Roger Baker : The Texas Road Lobby Meets Peak Oil

Photo by Rupert Ganzer / Flickr.
Coming soon:
Peak oil, peak driving, peak cars

Part IV: The Texas road lobby meets peak oil

By Roger Baker / The Rag Blog / July 28, 2011

[This is the fourth and final part of a series by Roger Baker on transportation, centering on the issue of peak oil and its ramifications.]

The 'Pentagon of Texas'

Molly Ivins once called TxDOT (Texas Department of Transportation) the "Pentagon of Texas.” The political clout of TxDOT and the Texas road lobby operating on the state level is still unrivaled.

Inside Texas, TxDOT has held a politically powerful position for many decades, with the help of its traditional political allies like the Texas Good Roads Transportation Association, which was the political base for businesses and civic clubs that might benefit from local application of road money, and the Associated General Contractors, essentially an alliance of private road contracting companies, rather analogous to the defense industry. The contractors gained their institutional power decades ago, when TxDOT stopped building very many roads on its own.

From its earliest days, the Texas Highway Commission, as it was known before it became TxDOT, has been a highly political institution ready to pass out favors to its political allies in the form of road contracts. This snip is taken from an especially scholarly study devoted to the early politics of TxDOT.

It’s more than likely that the conditions of these highways can be seen as a direct legacy of years of county authority and political struggle for control of the department. After all, since its founding in 1917 the Texas Highway Department has, as often as not, been forced to make decisions based on political considerations. Issues such as traffic density and the proportional allocation of funds were often secondary to the job of protecting revenue or just getting roads built.

In Texas, roads gradually became seen as a traditional form of publicly funded entitlement; a kind of welfare to subsidize suburban sprawl development in a heavily urbanized and rapidly growing state.

The way politics works in Texas, there is a traditional alternative to political bribes. Instead, the special interests channel money to Texas politicians through campaign contributions. Quite in line with this approach, the biggest road contractors in Texas contributed over $1 million to Texas Gov. Rick Perry during his first term in office. Later they gave more millions to other Texas politicians.

Since the state solicited its first bids for a leg of the TTC project in 2003, private companies that have landed lucrative TTC contracts have contributed $3.4 million to Texas candidates and political committees -- a significant increase in their political activity. TTC contractors also have spent up to $6.1 million on Texas lobbyists since the state solicited their respective bids. While the TTC contains windfalls for some contractors, lobbyists and elected officials, the benefits to Texas motorists and taxpayers are much less clear.

A few years ago, when the late Ric Williamson chaired the Texas Transportation Commission, it became apparent that fuel tax revenues could not possibly keep up with TxDOT's accustomed pace of road building. Working with Gov. Rick Perry, Williamson ordered TxDOT to try to shift all its new construction to "public-private partnership" toll roads to leverage TxDOT's limited public funds.

In order to sell private investors on toll road bonds, it is obviously helpful to try to maintain that road demand will keep increasing for decades until the bonds are finally paid off (some toll road bonds, like some issued for US 290 E, pay junk bond rates, but are uninsured against default). The policy is to try to use private toll road bond funding and also federal loans to supplement TxDOT's traditional but stagnant gas tax revenue, in order to bridge the revenue gap and keep building roads.

As is the case with Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, Texas governor Rick Perry is a highway booster. "The highways of Texas are built and paved in part by paths of gold leading to the Texas Governor's Mansion," political reporter R.G. Ratcliffe wrote in the Aug. 30, 2002, edition of the Houston Chronicle, in “Highway plans bring money to politicians.”

The political clout of the Texas road lobby still exceeds that of the various competing social needs such as education. TxDOT's long range road planning policy still stubbornly reflects the same outlook, which involves working hard to perpetuate the notion of ever-expanding growth in future road demand.

However, as the federal data clearly shows, Texas travel is currently falling short of TxDOT's vehicle travel growth projections, due to a combination of higher fuel prices, a poor economy, an aging population, congestion fatigue, and changing driving behavior, also seen nationally.


The Texas road lobby today

The latest incarnation of the Texas road lobby is arguably Transportation Advocates of Texas (TAoT). A sort of who's who of current Texas road politics, clearly organized by special interest money. Scroll down to the bottom to see a long list of those interests currently involved in promoting roads -- largely banking, construction, engineering, road contracting, and land development interests.

Those familiar with Austin's federally sanctioned Metropolitan Planning Organization, CAMPO, will see the last two CAMPO directors, Mike Aulick and Joe Cantalupo, listed among members of the road lobby's supporters.

This snip from an internal document of this same group, TAoT, recently circulated to its supporters, clearly shows that their primary political goal is to get more road money, despite the relatively falling gas tax revenue:

The Great Outstanding Issue: Texas has yet to identify a stable source of additional revenue that can meet the transportation needs of a rapidly expanding population. Fuel efficiency and hybrid vehicles reduce gas tax revenue -- and the state fuel tax hasn’t changed in 20 years. Whether it is through taxes, fees, tolls or other sources of revenue, further delays in providing additional financing will inevitably result in more traffic congestion.

By one estimate we under-fund roads by $8 billion a year. The problem will only get worse. Congestion will get worse. Economic losses will get worse. Rural connectivity will get worse. Road conditions and road safety will get worse. And the cost associated with doing nothing means one day the price tag will be worse.

Only roads are mentioned; TxDOT and the road lobby don't do much transit, except by TxDOT passing federal transit funds down to the local level. Even while admitting that the road funding situation is getting worse with no relief in sight, the focus remains strongly on building roads, as spelled out in this editorial by two top TAoT road lobbyists.

But we are not without solutions. The gas tax hasn't been increased in 20 years -- and its buying power has significantly diminished due to inflation. Vehicle registration fees could be raised and dedicated to high-priority projects. Allowing local officials to access a portion of the gas tax or other sources of revenue would also provide relief. And we can support ending the diversion of highway dollars to spending on other priorities.

The Texas road lobby selects data that
always predicts increasing road travel demand

The Texas road lobby seeks to keep building roads which benefit not only the road contractors, but also the powerful Texas suburban land developers who thrive by planning ever-expanding rings of suburban sprawl around the major metropolitan areas of Texas, a pattern typical of other sunbelt states.

By 2005, about 86% of the Texas population was living in its urbanized areas with only 14% living in the rural areas. Suburban sprawl development has long been made profitable by buying and developing land in the suburban fringe areas. These areas often escape city taxes, but require the help of publicly funded highways to help stimulate development.

