Getting from A to B

The more transportation costs, the more we pay attention to it. The price of transportation declined steadily during the post-war decades of cheap oil, leading Canadians to pay less attention to their options in getting between one place and another. Today’s rising price for crude oil and the soaring value of the loonie both signal clearly that the era of cheap oil is ending. This will inexorably lead us toward revolutions in transport technology and organization that attain much greater energy efficiency. In short, the easy mobility supported by unsustainable oil consumption will soon be history.

The key role of transportation would have been familiar to the parents of today’s Canadians and overwhelmingly obvious to their grandparents. From Winnipeg to Vancouver, Canada’s towns and cities are laid out in relation to the railways that brought them to life and delivered many of their early citizenry. Canada’s North remains the most attuned to transportation’s essential function, with aviation serving as the lifeline that railways did to early generations of pioneers below the 60th parallel. Contemporary awareness about transportation will arise from the necessity to figure out ways to cope with major cost increases for gasoline, airline travel and freight delivery. When the price of oil passes $150 a barrel, less than twice the price it is selling for at the time of this writing, mobility in Canada will cost enough that few will be able to afford to take it for granted. At that time, it will become painfully clear that our transportation system has not been designed for energy efficiency and that a “Plan B” will be needed to rapidly introduce energy-efficient transportation alternatives.

Transportation has always been one of Canada’s most important tools for economic and social development. Canada’s success in the world these days rests on three dimensions of transportation activity:

These three dimensions of mobility-intensive life add up to a lot of trains, planes and auto-mobiles moving around Canada at any given moment. In planning and policy, more mobility is equated with a better standard of living. But there comes a point at which railways filled with bulk freight and containers of imported goods, highways clogged with trucks and commuters, and airports crammed with people and planes become a drag on Canada’s future prospects because of the pollution, accidents and non-renewable energy consumption that they generate. These hidden costs of mobility have become accepted by experts and ignored by the media.

Today, people are much more likely to discover the latest on Lord Black’s legal appeals or Paris Hilton’s parole violations from the media than they are to find out what is on government’s transportation agenda. Lowering foreign ownership limits for Canadian air-lines could influence future travel choices, just as lengthening the size of truck trailers driven along provincial highways could affect supermarket prices and traffic congestion, yet Canadians pay almost no attention to such matters. That is because transportation costs remain under the radar, despite accounting for the second highest expenditure in a typical household budget.

The details behind transportation once attracted greater attention because mobility could make or break the prospects of whole regions or economic sectors. For example, both relatively ancient and more recent political battles have been fought over who would bear the costs and reap the benefits of Canada’s transportation system. In Ottawa, Sir John A. Macdonald’s second mandate was cut short by the Pacific railway scandal, in which American investors made huge campaign contributions with the expectation of gaining a franchise for our first transcontinental railway. In 1979, Joe Clark’s government fell on a budget vote that proposed increasing Canada’s gasoline tax by 25 cents during a time of rapid inflation. And in neighbourhoods from Toronto’s Forest Hill to Vancouver’s Strathcona, local activists successfully stopped expressway projects that would have fundamentally compromised the urban vitality these cities now celebrate. But as motor vehicles, and then airplanes, expanded travel and shipping options, the perception that problems in any one mode or carrier could seriously effect a community, let alone put a whole nation’s future at risk, gave way to a faith that the marketplace would translate the choices of firms and consumers into solutions that worked out well enough, over time.

It is not working out that way. The forces that will require rapid reductions in transportation energy use are unlikely to trigger effective adaptation in today’s marketplace. Oil depletion and climate change both require solutions that are beyond the reach of particular carriers and consumers. A major redesign of Canada’s transportation system will involve new infrastructure, new technology and new institutional arrangements to implement them. All of this requires government to be proactive in developing transportation policies that enable transportation options to do better with less energy flowing to power future mobility. If tomorrow’s transportation system cannot deliver a lot more mobility per joule of energy consumed, then many Canadians will confront the first period in our history when transportation is not able to expand upon existing mobility capacities, but begins to decline in both affordability and reliability.

