How Peak Oil Will Shatter Cities Like Merriam, Kansas

[FarCenter]

Living in Merriam means owning a car. The whole town is designed around the idea that cheap gasoline will always be available. The main shopping center is a strip mall off the Interstate. Sidewalks—and easily walkable grid street plans—come and go throughout the neighborhoods, following the whims of past developers. Merriam has two bike routes, but one is mostly aimed at recreation. It doesn't follow any path that people travel daily for business, school, or shopping. The other bike route begins and ends suddenly, covering only a small portion of busy Shawnee Mission Parkway. There are bus lines that pass through town, but the service isn't particularly robust. Most of the buses are strictly for commuters, offering a handful of morning trips to downtown Kansas City and evening trips back. The system isn't really meant for general mobility. A trip from Merriam's main shopping center to my favorite Chinese restaurant in nearby Overland Park is a nine-minute drive. By bus, it's forty-four minutes, and you can't go for lunch or a late dinner. The buses don't run between nine a.m. and four p.m., and they shut down for the night after six p.m. You see the problem here.

As the price of gas climbs, and middle-class Americans have to start seriously thinking about whether they can afford a given trip, the residents of Merriam will find themselves without an easy, all-weather way to navigate the crazy quilt of metro towns that surrounds them. For those who work outside Merriam, it'll be harder to get to work. Inside Merriam, businesses will suffer the loss of the heavy traffic that now passes by twice a day.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-peak-oil-will-shatter-cities-like-merriam-kansas-2012-3

[NYC_SKP]

1. "shatter" or "slap back into reality" and force sustainable planning?

Same here in California...

[anti-alec]

2. Drove by I-70 the other day through Kansas

So incredibly boring.

Other than Topeka, the entire state of Kansas was incredibly quiet and boring.

I spent the night in Hays, and I didn't sleep well that night.

Couldn't wait to get back to my bed the next night...

[RKP5637]

3. I think this is true for many places. I've lived in a lot of places in the US and thinking back I

can't really think of too many places where travel was easy without a car. If you live near a metro line, that sure makes it a lot easier, but then there's the cab fares, buses, transfers and all of that.

IMO the US was built to serve the car, not the pedestrian or biker. Yep, I bet that will change a lot in coming years. I read someplace that one town was considering allowing people to use golf carts to travel around.

[LiberalFighter]

14. What would be the difference if the automobile had never been invented?

With just horses and wagons?

I think it isn't so much that US was built to serve the car. It all depends on where people can find jobs and the extent they are willing to travel a distance to work. And also who they want to associate with in everyday life.

[Speck Tater]

4. We need to see a return to walkable communities. nt

[rwsanders]

9. It would be nice but...

The city planners apparently aren't trained that way and have no clue about how to get there. I don't live far from Merriam and went to some planning meetings about greenways and bicycle trails. I suggested that they be incorporated into an overall mass transit plan, that if businesses were clustered into malls it would be better for the businesses and better for accessibility. Fewer traffic lights would then be needed and roads that are 4 lane could have some of those lanes converted to bike trails. Well I wish everyone here could have seen the expression on the planner's face. He looked at me like I was from another planet.
By the way, I can't take credit for any of the ideas I was spouting. It all came from various articles I have seen in Sierra magazine.

[Speck Tater]

11. I was on a city planning commission for 5 or 6 years many decades ago.

For the most part they seem to be rubber stamps for whatever plans the developers propose as long as there is no big public outcry against them. The only real evidence of "planning" I saw was fiddling with the zoning laws. A few months back I had occasion to visit the little city where I was on the commission all those years ago. What was a pleasant little town has become just another ugly un-planned sprawling suburb of the nearby big city.

[LiberalFighter]

15. There should be restrictions on the type of plans used by developers for both business & residential

Too many places have half-cocked schemes that create problems.

[closeupready]

17. Jane Jacobs wrote a wonderful book about this,

The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

[hunter]

5. Higher density suburbs will do fine, even in the post auto age.

Fairly simple zoning changes, then suddenly you'll have shops you can walk to and places for public transportation to gather up commuters.

Many lower density suburbs will have to be recycled, razed, and the lost natural landscapes recreated or else they will collapse into the inner circles of hell.

In decaying low density suburbs lorded over by "homeowner association" gangsters no one will hear your screams.

[The Doctor.]

6. That would make sense, if the effects of insufferable energy prices were localized.

There will still be an extreme drop off in the transport of products. We would be likely to see what you're talking about, but with a far greater necessity for local self-sufficiency.

We're looking at the creation of many 'communist' communities' with a corporate-sponsored government vested in crushing and enslaving them. All too happy will be the jack-booted wingnuts to pick up arms against their fellow Americans on the federal dime.

[FarCenter]

7. Far more energy is used for travel by people than for transportation of goods

Auto mileage breaks down roughly 1/3 commuting to work, 1/3 for mostly essential travel for business, medical, educational etc. purposes, and 1/3 for discretionary purposes for visiting, vacationing, religious services, sporting events, etc.

Energy use by autos, buses and airplanes is far higher than by trucks and freight trains.

[The Doctor.]

23. No reason to discount it. It compounds the problem.

If transport prices double, and so do feed and fertilizer costs in concert with 'personal' transportation costs... you don't think that's serious?