This road-assisted urban development formula worked for decades, but it is based on unsustainable trends. Anyone can now see from the federal data that the total travel demand on Texas roads has been flat since about 2007. Here are the yearly VMT numbers for total travel in Texas in millions of miles on state's roads as measured by the Federal Highway Administration. See for example the 2007 link.

2004 -- 231,008
2005 -- 235,170
2006 -- 238,256
2007 -- 243,443
2008 -- 235,382
2009 -- 230,411

Unfortunately, this useful yearly data series for Texas road travel stopped in 2009. However, using this series we can compare the five most recent Februarys of Texas driving; here again, we can see that the Texas VMT road travel data have continued to stagnate or decrease, on through the most recently reported data:

Feb. 2007 -- 17,893
Feb. 2008 -- 18,831
Feb. 2009 -- 18,953
Feb. 2010 -- 18,490
Feb. 2011 -- 17,635

Given the nature of road politics in Texas, it comes as no surprise that TxDOT's long range plan released in May 2010 anticipates a travel demand growth of about 2.44% a year, for decades into the future, as a basis for TxDOT planning. As TxDOT says, "The new Statewide Long-Range Transportation Plan 2035 (SLRTP) will serve as the state's 24-year "blueprint" for the planning process.

TxDOT's "Statewide Long-Range Transportation Plan 2035," released in mid-2010, tries to ignore the current flatness in travel demand as something exceptional and abnormal. It assumes that vehicle miles traveled will somehow recover and then continue to rise steadily as a straight line for decades to come, much as it did before 2005.

The TxDOT long range planners are unable to explain the sharp falloff in traffic volume seen to begin about 2005 -- with Texas road travel peaking in 2007 -- and now continuing through the most recent data in 2011, or about six years now.

Since the Texas travel data is collected and published by the Federal Highway Administration, the continuing stagnation or decline in vehicle miles traveled on Texas roads is hard for TxDOT to deny. This well-documented reality has caused TxDOT to insert the strange flattened VMT section in the middle of their otherwise ever-ascending long range travel demand chart.



The reality is also that car registrations in Texas peaked in 2005 and then flattened and decreased slightly until 2009, where the most recent FHWA data ends. This data is given in thousands of car (light vehicle) registrations in Texas, 2004-2009, here seen peaking in 2005:

2004 -- 8,620
2005 -- 8,793
2006 -- 8,689
2007 -- 8,680
2008 -- 8,711
2009 -- 8,711


The Texas Road Lobby's think tank,
the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI)

The Texas road lobby has its own nationally prominent think tank, the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) based at Texas A&M. TTI functions more or less as an academic wing of the road lobby, implicitly denying peak oil, while focusing primarily on expanding road capacity as the best way to preserve mobility and serve future transportation needs. The TTI outlook on urban traffic congestion and congestion relief -- through building more roads for ever more vehicles -- is widely disseminated through the media as their main approach to transportation planning policy.

Over the past year, TTI experts answered tough questions on a variety of state and national transportation issues. Over 2,500 newspaper articles, broadcast television spots and professional journals -- with a potential reach of over 725 million readers and viewers nationwide -- mentioned the Institute or its experts.

For the Texas road lobby to contemplate that the total amount of driving inside the USA may never again exceed the peak reached in 2007, either in Texas or nationally, is considered a heresy.

As the charts show, the TTI and TxDOT claim to be able to predict the future numbers of drivers, and the future road demand, thus implying the need to keep expanding road capacity for decades into the future. (Note: car ownership peaked worldwide in 2004.)

The TTI works hard to help us ignore the fact that people are actually driving less, in large part because of higher fuel costs combined with a decreasing family budget. Other factors include an increasing level of rush hour congestion seen in most large U.S. cities as a normal consequence of their growing population.

At the same time, TTI concludes that Texans will always be willing and able to keep driving more, as they have in the past, by means of a transition to more fuel efficient or electric vehicles. This would of course justify the continued building of ever more new roads by the private road contractors.

Since fuel tax revenue has been stagnant compared to the rate of inflation, TxDOT's gas tax revenue has effectively been decreasing. From the standpoint of road lobby politics, the political path of least resistance is for the road lobby to try to claim that demand for new road capacity will always keep growing as fast as it has in the past.

The road lobby also has an interest in trying to maintain that the increasing fuel efficiency of vehicles is more important than changing driving behavior, thus causing fuel taxes to continue falling short of the funding needed to meet the projected increase in road demand.

In May 2010 Dr David Ellis of TTI appeared before a joint meeting of two top transportation-related committees of the Texas Senate to explain why Texas travel volume will always keep rising, much as it did before 2005. And to argue that future road demand will continue to increase rapidly for decades to come, which implies the need for ever more roads.

Note the similarity between Dr. Ellis's chart and TxDOT's VMT charts released about the same time, except in the case of Dr. Ellis's chart, driving demand is projected to increase even more steadily over time.



Dr. Ellis's argument is that while Texas may have seen slight decreases in driving before, that these are exceptional and momentary blips, after which the old historic, and presumably normal, increases in vehicles on the road will resume, blind to the rising price of fuel.

The steady increase in driving seen during the decades of cheap oil before 2005 should thus be accepted as the normal situation, and as a proper guide to future spending on roads in Texas (see Exhibit 2 of his report).

Part of Dr. Ellis's conclusion is based on the theory that vehicle fuel efficiency is increasing much faster than probably is the case. While it is true that the U.S. has been using a lot less petroleum since 2007, this is probably in large part due to the fact that the public driving is less.


The reality is that while average vehicle fuel efficiency is really increasing, it is only happening very slowly. It takes about 10 years for fuel efficiency to increase by 5%, or .5% per year, largely held back by a slow vehicle replacement rate, as Stuart Staniford shows in this chart.

In sharp contrast to this probable rate of vehicle efficiency increase, Dr. Ellis estimates in his chart that vehicle fuel efficiency in Texas has somehow increased from 17.2 MPG in 2005 to 20.5 MPG in 2009 (see Exhibit 4 of his report). This would be a whopping 19% vehicle fuel efficiency increase in just over four years. This is nearly 5% a year, or almost 10 times the much more plausible rate of .5% a year seen above.

Exaggerating the probable increase in fuel efficiency helps the road lobby ignore the current and ongoing stagnation in vehicle miles of travel since the 2007 peak, both in Texas and the USA. The theory seems to be that any time now we will dump our old cars and go out and buy new electric cars, which the road lobby will tax per mile with road user fees. Meanwhile, we are expected to keep driving more and more, just as we did in past decades of cheap oil.


