupancy-percentage gated condo in downtown Austin with 14-foot ceilings, outstanding noise isolation, a big courtyard to play with the dog, a enjoyable daily workout by doing my commute by bike... and I'm pretty damned happy with my quality of life.
"Slum"? I don't see it.
Re:Far from it... (Score:3, Interesting)
Which will work fine until oil is at $120-150/barrel, and you're spending a non-negligible amount on fuel for commuting and can't afford your mortgage and food.
Nonsense. Oil already hit $120 a few years back, and I don't know anyone who had to chose between commuting and traveling. Even if it hits $200 per barrel 5 years from now, my car will be ready for replacement, and I can buy another one which uses half as much fuel.
There are billions of people between India and China who are going to be driving soon. And who will be using oil to do so. Don't kid yourself, the suburbs are unsustainable.
Yes, billions of people in India and China will be able to afford $150/barrel fuel, but people in first world nations won't. Nice logic there.
Re:Far from it... (Score:5, Interesting)
A non-trivial number of us must want to live in cities, else real estate there would be cheaper. If you look at census data for blobs-O-people (50K units, or larger), a minimum of 1/3 of the US population lives in density greater than or equal to 2000 people per square mile. (This is a minimum, because the 25,000 people living in my town, are not counted, nor are people living in nearby, dense, sub-50K towns.) 2000 per square mile is Lexington, MA, complete with office parks etc. It might not be that dense. It is, however, the density of Assen in the Netherlands, where they manage a bicycle trip share of 40% -- so it's clearly dense enough for many people to get out of their cars.
Charts, pointers to data, here [wordpress.com].
You can also find other versions of this data at gapminder.org [gapminder.org]. Their claim is that we are less dense that quite a few countries (UK, Japan, France, Germany, South Korea) but that a higher fraction of our population is "urban" (82%, seems high, like to know how they define "urban").