It’s not just in Vancouver where driving is dropping (see post below). Here’s an update from below the border via Atlantic Cities:
You’ve got Peak Driver’s License. Peak Registered Vehicle. Peak Gas Consumption. Peak Miles Traveled. There are peaks per person, per household, per demographic. Then you’ve got your absolute peaks when you add up all of our vehicles and miles together, as if we were all cruising the highways at the same time.
The point of all of this is that any one number is a little dubious, especially in light of that inconvenient economic recession. But Michael Sivak at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute has been methodically slicing the question every which way. And the totality of the picture he’s built is starting to look pretty convincing.
More here.
So, all the patting ourselves on our backs that happens around here means we’re just following a trend?
I’ve been trying to follow up on the traffic counts for the new Port Mann Bridge with some difficulty. The Transportation Investment Corporation – the crown corporation which managed the construction and financing – has just published the latest annual report and service plan. However, there is very little interesting or useful in these reports. There are at:
http://www.pmh1project.com/about-the-project/about-ti-corp/Pages/Financial-Reporting.aspx
(The previous year’s reports seem to have disappeared.)
The annual report only states on page 26: “The cumulative number of tolled crossings to March 2013 was 10.6 million.” But this does not give the time period. If this was the whole 113 days from Dec 8th 2012 to March 31st 2013 that the bridge has been open and tolled, that would be 94,000 trips per day. The SDG report seems to estimate daily trips in 2013 at slightly less than 125,000 per day (graph on page 10):
http://www.pmh1project.com/Policy%20Planning%20%20Reports/COMM%20-%20rpt%20-%20SDG%20PMH1%20forecasts%20-%2020110912.pdf
Is this indicative of a major forecasting miss, are these numbers incomplete, or is this initial time period just not useful in measuring a new project’s use? We are not getting many answers, and if there is truly nothing to see here, the TIC would be advised to be more forthcoming with its forecasts and statistics.
Funny how it coincides with the economic decline of the Western World. They haven’t reached “peak car” in China.
It would be interesting to see the overall picture from the 1960s through the high gas prices of the 70s to the 80s.
A Guest: …the high gas prices of the 70s and 80s.
Oil prices have risen by about 400% since only 2000, let alone three or four decades ago. There’s more to come as the shale oil + gas “revolution” winds down well before this decade is through (read any independent analysis on shale, notably on the terrible production rates, costs and company debt loads) and the worldwide depletion of fossil fuels continues on its merry way toward creating more economic chaos,
Note that the downward aspect matches the timing of the global Great Recession, out of which we are still climbing. Chronic un-(and under) employment, household debt, small-business collapse (particularly retail), hotel industry suffering badly, it goes on. All which markedly impact mileage. Give it another 5 years; we may find its part of a cycle, rather than a trend.
Thats strange, I did not know the recession started in 2006.