Texas roads are already deteriorating on a large scale

With the Texas road lobby in effective political control of state funding, most of the available road money has been going into building new roads. As they say, there are no ribbon-cutting ceremonies for maintaining existing roads, which in Texas have been deteriorating. As this piece points out, Texas road upkeep is getting lot more expensive, so repairs are falling behind to the point that most Texas roads are in now less than good condition.

Texas’ road conditions

As of 2008, a full 65% of Texas’ state-owned major roads had fallen out of good condition, meaning they will now be increasingly expensive to repair and maintain. Only 34% of Texas’ roads were in good condition, the state in which repairs are least expensive. The condition of 1% of Texas’ state roads was not reported.

Texas’ highway spending priorities

Between 2004 and 2008, Texas spent 62% of its highway capital expenditures on road expansion – $4.1 billion each year on average -- but only 11% on repair and maintenance of existing roads -- $692 million. That 62% of spending on expansion added 2,962 lane-miles to the Texas road network.

Texas would need to spend $4.5 billion annually for the next 20 years to get the current backlog of poor-condition major roads into a state of good repair and maintain all state-owned roads in good condition. Shifting more funds toward repair would go a long way toward addressing the state’s maintenance needs.

Cartoon from Korea Times.
The Texas road lobby's funding solution:
the Mileage-Based User Fee (MBUF)

Given the TTI's faith in the need to build more roads to accommodate an ever-increasing level of road demand, combined with an increasing inability of the fuel tax to meet the funding gap, it is easy to conclude that a lot more road funding revenue will be needed.

Anything to avoid seriously dealing with the basic need to shift transportation policy toward more energy-efficient compact urban development sometimes called smart growth, together with a new focus on public transportation.

The road lobby's basic conclusion is that Texas now needs to move toward some kind of vehicle mileage tax or fee, and raise a lot more money per vehicle mile driven. However any kind of new tax or fee that extracts more total money from already financially stressed drivers is going to be widely unpopular. Since the word "tax" is already quite unpopular in Texas, other terms are being used such -- as a "Mileage-Based User Fee." Alternative terms being used are "road user charges" or "network tolls."

A new tax or fee on miles driven is seen as one of the few possible ways to raise enough new money to keep the road-building game going. However this method of funding expanded road capacity ignores the effect that rising fuel prices are having by already reducing total per capita driving. It is becoming a matter of what the driver market will bear, given that driving is now in decline both nationally and in Texas due to the rising cost of fuel on top of a stagnant economy. But TTI sees little alternative.

TTI Leads Mileage-Based User Fee Conference, June 20, 2011

Some 115 federal, state and local government representatives, transportation system users, private-sector representatives, and transportation researchers attended the Symposium on Mileage-Based User Fees (MBUF) in Colorado, June 13-14. That represents a 60 percent increase over last year’s attendance.

MBUFs, also known as vehicle miles traveled (VMT) fees, would raise funds based on how many miles a motorist drives. Revenue generated would replace or supplement the inadequate fuel tax, which comes from each gallon of gas sold at the fuel pump.

“Although the idea of a road-user fee to replace or supplement the fuel tax has been discussed and researched at varying degrees for about a decade now, interest is really growing at the state and national levels,” says symposium co-chair Ginger Goodin, of the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI). Goodin is currently serving as principal investigator for a USDOT study on road-user fee collection technologies and is TTI’s resident expert on the topic.

The Texas Transportation Commission (TTC), at its Dec. 15, 2010 meeting, took a look at a variety of road user fees in a presentation given by TTI.

The Texas Transportation Institute reviewed its draft report, "Is Texas Ready For Mileage Fees?" which asserted that fuel consumption will continue to decrease and make a gas tax an unsustainable revenue generation method in the upcoming decade.

This fact -- combined with increasingly fuel-efficient and alternative-fuel vehicles and the $315 billion in funding needs for Texas transportation identified by the Texas 2030 Committee -- demonstrates the inadequacy of the fuel tax as a viable long-term funding mechanism for maintaining and expanding highways in the Lone Star State,

the report read.

The Legislature required Transportation Commissioners to take a look at the viability of a Vehicle Miles-Traveled (VMT) tax, which would rely on either on-board devices or remote-tracking systems to measure the number of miles each registered vehicle travels, and then tax vehicle owners accordingly. No formal action was taken.

As a part of their background preparation for the TTC, TTI had set up a number of focus groups with average citizens to try to anticipate public reaction to road user fees. As the reader may easily imagine, new road user fees proved to be quite unpopular -- "negative reaction to mileage fees heard raised were pretty consistent across the focus groups"

Even though different focus groups in different areas all had these concerns (privacy, cost, and enforcement), in some groups privacy was more prevalent and in other groups it was cost.


Where is the Texas road funding deficit headed from here?

Given the current political climate and budget constraints, the chances of the Texas road lobby actually implementing the proposed mileage taxes or fees seems highly unlikely. This is simply because the amount of new revenue thought to be necessary would require the imposition of much higher user or driver fees than are now being collected through the current Texas gas tax. This totals about 40 cents a gallon, -- about half state and half federal.

However, the federal portion of this funding is in trouble since the feds have long been spending beyond their means. It appears that federal road funding must now shrink dramatically.

The Highway Trust Fund, based as it is on gas tax revenues, is the main revenue source for state and local transportation funding, special programs, and MPO planning funds. The gas taxes bring in about $35 billion annually, explained Beaudry, but the feds have been spending about $27 billion more than that, drawing upon revenues from other sources.

The crux of the Congressional debate swirls around “House Rule 21,” which says they can’t spend more than they bring in (in gas taxes), which means cutting more than a third of the transportation bill. There is disagreement over three options -- raise the gas tax, dramatically cut spending or find new revenue sources.

In essence, a new and less costly approach to maintaining urban mobility than road-building-as-usual is needed pretty soon. The economics of driving is likely to play out this way: we will probably see much higher oil prices by next year, with $4.50 a gallon gasoline now anticipated.

Goldman-Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Barron’s issued reports last week forecasting that oil prices will be much higher next year because of a stagnant supply situation. Goldman is saying the Saudis do not have nearly as much reserve capacity as Riyadh and the IEA claim and forecast oil at $140 a barrel next year. Barron’s is talking about oil reaching $150 next spring with spikes to $160 and $170 a barrel. Gasoline will be in the vicinity of $4.50 a gallon.

