The Willamette Speedway is a 1/3 mile clay dirt track in Lebanon, Oregon, in the county but right on the city boundary. It was first established in the 1960s before zoning, when Oregon was still the wild west and anything went. In that era the car culture ruled supreme. The interstate highway system was nearing completion. The U.S. still reigned as the world’s largest producer of oil – and U.S. oil production was still rising. The words “global warming” had not yet been uttered, except perhaps by a few prescient pairs of lips.

Things were soon to change. Oil production in the U.S. peaked in 1971. Linn County passed its first zoning ordinance in 1972, and in 1973 Oregon passed Senate Bill 100 and began to implement this country’s first statewide land use planning program.

In 1981, James Hansen published his first global temperature projection . . .

. . . a projection that has so far proved to be pretty darn good.

Since 2004 world oil production has remained within 5% of its peak despite historically high prices.

Now, almost 50 years later, Willamette Speedway wants to expand. As a nonconforming use, that should be pretty tough. A nonconforming use can be altered only if the alteration would have “no greater adverse impact to the neighborhood”.

The noise from the racetrack is bad enough. The roar of engines and the blaring of loudspeakers can be heard a dozen or more miles away, every weekend from late March to early October.

But the issues involve more than noise, which disturbs the tranquilly throughout the city and the countryside and must be insufferable for those who live close by. More than light from the towers lining the track. More than traffic on neighborhood streets.

The big issue is the continued celebration of the car culture. Driving as fast as you can around in a circle, going nowhere, burning precious fossil fuels, spewing greenhouse gas emissions in the process. Oil markets are global. The atmosphere doesn’t respect borders. Our neighborhood is bigger than Lebanon, bigger than Linn County. Our neighborhood is the world.

The time for indulgence of such foolishness is long past. Continued indulgence of such destructive profligacy is unconscionable. Like Christine, the car culture is a killer. And like Christine, that killer is refusing to die.

Shell CEO Peter Voser is warning that over time oil supply and demand fundamentals are going to tighten significantly:

Oil output from fields in production declines by 5 per cent a year as reserves are depleted, so the world needed to add the equivalent of four Saudi Arabias or 10 North Seas over the next 10 years just to keep supply level, even before much of an increase in demand.

So how have we been doing at discovering new reserves? Not nearly good enough.

All the easy stuff has been found. We basically stopped finding conventional super-giant high production rate oil fields forty years ago.

Despite the best technology and soaring prices, each year the amount of new oil reserves discovered is a fraction of that found in the 1960s. Oil production flattened in 2004. In 2010 consumption exceeded production by over 5m barrels per day for the first year ever.

In the charts above, a large part of the difference between consumption and production is accounted for by such things as biofuels, oil made from coal and other non-conventional sources, which are not included in the production figures. The rest of the difference is from the running down of world oil stocks.

The questions now facing us are how long can global oil production be held on its plateau, and how fast will the subsequent decline be?

The stall in global oil production in the face of strong demand from less developed countries is having a profound consequence: while the Chindia  (China & India) region, and many other developing countries, have been able to increase their net oil imports, most developed oil importing countries, such as the U.S., are being forced, via price rationing, to take a declining share of a falling volume of Global Net Exports.

In the U.S., oil consumption has fallen by 10% since peaking in 2005. Less oil consumption translates into fewer car sales . . .

. . . and less driving.

Vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in the U.S. plateaued in 2005 and have been trending down ever since.

Oregon is no exception to the national trend. Vehicle registrations in Oregon peaked in 2007 . . .

. . .  and were down to 3.23 million in 2010.

Gasoline consumption in Oregon and Washington has been on a plateau since 1999.

Sightline reports VMT in Oregon and Washington have been on a gently declining plateau since 2002.

The trend should now be clear, in Oregon as well as the nation as a whole. The times of ever-growing traffic on our roads are over for good. Instead, our future holds declining fuel consumption, declining number of cars and trucks, and declining vehicle miles traveled.

