Oil consumption in the twenty-seven countries of the European Union peaked in 2006 and has since been declining at a rate of 3% per year. Oil consumption in the transport sector in the EU began to decline in 2008, dropping 1.4% from 2007. Oil consumption in road transport fell, offsetting a continuing but slowing rise in air transport consumption.

Usings less oil than the U.S. does not mean the EU is less prosperous than the U.S. EU nations consume only 60% of the oil as the U.S., but  the gross domestic product of the combined 27 EU nations exceeds that of the U.S. by 15%.

Calculated Risk has posted this graph showing the rolling 12-month total VMT going mostly sideways, still 2.0% below the peak and only 0.6% above the recent low.

VMT in Oregon was off 2.4% in May compared to May last year.

Other factors like mixed-use, street and intersection design, and block size prove to be less important than destination accessibility. Still, these factors are more important than mere density. Density is less important than land-use mix and having shops, schools, and workplaces near to where people live.

Not surprisingly, driving is found to have energy and climate implications:

The transportation outcomes . . .  vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and vehicle trips (VT), are critically linked to traffic safety, air quality, energy consumption, climate change, and other social costs of automobile use.

Figuring out a way to drive less – much, much less – is key to coming to grips with peak oil and to arresting global warming before we reach a tipping point beyond which Earth’s climate will spin out of control, resulting in an Eaarth we no longer recognize and which is no longer fit for human habitation.

The free-access analysis, Travel and the Built Environment, was authored by Reid Ewingab of the University of Utah’s Urban Land Institute; and Robert Cerverocde, University of California (Berkeley) Transportation Center, Institute of Urban and Regional Development.

Here’s the abstract:

Problem: Localities and states are turning to land planning and urban design for help in reducing automobile use and related social and environmental costs. The effects of such strategies on travel demand have not been generalized in recent years from the multitude of available studies.

Purpose: We conducted a meta-analysis of the built environment-travel literature existing at the end of 2009 in order to draw generalizable conclusions for practice. We aimed to quantify effect sizes, update earlier work, include additional outcome measures, and address the methodological issue of self-selection.

Methods: We computed elasticities for individual studies and pooled them to produce weighted averages.

Results and conclusions: Travel variables are generally inelastic with respect to change in measures of the built environment. Of the environmental variables considered here, none has a weighted average travel elasticity of absolute magnitude greater than 0.39, and most are much less. Still, the combined effect of several such variables on travel could be quite large. Consistent with prior work, we find that vehicle miles traveled (VMT) is most strongly related to measures of accessibility to destinations and secondarily to street network design variables. Walking is most strongly related to measures of land use diversity, intersection density, and the number of destinations within walking distance. Bus and train use are equally related to proximity to transit and street network design variables, with land use diversity a secondary factor. Surprisingly, we find population and job densities to be only weakly associated with travel behavior once these other variables are controlled.

Takeaway for practice: The elasticities we derived in this meta-analysis may be used to adjust outputs of travel or activity models that are otherwise insensitive to variation in the built environment, or be used in sketch planning applications ranging from climate action plans to health impact assessments. However, because sample sizes are small, and very few studies control for residential preferences and attitudes, we cannot say that planners should generalize broadly from our results. While these elasticities are as accurate as currently possible, they should be understood to contain unknown error and have unknown confidence intervals. They provide a base, and as more built-environment/travel studies appear in the planning literature, these elasticities should be updated and refined.

Cumulative travel for 2010 is down 0.2% (-1.6 billion vehicle miles). Calculated Risk has posted this chart.

Are we seeing a Hubbert’s Peak for VMT? Peak VMT logically would be a consequence of peak oil, as vehicle travel is almost totally dependent on oil.

Travel in the western states rose considerably less than the rest of the country – only 0.3%.

One implication of peak VMT is that we won’t be needing all of the road infrastructure that is currently being planned, based on the assumption that traffic will continue to increase into the future as it has in the past. Peak VMT means we’ll likely be stranded with excess capacity. Continuing to squander billions on new bridge and highway capacity will prove to be a tragic misallocation of precious land and scarce resources.

Calculated Risk has posted this chart showing the percent change from the same month of the previous year:

Travel in the 13 western states increased by 2.2% – a little less than the national average.

Miles driven in March are still below 2006 levels.  Cumulative travel so far this year is below 2005 levels.

It’s still too early to tell whether the overall trend has resumed its historic climb or remains down. There’s too much unpredictability about economic conditions, and oil supplies and prices. As Yogi Berra said: prediction is hard, especially about the future.

Travel on all roads and streets changed by -2.9% (-6.3 billion vehicle miles) for February 2010 as compared with February 2009.

In the west, not so.  Western region travel is up 0.9%. In Oregon, VMT was up 3.5% in February after being off 1.2% in January.

Cumulative travel in the U.S. is also down so far in 2010:

Cumulative Travel for 2010 changed by -2.3% (-10.1 billion vehicle miles).