Just try to imagine the political challenge of the road lobby trying to impose miles driven fees on top of these fuel prices! But even this situation will probably not be enough to break through the current public denial relating to the unsustainability of driving as we have in the past.

To really break through our denial it may take $10 a gallon gasoline, as prominent peak oil policy analyst Tom Whipple has recently speculated:

Even weeks of 100 degree temperatures or even $4, $5, or $6 gasoline is unlikely to shift many prejudices in the short term. It is going to take a more severe shock -- say food shortages or $10 plus gasoline -- to shake the notion that a return to life as we knew it is still possible.

[Roger Baker is a long time transportation-oriented environmental activist, an amateur energy-oriented economist, an amateur scientist and science writer, and a founding member of and an advisor to the Association for the Study of Peak Oil-USA. He is active in the Green Party and the ACLU, and is a director of the Save Our Springs Association and the Save Barton Creek Association in Austin. Mostly he enjoys being an irreverent policy wonk and writing irreverent wonkish articles for The Rag Blog. Read more articles by Roger Baker on The Rag Blog.]

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Roger Baker : U.S. Driving Hits the Wall

Digitized image by Harm van den Dorpel / Today and Tomorrow.
Coming soon:
Peak oil, peak driving, peak cars

Part III: U.S. driving hits the wall

By Roger Baker / The Rag Blog / July 7, 2011

[This is the third part of a series by Roger Baker on transportation, centering on the issue of peak oil and its ramifications.]

Peak driving has many causes

In my last post, we saw that total U.S. driving hit a peak back in 2007. This time we will take a closer look at the situation to examine the reasons, the implications, and the prospects for the future of driving in the United States.

There are a number of contributing factors behind the 2007 peak. High unemployment simultaneously reduces the need to commute as well as the ability to afford to do so. There is the deteriorating condition of U.S. roads amidst increasing congestion. U.S. government grants to the states for highways are anticipated to drop further from the current level of $41 billion a year to about $32b next year.

The reduction in driving is not only due to high fuel prices as various observers have noted. It seems to be part of a global trend that predates the big runup in fuel prices.

A fairly recent study by economists Kenneth Small and Kurt van Dender found that a 10 percent increase in gas prices leads to a 0.2. to 0.3 percent reduction in driving in the short run, and an eventual reduction of 1.1 to 1.5 percent. But does this explain the driving slowdown? Maybe partially, but not entirely.

The growth of driving began to abate around 2000, and driving flattened out around 2004; the big gas price hikes didn’t come until late in the decade. Besides, though the graph I showed you last time has a couple of kinks in the 1970s, the relentless rise in driving basically shrugged off a comparable (in real terms) runup in oil prices during that decade.

Another factor is that an aging U.S. population tends to drive less. A recent AARP report, “How the Travel Patterns of Older Adults Are Changing,” predicts that older travelers will change the landscape of transportation in coming years, and concludes that transportation planners and policy makers must adapt to this shift. The number of Americans 65 and older is projected to rise by 60 percent in the next 15 years.

Seniors are piling onto public transportation

This analysis of the 2009 National Household Travel Survey by Jana Lynott and Carlos Figueiredo found that:

• Older adults comprise an increasing share of the nation’s travel.
• Although individuals are traveling less, particularly in private vehicles, public transportation use is up.
• Older men are more mobile than older women; however, the gap has been narrowing.
• The number of older non-drivers has grown by more than 1.1 million.

End of a love affair? Cartoon from Wellsphere.
Driving less is mostly due to the economy

The closer we look, the more evidence we find that the single biggest factor behind both the driving and car ownership decrease is the economy. The cost of driving has been going up a lot faster than average income. A new poll that helps to reveal the degree to which high fuel prices are impacting average folks concludes that about 40% are already stressed by steadily rising driving costs.

If we look at driving trends among young people we see that driving as a favorite teenage pastime is in decline. It is hard not to attribute a lot of this decline to the fact that the unemployment rate among youth is at a depression level of about 24%.

Thanks to a Brookings Institution report on U.S. metropolitan areas released last year, we can easily see the strong link between household income and car ownership.

If we go to the Brookings site we find all kinds of interesting demographic data on an interactive U.S. map, and sometimes yearly data series, for most major U.S. metropolitan areas. In this case, we can choose a city, go to "explore the data," then "commuting," and then "Vehicles availability by median household income." The income cutoff points used are: 80% of average is Low; 81-150% is Medium; and 150% of median or above is the High income category.

The report shows that most of the bottom third or so of households in U.S. metropolitan areas are unable to afford family cars. These households typically only have a 30-40% vehicle ownership rate. Of the roughly third in household income above that, comprising what we might often call the middle class, roughly 80% own cars. In the top third, typically about 90% of households own cars.

Following are NO-CAR family percentages for Texas and other big U.S. cities in 2008.


In each case, we see dramatic differences in household car ownership by income level, usually differing by a factor of four or more between the high and the low income levels. It is apparent that perhaps a quarter of U.S. households can't afford to own cars now. It is apparent that any continuation of the current hard times combined with higher driving costs will decrease car ownership and driving even more.

Since the data above is for 2008 car ownership, such ownership at the bottom end must have declined further, since the cost of driving has now risen above the previous 2008 peak. It appears likely that high imported oil prices are now killing the current recovery.

PRINCETON, NJ -- The slight majority of Americans, 53%, say they have responded to today's steep gas prices by making major changes in their personal lives, while 46% say they have not. Sizable proportions of adults of all major income levels have made such changes, including 68% of low-income Americans, 54% of middle-income Americans, and 44% of upper-income Americans.

What about the family budget available for driving? We can use the interactive map at the same Brookings link to see a series of yearly metropolitan income trends ending in 2009. Here we see that most metro areas show a striking decrease in median family income over the past decade, commonly 10% or more.

Economists often say that the core rate of U.S. inflation is just a few percent, since this core rate calculates inflation to exclude food and energy and focuses more on labor costs. However, at the low end of the car driver income scale, necessities like food and fuel and housing make up a comparatively larger portion of the family income. For low income drivers, inflation is effectively higher.


Another way to track the economic stress level for low income families is food stamps, where we see a large increase in use since 2008. Those who can afford to buy new cars are switching to smaller, more fuel efficient cars. Those who can't are trying to keep their current cars running longer.