It’s time to start planning for that, rather than for continued growth.

The Census Bureau reports new home sales in August were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate (SAAR) of 295,000, down from a revised 302,000 in July (revised up from 298,000).

The Census Bureau started tracking new home sales in 1963. Since then, the record low was 412,000 in 1982 – until that record was broken in 2009, and again in 2010. Calculated Risk posts this chart.

 It’s  looking like 2011 will see yet another record low for new home sales: at the pace so far this year, 2011 sales would total just 302,000.

As far as can be discerned from available data, Oregon tracks the national trend pretty closely. New Home Trends Inc. produces a Monthly Monitor Report for the Portland market (which includes Washington as well as Oregon: Clark, Clackamas, Multnomah, and Washington).

Fewer new homes means less land is being gobbled up by development. The number of new subdivision lots being created has plummeted, and in June of 2011, no new lots were either applied for or recorded in the four-county Portland area.

Back during the Measure 49 debates, I argued that sacrificing the principle that the common good trumped property rights – rights which themselves were created by government in the belief that such rights, as carefully circumscribed, furthered the common good – was much too high a price to pay for the repeal of Measure 37. The philosophical argument was bolstered by a practical, economic argument: Oregon and the U.S. were on the precipice of an unprecedented collapse of the housing market that would render the so-called “right” to develop one’s property moot.

Property development as our future is dead. The data is beginning to confirm we sacrificed our principles for nothing. Now we find ourselves faced with the greatest challenge industrial civilization has ever faced – peak oil; and with the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced – climate change. But we’ve tied our hands, unable to shape our urban and rural communities to meet the challenges. In Oregon, virtually no law can be even considered that might lower the market value of someone’s property. Property rights trump everything, come hell or high water. And be assured, both hell and high water are coming.

The Federal Highway Administration reports travel on all U.S. roads and streets was down 2.5% for July 2011 compared to July 2010. Cumulative travel for 2011 is down 1.2%.

Bill McBride at Calculated Risk observes the downward trend in VMT is unprecedented.

In the early ’80s, miles driven (rolling 12 months) stayed below the previous peak for 39 months.

Currently miles driven has been below the previous peak for 44 months – so this is a new record for longest period below the previous peak – and still counting!

Gas prices are down from highs reached in spring this year, but are still significantly higher than a year ago – as seen in this chart made available by GasBuddy.

Crude oil prices have declined from highs reached earlier this year, but are still high enough to stifle economic growth (Bloomberg: as of 99/27/2011, WTI was trading at $84.45, Brent at $108.95). Gasoline prices appear to have room to decline, too. Crude oil accounts for about 55% of the price of gasoline. The chart shows WTI prices; however, gasoline prices in the U.S. are impacted more by Brent prices. While WTI briefly exceeded $112/barrel in April, Brent briefly broke above $127/barrel. WTI has become disconnected from global markets and the WTI/Brent spread has exploded, as seen in this chart from Bloomberg.

The American Trucking Association reports truck tonnage is down, too.

The American Trucking Associations’ advance seasonally adjusted (SA) For-Hire Truck Tonnage Index declined 0.2% in August after falling a revised 0.8% in July 2011. July’s decrease was less than the 1.3% ATA reported on August 23, 2011.  The latest drop put the SA index at 114.4 (2000=100) in August, down from the July level of 114.6.

This chart posted at Calculated Risk shows that freight tonnage has been on a downtrend since peaking in early 2005.

ATA Chief Economist Bob Costello observes while freight tonnage is down, carriers handling as much freight as they can – because trucking industry capacity has fallen.

“In part, this is due to less industry supply.  The number of trucks operated by the truckload industry is still down about 12% from the height in late 2006, yet tonnage levels are about the same as in late 2006. Additionally, most carriers are finding it very difficult to hire new truck drivers, which mean they can’t add too many trucks.”

VMT in Oregon was down 2.1% in July 2011 from July 2010, and is now down 2.4% for the year.

