What Happens When We Reach ‘Peak Car’?

[ALS]

If and when the economy kicks back into high gear, car usage and average and overall miles driven may very well rebound. Then again, maybe they won’t.

Brad Tuttle - TIME - September 25, 2012

Despite several strong months of new-car sales in a row, the average American is driving less and less each year. Drivers have been hitting the road less for years in countries such as France, Spain, Belgium, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan as well. Could it be that car usage has peaked?

An article published over the summer by Scientific American discussed the possibility that the U.S. may have reached “peak car,” the term academics have used to describe the point at which car ownership and miles driven per vehicle level off, and then decline. For a variety of reasons, including a rise in unemployment, telecommuting, and online shopping, vehicle miles traveled (or VMT) has dropped during the Great Recession years.
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[WriConsult]

This has major implications for the road construction business. No need to keep building ever bigger facilities with more capacity when demand is dropping.

We're seeing that locally. For some time some of our politicians have been pushing the Columbia River Crossing project (CRC), which would replace the I-5 bridges across the Columbia River between OR and WA and redesign a number of interchanges along I-5 to increase the overall capacity of the roadway.

Problem: It will cost $4 billion. Funding is not completely secured. The Alaskan Way Viaduct/Tunnel project in downtown Seattle is going to cost billions more than even this project, siphoning away available dollars that Washington would otherwise contribute to the CRC.

Problem: CRC's travel demand assumptions are based on projections made 5 years ago, before the economic collapse. As it has turned out, travel demand collapsed along with the economy (and other "peak car" factors mentioned in the article above), and despite some economic recovery is now something like 30% lower than had been projected for this year. Hard to make the case that we even NEED a new bridge.

Problem: A big chunk of the funding was to come from tolls. But now the previous travel demand assumptions have been shattered, and
with 30% less toll revenue (or worse), the whole thing doesn't even come close to adding up.

Problem: The politicians who pushed for CRC before are still pushing for it.