People aren’t buying expensive items like cars and durable goods as much as they used to. Not even gas-saving hybrid cars are exempt from this downward trend. Interestingly, spikes in searches for maintenance related issues like “new tires” and “oil change” suggest people are looking for ways to keep their old cars running longer... A record number of Americans -- around 45 million -- now rely on food stamps. That means nearly 1 in 7 people, or 14%, are living on food stamps. The number of food stamp recipients increased 16% in 2010.

There is a lot of other evidence of a strong shift underway from two car families to one car families. A number of reasons for the decline in car ownership in recent years are reviewed here.

Ten reasons for drop in car ownership

In the United States, we embarrassingly have more vehicles than people with driver’s licenses. We have 246 million vehicles. AAA estimates that it costs $8,000 per year for each car owned, which creates a financial burden on cash-strapped Americans... One Car Households. The average suburban U.S. household has two vehicles. Some more. The average urban U.S. household has one vehicle. More American families and roommates are going from three cars to two cars to one car...

The latest polls show that about 40% of the US population is being squeezed hard by the rising cost of driving which now consumes about 20% of the typical family budget, even while total household income remains flat and families struggle to cope with a backlog of credit card debt and increasingly burdensome mortgage payments. There can be little doubt that American family budgets are now being severely stressed by the rising costs of driving their cars.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Wal-Mart's core shoppers are running out of money much faster than a year ago due to rising gasoline prices, and the retail giant is worried, CEO Mike Duke said Wednesday. "We're seeing core consumers under a lot of pressure," Duke said at an event in New York. "There's no doubt that rising fuel prices are having an impact."

Wal-Mart shoppers, many of whom live paycheck to paycheck, typically shop in bulk at the beginning of the month when their paychecks come in. Lately, they're "running out of money" at a faster clip, he said. "Purchases are really dropping off by the end of the month even more than last year," Duke said. "This end-of-month [purchases] cycle is growing to be a concern."

In Texas, we can see that the big box retailers are quite concerned that their customers are running out of money because of the cost of driving, causing them to shop less, especially toward the end of the month.

High gas costs are changing consumers' shopping habits, and that's hurting national retail chains like Wal-Mart Stores Inc. In fact, one in five Walmart moms list gasoline costs as their top expense behind housing and car payments, Wal-Mart spokesman Greg Rossiter said. Wal-Mart recently reported its eighth consecutive quarter of sales declines at U.S. stores open at least one year.“You know, it's just a ripple effect,” Rossiter said. “These concerns aren't geographic -- they aren't limited to any part of the country.”

Cartoon by johnxag / toonpool.
Further evidence for a big shift in U.S. driving behavior;
Elasticity of demand with driving cost

It used to be thought that the amount of driving in the U.S. was relatively blind to fuel cost. As economists would say, driving demand is an inelastic function of the cost of driving. In the past, most Americans would tend to spend less elsewhere in order to keep driving about as much. The need for U.S. drivers to keep driving at all costs in order to get to work and do other vital errands meant that they willing to pay a high price at the pump to keep driving.

In economic terms this is called a low elasticity of demand with fuel price. Over the longer run, people can move closer to work, or buy a smaller car, but over the short run they are stuck with paying, no matter what their fuel costs. However, this assumption has its limits when we reach the point that growing numbers simply can't afford to drive. The decrease in car driving and ownership due to a higher driving cost is resulting in a growing increase in the elasticity of oil demand with higher fuel price.

This snip from an insightful analysis by Tom Whipple reviews the conventional wisdom on the elasticity of driving with fuel prices. The conclusion is that these elasticity numbers may have reflected driving behavior in response to fuel price increases in the past, but not necessarily currently when many drivers are being forced to give up driving in order to support other equally important survival costs like food and housing.

In the very short run, motorists have no choice but to spend whatever it costs to keep their automobiles and trucks running for their livelihoods depend on it. Over the course of a year or so, some can move to substitute forms of transport, cut back on discretionary travel, and, if they have a choice, use more fuel efficient vehicles.

Within a year, all this should add up to an elasticity of demand of roughly -0.26 suggesting that for every 10 percent increase in gasoline prices, gasoline demand should fall by 2.6 percent. If prices remain high for several years, then the elasticity number goes to -.58 suggesting that the demand will fall by 5.8 percent for every 10 percent increase in prices. These numbers of course were derived from past experience in a simpler time before global oil production had peaked and price run-ups were mostly short-lived.

This diversion of spending toward fuel for cars automatically subtracts consumer spending, the bulk of the U.S. economy, from other areas. If the food and fuel and commodity sector of the economy is seeing inflation, this subtracts spending from other discretionary spending areas of the economy.

Inflation in the relatively necessary energy sector subtracts spending and generates deflation in the other sectors, hurting consumer wages of those drivers in the service sector of the economy. With U.S. income stagnant, a combination of inflation for non-discretionary expenses like driving and a simultaneous cutback in discretionary consumer spending in other areas adds up to stagflation. This is bad news to economists, since there is no good economic remedy.

The British Economist has noticed a fundamental shift in U.S. driving behavior.

Yet, here’s the conundrum. Following all previous recessions, petrol consumption has been a leading indicator of recovery, bouncing back sharply as people started using their vehicles more to shop, to dine out, to seek the curious and the entertaining, and, above all, to take vacations. Despite the American economy’s belated and still timid recovery -- seen in increasing sales of cars, clothing, hospitality, entertainment, and consumer goods generally (though still not housing) -- the amount of petrol being consumed across the country has tumbled to 2001 levels, and shows every sign of falling further.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis, the federal agency that churns out monthly reports on how the economy is faring, believes the 2008 spike in petrol prices and the subsequent recession have changed the consumption patterns of American motorists irreversibly. How so? The short answer is that technology and marketing have altered the type of vehicles Americans are now buying

Driving behavior and public opinion toward driving are both changing in the world's more affluent countries.

Until now, most projections for future energy use and transportation needs have taken for granted that there will always be more people owning more cars, driving farther and using more oil. But those assumptions are being put to the test by a profound change under way in the countries that have long been the world's biggest fuel consumers. And it goes beyond the payoff that is already being realized from government fuel economy efforts, like the U.S. government's announcement today of enhanced consumer labeling to promote efficient vehicles.

We could already see a big change in 2008 when rising fuel price spiked driving costs. "From 1970 to 2008, total highway fuel consumption increased from 92 billion gallons to nearly 181 billion gallons in 2007. The vehicle fuel consumption decreased to 175 billion gallons in 2008." The fact that we are driving less and using less fuel for years suggests that all the easy changes have already been made.