What if the recent down trend in vehicle miles traveled is not a fluke, but rather the manifestation of a new reality brought about by peak oil and its resultant economic impacts? Oregon’s planning assumes continued growth. Travel demand forecasting is driven by population and employment forecasts, assuming a positive correlation (if not a causal relationship) between population and employment growth and growth in travel demand. If that assumption is no longer valid, we will be wasting billions of precious dollars on unneeded highway white elephants, such as the Columbia River Crossing (or, in Evan Manvel’s words, the extremely risky and costly CRC highway mega-project).

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.

Despite continuing global economic weakness, crude oil prices continue to bounce around within the $112-115 range (Brent) and around the $100 level (WTI). Crude remains down a bit from highs reached a few weeks ago, as for the moment the slowdown in global growth is masking the inability of oil producers to boost the global supply of crude oil.

The latest EIA data show new global production records for both crude and all liquids. Sam Foucher asks at The Oil Drum, how much faith can we put in EIA data? Foucher points to another data source – the public database JODI – which shows production significantly lower than the EIA, and notes the way the production data are collected vastly differ between the EIA and JODI.

Jodi is a voluntary activity. Participating countries complete a standard data table (see table on page 2) every month for the two most recent months (M-1 and M-2) and submit it to the Jodi partner organisation(s) of which it is a member. The respective organisation compiles the data and forwards it to the IEF Secretariat which is responsible for the JodiOil World Database.

Foucher shows that, using JODI data where available and EIA data where JODI data are not available, the earlier record highs in both crude and all liquids production still stand.

Foucher asserts the EIA does not itself collect international production data, but rather pays a private company (IHS) for the data. I could not find a discussion of data sources on the EIA website, and am awaiting a response to an inquiry about their sources.

Global oil production data are less than perfect or certain. Jodi data are incomplete and, where available, self-reported. EIA data appear to be from a black box. Both should be taken with a pinch of salt. It’s a shame that Peakoil Nederland is no longer publishing Oilwatch Monthly – July 2010 seems to have been the last issue. A valuable service Oilwatch Monthly provided was to track the enegy content of liquid fuels produced, as volume of liquids is not the same as useful energy. For example, conversion to BTUs shows that actual available energy worldwide in January 2010 was 3.3% lower than liquids statistics counted in barrels would suggest. And nobody is tracking liquid fuels production in terms of net energy, accounting for the decrease in EROEI over time as the easy oil is depleted.

Regardless of whether the world is seeing new record highs of oil production, high oil prices are already prompting people to make big changes in their lives. More than half of Americans say they have made changes to their lifestyle, according to a new Gallup poll. The most common adjustment: driving less.

The Federal Highway Administration reports that vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in March were down 1.4% compared to March 2010 – and VMT for the year are now down 0.1% from last year. VMT in Oregon were down 4.1% from a year ago. So far, the decline is not as severe as in 2008. But as seen in this chart posted at Calculated Risk, the decline began at a lower level.

Calculated Risk also reports truck tonnage fell 0.7 Percent in April – and has not shown any overall growth in over seven years.

A new survey of real-estate professionals suggests driving less is causing Americans to rethink where they’re living, about shorter driving distances and being closer to shops and services.

The migration to the suburbs has stumbled as fuel prices soar and as levels of unemployment in suburbs remain about twice the level of unemployed in cities. New home sales overall have collapsed and remain at record lows. The Census Bureau reports 32 thousand new homes were sold (not seasonally adjusted) in April 2011, tying the record low for the month of April.

The Census Bureau breaks out sales data by region (Northeast, Midwest, South, and West), not by state – so from the data, we can’t tell what’s going on in Oregon. But in the West as a whole, April new home sales have fallen from an average of over 20,000 units a year in the 20-year period 1991-2010 to 8,000 units a year. New home sales are only 40% that of the 20-year average, and only 24% of the 33,000 units in the peak years 2004 and 2005.