In a major study of transportation, environment and energy that I have recently conducted with Richard Gilbert, we conclude that today’s mobility is especially vulnerable to oil depletion because:

Electric Traction

The prospect that world oil production could peak by 2012, causing much steeper price increases for all energy sources than we have seen to date and generating considerable economic turmoil, lead us to propose converting as much of the world’s transportation capacity from reliance on the internal combustion engine to electric mobility as possible. While this is not the place to reprise the extensive “peak oil” analysis, a good—if provocative—summary can be found in James Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency. The bottom line is that Canada’s extensive tar sands deposits will not be able to be turned into “conventional” crude oil fast enough to keep pace with depletion of conventional oil wells, which are increasingly in decline.

In a world where energy alternatives to gasoline, diesel and kerosene fuels will become essential to keeping the wheels turning (literally), the electric motor offers the most promising means of propulsion. Without the efficiency and diversity of energy sources that can propel vehicles through electric motors, it is unlikely that Canada can maintain the mobility levels needed to sustain today’s economic and social development levels.

Electric motors are as much an established technology as internal combustion engines, although they have played a more specialized role in transportation, as a mainstay of railway propulsion. Electric motors power subways, light rail transit and high-speed passenger trains around the world. Electric motors also propel trolley buses in many cities, including Edmonton and Vancouver. And hybrid autos like Toyota’s Prius have recently brought electric motors onto the streets of most Canadian cities. Electric vehicles are quiet, energy efficient, require little maintenance, have good acceleration at low speeds and emit essentially no pollution at the vehicle level. Thus they provide an existing capacity to deploy a “green machine” in transportation, by enabling the immediate evolution away from carbon-based fuels (e.g., coal and natural gas electricity generation) toward renewable sources (e.g., hydro, wind, geothermal and solar). Betting on exotic technologies such as hydrogen fuel cells or genetically modified biofuel crops to replace and refuel the internal combustion engine in time to keep ahead of oil depletion represents a very risky gamble. Counting on the lottery to bankroll two or three decades of retirement looks like a sure thing by comparison.

Getting electricity to the motor is what has held electric motors back from powering most cars and trucks today. Batteries fall far short of the energy density provided by gasoline, meaning that their size, weight and cost have to be much greater to keep a car moving the same distance as a tank of gas. With cheap oil to fuel them, cars powered by internal combustion engines have been an irresistible mobility option for many. While further research can enhance battery performance, and will eventually bring battery- electric automobiles into the transportation mix, the need to keep people and freight moving in the meantime suggests that expanding what already works needs to happen fast.

Canada will thus need to launch an ambitious program for developing electric rail and bus infrastructure, both within cities and between them. While we have some very successful urban subway, light rail and trolley bus operations, Canada is among the world’s laggards in utilizing high-speed electric trains. One reason for Canada’s gap in making use of electricity on rail-ways is that rail infrastructure is privately owned by corporations that have seen no advantage in investing significant sums for electrification. This would be likely to change in an era of $150 a barrel crude oil, and could even give government and industry a rationale for partnering to electrify and expand rail infrastructure.

Expanding track capacity at the same time as electrifying railways would make it possible to carry more freight as well as introduce modern passenger trains that would take the place of most driving and flying between cities as far as 1,000 kilometres apart. This approach would transform VIA’s existing Quebec City–Windsor rail corridor into a world-class passenger railway, and open up long neglected rail passenger potential, such as travel between Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver.

The challenge within cities will be to expand electric transit infrastructure fast enough to keep up with demands from those suddenly seeking affordable mobility. Electric trolley buses will offer the best chance for such relief. The ability to deploy trolley buses on existing road infrastructure will make it possible to extend electric mobility within walking distance of many suburban homes. These more sparsely populated communities lack a density that would support light rail services.