Driving costs are even higher now, while incomes are relatively lower, leading to a trend toward single car families.

Many families limiting themselves to a single car

Motivated by the declining economy, rising gas prices and a concern for the environment, families like the Rogerses say they are starting to rethink the need to have more than one car. Make no mistake, however: America’s love affair with the automobile is still strong. According to a February study by Experian Automotive, which specializes in collecting and analyzing automotive data, Americans own an average of 2.28 vehicles per household, and more than 35 percent of households own three or more cars.

But there are signs of change. Brian Gluckman, a spokesman for AutoTrader.com, a leading automotive Web site, said more buyers were moving to one car. Until the last three months, Mr. Gluckman said, that car tended to be a midsize S.U.V. or crossovers. He said AutoTrader.com’s more recent data showed buyers shifting toward smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles.

U.S. transit demand grows

As both driving and cars on the road peak while the need for transportation remains relatively constant, it is apparent that the public will tend to seek out alternatives to cars. The rapid increase in bikes being used for commuting is one sign of this trend. See Fig. 3: "Trend in Share of Workers Commuting by Bike in Large North American Cities, 1990-2009" Another indication is car sharing, which is also growing rapidly.

A loss of driving affordability tends to turn up as increased transit use whenever the transit is useful and available.

Transit ridership up due to rising gas prices
by Joseph Cutrufo on Thursday, May 5, 2011

It was only a matter of time: Transit agencies are reporting increased ridership due to higher gas prices. With the national average for a gallon of regular unleaded now at $3.98, motorists across the nation are switching to public transportation. We saw it in 2008, when the national average reached $4, and we’re seeing it all over again. According to the American Public Transportation Association, $4 per gallon is the tipping point where people begin to drive less and use transit more -- a lot more. If gas prices stay this high, we can expect an additional 670 billion transit trips made this year nationwide.

When fuel prices get high enough, many are willing to shift to transit since they must get to work somehow.

PRINCETON, NJ -- Americans are most likely to say they would seek vehicles that get better gas mileage if gas prices keep rising but don't go above the $5-per-gallon range. Americans are second most likely to say they would use mass transit. Seven in 10 Americans would not move and about the same number of workers would not change jobs or quit working, no matter how high prices rise.

Nothing could be more positive for increasing transit use than for the cost of car driving and car ownership to go high enough so that broad new sectors of the population seek to use it. The current stress of rising fuel prices on the family budget is indeed causing a national increase in transit ridership.

Higher gas prices driving motorists to mass transit

"When gas prices hit $3, we see serious interest," Williams said. "Some people come and leave (when gas prices recede). Others come and stay. "The link between higher gas prices and increased use of mass transit is a significant one. It could get even more pronounced. According to a study by the American Public Transportation Association, the U.S. will see an additional 1.5 billion mass transit boardings per year if gas reaches $5 per gallon.

A lot of the new potential users are senior citizens. In particular, the aging baby boomer population is increasing its use of transit as this sector of the total population grows. However poor public transit is a threat, especially to older Americans.

A recent Brookings study has thoroughly documented the fact that, in the U.S., transit tends not to go where it is most needed to help low income workers get to work.

These trends have three broad implications for leaders at the local, regional, state, and national levels. Transportation leaders should make access to jobs an explicit priority in their spending and service decisions, especially given the budget pressures they face. Metro leaders should coordinate strategies regarding land use, economic development, and housing with transit decisions in order to ensure that transit reaches more people and more jobs efficiently. And federal officials should collect and disseminate standardized transit data to enable public, private, and non-profit actors to make more informed decisions and ultimately maximize the benefits of transit for labor markets.

Public support for transit will no doubt continue to increase along with decreasing driving, stagnating income, and higher driving cost, whenever the transit can be easily used. The problem is that much transit in the U.S., when it is available, does not go where it could be most useful. The private business sector is not much interested in helping out, so even jitneys are being suggested. Meanwhile, the expansion of transit service is becoming harder for local government to afford, just when it is most needed as an alternative to private cars.

Transit, and especially rail, typically has high up-front capital costs despite the overall cost and energy savings of rail when it has a high ridership ("Electric traction offers a lower cost per mile of train operation but at a higher initial cost, which can only be justified on high traffic lines.") One problem lies in trying to explain to the public that saving money on the initial cost is not always a smart long range policy. For now we should expect less federal help in spending for transit, and most other public infrastructure, as the result of the Congressional gridlock over the U.S. budget deficit.

Widespread support for better public transportation awaits a broad turnaround in public opinion led by peak oil, higher fuel prices, and less affordable driving. As a nation, the U.S. is still in denial about the unsustainability of its car habit. The economic reality is stubborn, telling us that our transportation habits will soon have to change more than most American are willing to admit.


Why rising fuel prices are likely to prevent a driving recovery

Could we ever recover our previous driving or car ownership levels? The slow replacement rate of the vehicles now on the road strongly suggests that the current level of total U.S. driving cannot increase by very much, nor for very long.

Since the 2007 driving peak followed by the 2008 economic crisis, there has been a partial recovery in vehicle sales, but these sales have never approached the previous peak. U.S. family budgets for car replacement are shrinking as driving costs rise. People are hanging on to their old cars longer than ever, and a lot of SUV owners are financially unable to easily downsize to more fuel efficient cars. Currently, there is a shortage of small used cars and this is reflected in their relatively higher prices.

This is not to say that those who can afford to replace them are not already choosing smaller cars. Robert Sinclair Jr., a spokesman for the New York regional chapter of AAA, agrees that “we are witnessing a major sea change in both the types and number of vehicles on the road."

There has been some backsliding on new vehicle mileage since 2008, but recently higher fuel prices will likely help turn this gas mileage trend around again.

Hybrid sales rose quickly in 2007 as gas prices climbed, then dropped noticeably in the second half of 2008 as gas prices plummeted from over $4 to $1.60. This time around, despite gas prices climbing steadily over the past year, hybrid cars shrunk from 2.9% of new vehicle sales in 2009 to 2.4% in 2010, according to Ward's Auto. Meanwhile, sales of trucks, SUVs, crossovers and minivans rose from 48% of the market to 51% from 2009 to 2010. In addition, the average fuel economy rating of new vehicles sold in 2010 was 22.2 mpg, down from 22.3 mpg in 2009.