In Oregon, expansions of urban growth boundaries are based on historical trends. Currently around the state, a flurry of requests for expansions are being considered. There’s just about zero current need for additional new homes, and future housing needs will not reflect past needs in number of units,or in size, type, or location. Expanding urban growth boundaries to accommodate desired growth will prove pushing on a string. It’s a good bet that most of the land to be newly slated for future growth will forever remain undeveloped.

Beginning this month, Transition United States is publishing a three-part series of papers titled Economic Resilience, authored by Joanne Poyourow. The first of the series is Economic Contraction.

Poyourow sets out to confront the the “triple crisis” of global warming, peak oil, and economic collapse. Any long-term plan we come up with is futile unless we anticipate that it will unfold amidst a world of economic contraction:

We have to plan for it, and put alternative financial tools in place to weather it, or it will undermine all of our other efforts.

Poyourow says it takes “raw courage” to confront the end of growth on a personal level, and even more to violate social and political taboos by doing so in public. But in the end, we have no choice – and our options are severely constrained:

Whether it will be a full-scale collapse into chaos like Jared Diamond writes about or Stoneleigh forecasts, or whether we will be successful in creating locally-managed “surge breakers” in time, remains to be seen.  But either way, we’d better try our best to get something in place.

The “techno-fantasy” conceptualized in the chart below – continued growth, “business as usual” – is just that, a complete fantasy. And the “green-tech stability” projection is also a fantasy: it represents a form of bargaining with rather than accepting the reality that renewable .

The uncomfortable reality is, no renewable energy sources are on hand that approach the energy density of fossil fuels. That leaves us with two options. We can choose to accept and deal with reality, with all the creativity, wisdom, and grace we can muster. Or we can continue to deny and resist reality,  destroy the land, the oceans, and the atmosphere and in the end suffer collapse as a consequence of our obdurateness.

The reality is, we  can’t force or cajole a finite world to accommodate infinite growth. As available energy and other resources become more scarce and expensive, there must be a descent.  A a severe contraction in our economic systems is inevitable. And we will have to adapt, voluntarily or involuntarily.

Against the backdrop of this reality, it’s no wonder that our politics – for example, Obama’s nonspeech outlining an energy nonpolicy – are nothing less than an absurdity.

Huge Bardi observes that we can learn an important lesson from the Japaneses – the pre-modern, pre-Fukushima, Edo period Japanese, that is. Like Japan, Earth is an island. To live sustainably and successfully on that island, the winning strategy is adaptation. We need to adjust our needs to what this planet can give us.

A recent post questioned whether the previously inexorable growth in VMT in the United States has ended, to be replaced with a trend of declining VMT.

A broader question is, has the trend of growth itself now ground to a halt?

New home sales have seen an unprecedented crash, as seen in this chart at Calculated Risk.

For the first time since the Census Bureau began keeping track of new home sales, sales have failed to rebound following a recession. New homes fuel the growth of suburbs and, in Oregon, the expansion of urban growth boundaries. Fewer new homes translates into less growth.

Mish Shedlock reports petroleum usage in the U.S. has been declining for the first time ever.

The decline in petroleum usage can’t be attributed to an increase in fuel economy of the U.S. light vehicle fleet, as seen in this graph from the EPA’s Fuel Economy Report.

There was a big uptick in fuel economy following the oil shocks of the late 1970s and early 1980s. But there’s been no significant increase in fuel economy since.

The commercial sector has hit hard times, too. The United States has too many stores.

And now demand for new retail space has collapsed.

And according to the BLS, non-farm employment is lower than it was 11 years ago.

Growth in new housing has collapsed, and we already have too many shopping malls. Growth in petroleum usage has reversed and VMT may have peaked. There’s been no growth in employment in over a decade. Could it be that the growth paradigm is itself history?

Perhaps it’s time to consider the possibility of planning for something other than growth. Perhaps we won’t need new roads and bridges, more land for houses and industry. Perhaps what we’ll really need is land for food and forests, and communities that can function well in a world where energy is scarce and dear. Perhaps we should begin planning to make that happen.