There is also the possibility of introducing a new local transport mode that would approach the convenience of conventional automobiles while approximating the energy efficiency of public transit. Such an alternative, offering more flexibility than conventional public transport, could be a widespread system of personal grid- connected vehicles, usually known as a personal rapid transport (PRT) system. Such systems comprise fully automated, one-to six-person vehicles on reserved guideways providing direct origin-to-destination service on demand. PRT has been mooted for decades and may now be poised for implementation. A system is under development for moving passengers between parking areas and terminals at Heathrow Airport, and a PRT system is being considered for the new Dubai International Financial Centre. (1)

Deploying PRT in Canada would be challenging, because it would require retrofitting such infrastructure into a built environment that had already been designed around the automobile. Places most suitable for PRT would be locations where other public transit services were not attractive due to the very low population density and great distance between homes, workplaces, shopping centres, etc. These places like Barrie, Ontario, or Surrey, British Columbia, would have ongoing car and truck traffic, even accounting for traffic reduction due to high fuel prices. Much of the existing road network would still need to be maintained. In much of Canada, PRT would thus represent additional transportation infrastructure expenditure beyond what is already required to move cars and trucks. Contrast this with PRT’s emergence around the cities of quickly developing countries such as China or India, where it could flourish as an alternative to the automobile. In these places, PRT could be purpose built into new communities in lieu of multi-lane road infrastructure and would be quite appealing to residents who had never owned an automobile.

Canada thus is more likely to be a late adopter of entirely new mobility technologies like PRT and an early adapter of established rail and public transit capabilities. But over time, perhaps once the initial tasks of coping with oil depletion are in hand, efforts to reduce the transport intensity of Canadian life will need to be undertaken. Cheap oil has enabled Canadian cities to sprawl into a state of auto dependence in which distances between home, work, shopping and school often preclude access by anything other than an automobile. And as one moves away from the city centre, autos are driven more just to meet the same quotidian needs that are (or could be) accomplished on foot or by bicycle. A travel survey done in the greater Toronto area illustrates this trend toward greater automobile mobility in daily life.

Across the GTA, average daily travel by car goes up from 7.5 kilometres in the old (pre-amalgamation) city of Toronto to 11.6 kilometres in outer core communities (i.e., the former municipalities of Etobicoke, North York and Scarborough) to 15.3 kilometres in adjacent suburbs such as Mississauga and Pickering and reaches 24.8 kilometres in the outer suburbs such as Caledon and Stouffville. (2) Outer suburbs such as Surrey and Barrie have become Canada’s fastest growing communities. Those communities will need talented urban designers to fill in their sprawl with transit-oriented developments that could eventually incubate new mobility technology such as PRT.

Freight logistics and production management will also be undergoing change to moderate the transportation intensity of Canada’s living arrangements. Global supply chains are now used to source products and components from the most cost-effective origin, irrespective of the distance that these goods then travel. This has led to a production sprawl that parallels the residential and commercial spread beyond cities, but on a worldwide scale. Moreover, most of our purchases are rushed to market on just-in-time delivery schedules that favour speed over fuel economy. Keeping the shelves at Costco or Wal-Mart turning over is more important than making sure that trucks are fully loaded. The result is that our goods now spend little time being stationary until we get them into our homes.

When paying for such energy-intensive freight mobility costs more than the extra inventory and warehouse space, the return to more traditional shipping practices will begin. These and other changes will again raise the profile of transportation services that we depend upon until we recognize their value and thus take seriously the decisions being made about them. With renewed public attention, government deliberations over transportation policy will take on a political intensity not seen since the 1970s. It is too soon to tell whether Canadian governments will again rise and fall on matters of transportation policy, but such a possibility should not be ruled out.

Along with most developed nations, Canada will face some major choices regarding how to redesign transportation that can function effectively in an era of oil depletion. The immense physical scale on which new transportation options will have to perform, the economic gains and losses at stake in their execution, and the personal impacts of changing the technology and organization of Canadian mobility will make this country’s effort to redesign modern transportation systems one of the more interesting to observe, and also experience, in coming years. While dealing with oil depletion will require profound transformations in our transportation needs that might seem more radical than Canada’s typical approach to change, it is worth emphasizing that such breaks with the past will be embraced because they will be seen to involve less disruption and turmoil than any alternative course of action.

Notes