Some imagine that electric cars or smaller more fuel-efficient cars could make a big difference. They will make a difference, but probably only a small difference overall. For an economy structurally geared over decades to run on cheap oil to serve low density sprawl development, historic energy transitions like reducing dependence on oil for commuting turn out to be unexpectedly slow and expensive. Electric cars are not well suited for long suburban commutes, and are typically a lot more expensive when new than the current U.S. fleet of gas guzzlers.

Cartoon by JennyBowman / Drive.com.
Little prospect for a U.S. driving recovery as seen by the global economists

Oil prices have moved to center stage as a primary factor governing the recovery of the global economy.

Fatih Birol, chief economist of the International Energy Agency, said that the current price of $120 per barrel could be the catalyst for a global economic crisis on the scale of the one experienced in 2008. "If you don't see any softening of the prices, there is a risk of derailing the economy, of a double-dip," Dr Birol told the Reuters Global Energy and Climate Change Summit. "We all know what happened in 2008. Are we going to see the same movie?"

Oil prices fell nearly $3 in London to $117.30 and more than $5 in New York to $94.84 on worries about the faltering global economy. However, economists believe the price is still at a level near to tipping the global economy back into a downturn. To combat sky-high oil prices, the U.S. is reported to have attempted an ambitious swap with Saudi Arabia in the past month.

The IEA is now warning that a fuel supply bottleneck has emerged in the face of growing demand because the loss of Libyan sweet crude is hard to make up with increasingly low grade Saudi oil.

Last week saw the publication of the IEA’s monthly Oil Market Report (OMR) and its Medium Term Oil and Gas Markets outlook which projects the Agency’s assessment of global supply and demand for the next five years. In recent weeks the IEA has been sounding nearly non-stop warnings that ever since the Libyan and Yemen uprisings took some 1.5 million b/d off the oil markets there was a real danger of higher oil prices and shortages this summer.

The current publications are no exception. The Agency is still expecting global oil demand to increase this year by 1.3 million b/d to 89.3 million b/d with OECD demand down a bit due to high prices and the economic slowdown, and Chinese and Indian demand up a bit. The IEA says that global oil supply for May rose by 270,000 b/d from 87.41 billion b/d in April with 210,000 b/d coming from OPEC. The cartel is reported as supplying an average of 29.18 million b/d in May which is close to the Platts survey which put OPEC production for the month at 29.04 million b/d. The IEA, however, points out that the OPEC’s May production was still 1.25 million b/d below the pre-Libyan uprising level.

Here are the most recent two years of gasoline and diesel price trends which show a slight increase in 2009-2010 and then a big jump in the past year. The recent slight decline in gasoline price at the pump is tied to the poor economy and slack U.S. demand.

Fuel demand in North America will decline this year by 190,000 barrels to 23.7 million a day, the Paris-based IEA said. The agency lowered its forecast for the region by 220,000 barrels a day from last month’s report, citing lower growth projections from the International Monetary Fund... “High gasoline prices are scaring off some incremental demand,” said Rick Mueller, a principal with ESAI Energy, LLC in Wakefield, Massachusetts. “We’re going to see people conserve more and cut down on trips.”

If we look at the next few years, according to this analysis by Chris Martenson (and others equally savvy), we see that, even if nothing unexpected goes wrong, we can expect another serious oil price spike by about 2013, due to declining global supply and inflexible demand. Assuming fuel price trouble over the short term and trouble over the long term, how can U.S. driving recover?

The economists at Levy Institute don't talk about oil much, but they do have excellent economic models that arrive at a gloomy outcome if U.S. trade cannot be brought back into better global balance. Their recent analysis, "Jobless Recovery Is No Recovery: Prospects for the U.S. Economy," is pessimistic enough, even without mentioning peak oil. The best economic prescription the Levy economists offer is in part based on dollar devaluation. This, of course, would increase the cost of imported oil priced in dollars, reducing U.S. driving further.

It is not just driving that is in trouble because of fuel cost. This is arguably part of the bigger problem of global industrial production no longer being able to outrun global energy costs.

While it’s a positive that the U.S. is reducing its demand for oil, it doesn’t necessarily mean we are becoming more efficient. More to the point, the U.S. is no longer able to reduce its overall energy expenditures as an input to its GDP. Post 2008, some of the “gains” enjoyed by lower energy expenditures were simply made possible by a lower GDP.

When the U.S. reduces its use of oil, and switches over more to coal and natural gas, its GDP tends to fall. For an economy that structured itself towards oil-dependency the past 70 years, that should be expected. The U.S. therefore can have a higher GDP or a lower GDP, but the Energy Limit model reveals that energy costs are becoming more stubborn on the upside. This is a structural change, that will not revert.

Industrialism in the U.S., and elsewhere in the OECD, is therefore no longer able to outrun energy costs. This means that in order to maintain production, prices for assets like housing, and input costs we can produce less or measure “production” in non-industrial terms.

Either way, this megatrend is simply the reverse of the dynamic which began 250 years ago when humanity moved from wood to coal, and the impact on wages and asset prices was revolutionary. The same model which explains that ascent, now explains our descent.

[Roger Baker is a long time transportation-oriented environmental activist, an amateur energy-oriented economist, an amateur scientist and science writer, and a founding member of and an advisor to the Association for the Study of Peak Oil-USA. He is active in the Green Party and the ACLU, and is a director of the Save Our Springs Association and the Save Barton Creek Association in Austin. Mostly he enjoys being an irreverent policy wonk and writing irreverent wonkish articles for The Rag Blog. Read more articles by Roger Baker on The Rag Blog.]

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Roger Baker : Have We Turned the Corner on Peak Driving?

A window on peak driving. Image from The Auto Channel.
Coming soon:
Peak oil, peak driving, peak cars

Part II: Have we turned the corner on peak driving?

By Roger Baker / The Rag Blog / June 23, 2011

[This is the second part of a series by Roger Baker on transportation, centering on the issue of peak oil and its ramifications.]

Tell the average U.S. car owner that total driving in the USA might have already peaked forever, and they are likely to think you're crazy. That possibility goes against a lifetime of personal experience, living as we do in a country dependent on personal vehicles for work trips and various other vital functions.

It doesn't seem possible that total driving could peak and decline in our lifetimes, especially given an ever increasing population. Cars and their social and economic implications might be said to be the primary basis for the prevailing U.S. lifestyle and culture.

We see evidence for a shift in driving behavior in many places. Indeed, evidence for a driving slowdown clearly predates the big 2008 run-up in fuel prices. There are a number of factors at work. High unemployment cuts down on work trips. Intractable traffic congestion associated with suburban commuting in most U.S. metropolitan areas plays a role. As the U.S. population ages, it is driving less.