A new study by Eben Fodor shows that growth isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. Communities are often better off without it.

The study, titled Relationship between Growth and Prosperity in 100 Largest U.S. Metropolitan Areas, examines the relationship between growth and economic prosperity in the nation’s largest cities. It finds that faster growth rates are associated with lower incomes, greater income declines, and higher poverty rates. Unemployment rates tend to be higher in faster growing areas. The 25 slowest-growing metro areas outperformed the 25 fastest growing in every category and averaged $8,455 more in per capita personal income in 2009.

Conventional urban planning and economic development strategies, which pursue growth of metro areas to supposedly advance the economic welfare of the general public, may be misguided. Our “growth is good” ideology presumes the negative impacts of growth to quality of life – such as increased traffic congestion, environmental destruction, loss of farm and forest lands, and loss of amenity values (such as tranquility, sense of community, or open space), and higher taxes to fund the cost of the new public infrastructure (roads, schools, sewer and water systems, etc.) – are outweighed by the new jobs and economic prosperity that are assumed to come with growth.

But this study suggests the presumed link between growth and prosperity is nothing more than a myth. The real consequence of growth is degradation of the quality of life.

For the last 25 years, the Urban Mobility Report (UMR) created by the Texas Transportation Institute has driven transportation policy in the U.S.  Its results have been used to justify billions of dollars in expenditures to build new roads and highways.

Now a new report titled Driven Apart: How sprawl is lengthening our commutes and why misleading mobility measures are making things worse, finds the solution to the problem of commute time has much more to do with how we build our cities than how we build our roads.

Driven Apart ranks how long residents in the nation’s largest 51 metropolitan areas spend in peak hour traffic, and in some cases the rankings are almost the opposite of those listed in the 2009 Urban Mobility Report. While peak hour travel times average 200 hours a year in large metropolitan areas, Driven Apart proves that some cities have managed to achieve shorter travel times and actually reduce the peak hour travel times.

Here is the report’s finding, in a nutshell:

Imagine two drivers leaving downtown to head home. Each of them sits in traffic for the first ten miles of the commute but at that point, their paths diverge. The first one has reached home. The second has another twenty miles to drive, though luckily for her, the roads are clear and congestion doesn’t slow her down. Who’s got a better commute?

Some metropolitan areas such as Chicago and Portland have land use patterns and transportation systems that enable their residents to take shorter trips and minimize the burden of peak hour travel.  Such cities have actually seen reductions in average peak hour travel times. Driven Apart concludes that if every one of the top 50 metros followed suit with Chicago and other higher performing cities, their residents would drive about 40 billion fewer miles per year and use two billion fewer gallons of fuel, for a cost savings of $31 billion annually.

The UMR depicts Chicago as having some of the worst travel delays, when it actually has the shortest time spent in peak hour traffic of any major US metro area. In contrast, Nashville jumped from 31st to first on the list of those with the longest peak travel times.

The UMR has a number of major flaws that misstate and exaggerate the effects of congestion, particularly the Travel Time Index (TTI).  TTI is the ratio of average peak hour travel times to average free flow travel times. Furthermore, for the 51 metropolitan areas analyzed in Driven Apart, the UMR overstates the cost of congestion by about $49 billion. Because UMR methodology does not take into account travel distances, it universally rewards cities that are spread out as opposed to compact urban areas.

Driven Apart suggests new metrics that focus on trip distances and total travel times – two statistics not reported in the UMR – because they point to a broader and more powerful set of public policy options for dealing with urban transportation problems.  The report recommends a new system for measuring urban transportation performance that includes emphasizing accessibility and focusing on measures of land uses, trip lengths and mode choices as well as travel speeds. The Texas Transportation Institute is listening, and is considering introducing a Total Travel Time performance measure and sustainability factors in future mobility reports.

Transportation costs are often the second highest expense for working Americans, behind housing costs – so it’s critical that transportation investments are guided by accurate and meaningful data.