Calculated Risk has posted this chart showing the moving 12 month total peaking in November 2007:

Similar studies conducted for the San Francisco Bay Area and the Washington, D.C., region have found average housing and transportation cost burdens of 59% and 47%, respectively.

“Drive until you qualify” make no sense when the transportation costs offset the lower house prices.

When gasoline prices rose to over $4 per gallon in 2008, the high prices hit exurban areas hard and magnified the housing bust in areas such as Riverside County, CA.

A news story in the Minneapolis -St. Paul Star Tribune now reports a reversal in the migration to suburbs and exurbs in Minnesota:

New estimates suggest that the movement into suburban and exurban counties within commuting distance of Minneapolis and St. Paul has stopped cold for the first time in recent memory.

For many years, the combination of robust growth, a multitude of freeways and plenty of open space helped ignite an explosion in exurban living. People were commuting for hours from towns such as Mora, Glencoe and Owatonna. National experts classed the Twin Cities as having the nation’s third-largest exurban flight from 2000 to 2005, ahead of even sprawling Atlanta.

But the U.S. Census Bureau’s latest estimates — the first to reflect the impact of 2008’s $4-a-gallon gas — suggest that:

• With people abandoning foreclosed and unsellable homes, the two-state ring of exurban counties is hardly growing. For these counties as a group, 2009 marked the first time more people left than moved in.
• In the five big suburban counties closest to the center (Dakota, Scott, Carver, Anoka and Washington), new arrivals have slowed to a standstill. With a wave of baby boomers sitting on empty nests in older suburbs such as Eagan, and new construction all but extinguished in once-booming counties such as Scott, growth is half what it was a decade ago.
• The two big core counties of Hennepin and Ramsey, losing tens of thousands of people a year as recently as five years ago, are on the rebound. Growth is gaining by the year.

When gas is cheap, moving farther out as a way to get more space for less money can make sense. But there’s a trade0ff. Time spent commuting is time not spent with a spouse, a child, a dog. Distance can be a drag. When gas prices rise and housing prices collapse, being upside down on a mortgage can make it difficult or impossible to escape.

Ominously, gas prices are now rising again.

Vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in the 13 western states were off more than the national average – 2.8%.  VMT in Oregon were off 1.2%. Oregon VMT were up 12.8% in 2009 over 2008, but now appear to be dropping again.

The rural/urban split of the total VMT was about 1/3: 2/3 -  72.0 billion vehicle-miles on rural roads and 150.8 billion vehicle-miles on urban roads and streets.

VMT have declined 2.9% compared to January 2008, and are down 4.7% compared to January 2007. As gas prices have been rising again (as discussed here), it looks like VMT are once again dropping.

Bill McBride at Calculated Risk has posted a chart showing the relationship between gas prices and vehicle miles traveled (VMT).

McBride explains:

Although vehicle miles driven are noisy month to month, it appears that miles driven responds to spikes in oil prices.

For the last few weeks, oil prices have been bouncing around $80/barrel, a price level last seen just before oil prices spiked in 2008. Will we once again begin to see demand destruction and a collapse in VMT, such as we saw in 2008?

For December 2009 – the last month of data – the DOT reported that miles driven were unchanged compared to December 2008 after increasing in 5 of the 6 previous months. The report for January should be out this next week.  Should be interesting.

As energy analyst Jeff Rubin points out, the U.S. will never regain pre-recession peak levels of oil consumption – and ditto for oil consumption in Canada, Western Europe, Japan, or anywhere else in the OECD economies.

But don’t expect oil prices to go down. Rubin says:

Back in the 1990s, that kind of demand contraction in the OECD would have foretold a big decline in oil prices, since those countries accounted for almost three quarters of global oil demand. Today, they account for barely half, and tomorrow they will account for even less.

In a world where oil supplies have most likely peaked, global oil consumption has become a zero-sum game:

As China moves from consuming 8 million barrels a day to 10 million barrels, and OPEC ramps up its own daily consumption from 10.5 million to 12 million barrels, somehow, somewhere else in the world, there must be a corresponding decline in oil consumption. That somewhere else just happens to be the U.S. market and the oil markets of the other OECD economies.

Automobile sales in the U.S. have also peaked, never to regain former levels. Calculated Risk reports estimated car sales for February 2010 at 10.4 million SAAR (seasonally adjusted annual rate).

The current level of sales are very low – far below the 17 million that were sold each year between 1999 and 2007 – and are still below the lowest point for the ‘90/’91 recession (even with a larger population).

All of our land use and transportation planning assumes that vehicle travel will continue to grow at historic rates. Based on those assumptions, reducing the historic rate of increase would require heroic efforts; reducing per capita vehicle miles traveled (VTM), even more.  Reducing overall VTM significantly enough to achieve even the modest emissions reductions goals that are currently on the table would be a Sisyphean task, especially if population were to continue to increase as projected.

Given the new reality of dwindling fuel supplies and collapsing vehicle sales, it may be wiser to devote our planning efforts to figuring out how people can live and get around in communities with far less fuel and far fewer vehicles. The new reality is, the era of car-dominated communities is drawing to a close.