According to the best data, collected by hundreds of stations around the USA by the Federal Highway Administration, the total amount of U.S. driving, called VMT or vehicle miles traveled, hit a peak of about 3.04 trillion miles of travel in 2007. Since 2007, travel volume has been making a sluggish recovery, but U.S. driving is still over 1 percent below the level of four years ago.

The chart below offers my expanded version, including the latest month available, the VMT for April 2011, and extending back for each month since 2004. We can see there were several years of a weaker increase, beginning about mid-2005. As gas prices rose during 2008, total driving took a nosedive and then made a slow bumpy recovery during 2009-2010. In early 2011, driving has dropped again, likely in response to sharply higher fuel prices.

Rag Blog chart by Roger Baker.

CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE.

The reason for this slow recovery in U.S. driving is not hard to understand. The most recent data show that the cost of transportation (mostly driving) in the U.S. has been rising with increasing fuel prices. It has now recovered and exceeds the previous 2008 peak, even as household income continues to fall behind due to inflation.

If we are optimists, we can look at this chart and argue the VMT numbers might keep rising at the current sluggish rate. Purely by eyeballing the chart, it looks like U.S. travel volume might possibly recover to reach its old 2007 peak in two years or so. But the likelihood of higher oil prices and the slow replacement of the existing vehicle fleet suggest that this is unlikely to happen.

The U.S. vehicle fleet of cars, light trucks, etc may already be past its peak. The total number of private vehicles reached a high of about 250 million in 2008.

An excellent analysis of the changing economics of U.S. transportation has been provided by Worldwatch Institute founder Lester Brown. He points out that In 2009 alone, car ownership declined by about 4 million vehicles, or about 2%.

Future U.S. fleet size will be determined by the relationship between two trends: new car sales and cars scrapped. Cars scrapped exceeded new car sales in 2009 for the first time since World War II, shrinking the U.S. vehicle fleet from the all-time high of 250 million to 246 million. It now appears that this new trend of scrappage exceeding sales could continue through at least 2020.

The basic case for peak driving and peak cars is that driving is becoming increasingly unaffordable for the steadily growing ranks of low income drivers, in a nation where vehicle ownership is highly correlated with income. Annual car ownership cost is now estimated at $9,000.

Meanwhile, many experts now believe that we are very near or past peak global oil production. Given a steadily growing demand for a shrinking global oil supply, the lack of practical alternatives is bound to make driving in the U.S. steadily less affordable. This is doubly the case when rising fuel prices act like a tax that competes with, and depresses, consumer spending in other sectors of the economy.

Until the U.S. economy recovers, it is hard to see how driving and car sales can recover. Assuming the U.S. and global economy do recover, it is just as hard to imagine a scenario in which basic supply and demand will not raise the cost of fuel high enough to kill the economic recovery, much as we saw in 2008 when the price of oil reached $147 a barrel.

If we knew the state of the U.S. economy a year from now, and an average driver's fuel costs, we would be in a good position to predict the level of driving. Since the economy is unlikely to recover much the next year, in terms of the part of family income that can be devoted to driving, the wild card, the biggest source of economic uncertainty, is the cost of motor fuel next year and beyond.


The Road Lobby:
Why public planners hate the concept of peak driving

The reality of peak driving and peak cars on the road is guaranteed to be seen as unwelcome, and to be unpopular among planners. Planning for peak driving deeply disturbs the basis for business as usual, an unpopularity it shares with measures to limit global warming. Peak driving is subversive of existing interests since so much existing investment and infrastructure is based on the status quo.

There are a constellation of powerful financial interests tied in one way or another to the automobile, all sharing in common an interest in the continuation and expansion of a car-centric and oil-addictive U.S. suburban lifestyle. These interests include the car building industry, the road construction industry, the home products industry, and also include the various suburban sprawl and home-building beneficiaries.

Most transportation planners and their allies -- ranging from Exxon, to Walmart, to General Motors -- are inclined by the nature of their existing investments to favor roads and driving as the way to serve a profitable continuation of the prevailing pattern of suburban development.

It should come as no surprise that there is an active road lobby with many branches, including here in Austin, dedicated to perpetuating the privately profitable aspects of driving. The road lobby has its own stable of active driving promoters like Wendell Cox and Randal O'Toole, both stridently pro-road and anti-transit. If there is a toll road lobby it is probably centered around Peter Samuel and Toll Roads News.

The Texas Transportation Institute is essentially the academic think tank of the Texas road lobby. It offers an academic fig leaf of respectability to the active promotion of roads and cars and driving as unchallenged core values and infrastructure funding assumptions.

One of their current projects is to study, and prove the necessity for, a new tax on miles driven to replace or supplement the current fuel tax. The fact that the road lobby would be suggesting what is guaranteed to be such a highly unpopular kind of tax only underlines the deteriorating economics of driving.

The road lobby, in its more overtly and stridently political manifestation, often maintains that the ability to drive anywhere is a basic civil right under attack by transit advocates and urban planners inside government. At any rate, this outlook applies when the planners are not primarily trying to build more roads. Especially the roads that subsidize the suburban growth surrounding major U.S. metropolitan areas, where most state and federal planners are still focusing their attention.

The ultimate futility of subsidizing suburban sprawl development with more roads comes as no surprise. The case was already solidly made in 2004 in the classic peak oil documentary, The End of Suburbia.

The degree to which supposedly near-universal car ownership is threatened by a relatively declining U.S. household income is a factor that U.S. transportation planners are especially reluctant to admit. The reality is that rising fuel prices and a stagnant economy are fundamentally changing the economics of transportation and forcing the growing ranks of the poor to give up their cars.

Next time: A deeper look at what is by now an overwhelming body of evidence that U.S. driving behavior is fundamentally changing in response to our changing economy. The closer you look, the more apparent that a basic shift is really taking place. But what will the public transportation alternative look like by the time the public widely appreciates how much they really need it?

[Roger Baker is a long time transportation-oriented environmental activist, an amateur energy-oriented economist, an amateur scientist and science writer, and a founding member of and an advisor to the Association for the Study of Peak Oil-USA. He is active in the Green Party and the ACLU, and is a director of the Save Our Springs Association and the Save Barton Creek Association in Austin. Mostly he enjoys being an irreverent policy wonk and writing irreverent wonkish articles for The Rag Blog. Read more articles by Roger Baker on The Rag Blog.]

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