[FarCenter]

24. It is serious economically, politically and socially -- but the situation is not calamitous

There are collapse theorists who think that post peak oil will cause widespread starvation and death due to the breakdown of production and transport.

I don't think that will happen.

Instead, there would first be rioting, martial law, and then strict organization of society around using the remaining fossil fuel to produce and transport the necessities with travel by people held to an absolute minimum. After all, we can produce within the US more energy per capita than is currently being used in China.

[GliderGuider]

28. If all we had to worry about was Peak Oil, I'd agree with you.

I used to be one of the "Peak Oil's gonna kill us all" types. It's an easy argument to defeat - so long as all you're considering is oil supplies. The problem is that we're facing a number of crises, all of which seem to be converging pretty much simultaneously:

• The global financial/economic crisis is still picking up steam and could turn into a full blown global recession or depression.
  
  
• Climate change is already altering rainfall and food growing patterns (aka crop failures), and is only going to get worse. Then there is the social problem of climate refugees and the rising cost of weather disasters.
  
  
• Biodiversity is taking a major hit. Besides the less visible extinctions further down the chain, the problems with the bees and the bats are very worrying - but the collapse of the ocean fisheries should have us all terrified.
  
  
• There is a trans-national corporate hegemony running the global show, and they aren't interested in doing (or in letting us do) a blessed thing about climate change or oil depletion. All they will let us do is kick their financial can further down the road. (Hint - the reason we "lack the political will" to do anything about the problems is that politicians don't actually run the show any more, at least on global issues).
  
  
• The Peak Oil problem should more correctly be described as a "Net Oil Export" problem. This happens when post-peak exporters need to keep more of their declining production at home rather than putting it on the market. Importers get absolutely hammered, and very fast. From the point of view of an oil importer like the USA - or even worse, weaker importers like Spain and Thailand - this is far worse than just facing peak oil - their imports could dry up completely.

All of these problems are happening now. Nothing needs to be said about the ongoing economic crisis. We hit Peak Oil about 7 years ago in 2005, but haven't rolled off the production plateau just yet. The evidence of climate change is clearly visible now, in shifting rainfall patterns and extreme weather events affecting crop production world-wide, as well as the the melting of the Arctic and Greenland ice caps and the glaciers. The food fish in the oceans are 90% gone at this point. The next 5 years are going to see all of this getting worse.

Now, some places in the world have more room to maneuver, and the USA is one of them. But viewed from 50,000 feet there seems to be a shitstorm approaching the planet. It might be time to think about preparing.

[FarCenter]

29. The impact on the world will be greater than on the US

The current financial systems depends on people believing in numbers in computers. I agree that this will pass, and that power will revert to people with guns instead of people with large numbers. The economy under martial law will be a command and control economy because militaries work best using command and control.

With the decline in fossil fuel production, the cost of international travel will soar. International travel will be limited to the transport of goods and "official" travel. Borders will be generally closed. Climate refugees will not move, but instead will starve to death where they are. Note that climate refugees in the Sahel do that today.

As desperate populations look for calories, they'll eat anything they can catch. So I agree that biodiversity will decreas in a greater extinction. However, extinction due to use of pesticides will probably decline as pesticides become more expensive.

The trans-national hegemony will still run the show, although with a lot of jockeying and struggling to stay at the top of an increasingly shaky heap. The means of acquiring and exercising power will be primarily military as economic systems sieze up.

North America, Europe, Northeast Asia, and the Mercosur are probably disciplined enough societies to acquire and share out the remaining supplies. I'd expect more collapse-like conditions in South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Central America with a couple billion casualties there.

[GliderGuider]

30. That's a very realistic assessment.

On the question of biodiversity loss, there are two main factors - pesticides and habitat loss. While we may over time use fewer pesticides, our destruction of natural habitat will probably continue until our numbers have begun to decline significantly. Even pesticide use may not decline very fast, because farmers may be desperate to preserve the crop yields that remain after climate change has done its work. That means slathering on the insecticides and weed-killers. Those damage the natural world out of all proportion to their cost.

As a result of the tightening overall predicament, one of the trends we'll see over the next century will be an inevitable, involuntary re-localization of societies, with the boundaries of "locations" getting smaller as time goes on. As you point out this will have a different character depending on the regional culture and resources. A lot of people are seeing this probability, and are working to get ahead of the curve with a wide range of localization initiatives from community gardens and Transition Towns to large reform movements like Via Campesina. It's a good idea anyway, because such re-localized lives are far healthier psychologically.

I'm expecting global population to peak between 7.5 and 8 billion, well short of the UN's medium fertility projection. Population growth will be restrained by a combination of the climate-driven limits to the global food supply, the increasing cost of food due to rising relative oil prices, along with rising mortality and falling fertility due to the global economic problem (this is what happened in the fall of the Soviet Union).

We could hit a population peak of 7.75 billion around 2025, and then go into an outright decline. How fast the decline will be depends on the severity of the crisis, but I think a decline to 5 billion by 2050 is entirely possible. This is somewhat worse than the UN's low fertility scenario, largely because the UN drastically underestimates the impact of encountering biophysical limits and the global economic unraveling. It's not really the UN's fault, of course - they have the same blind spots and cultural biases as most other people.

There are significant error bars on any speculative projection like this - given my assumptions they probably range from 4 to 7 billion people in 2050.

[FarCenter]

31. I think that localization will turn out to be a little different

I generally agree with your population predictions. The limiting factors will be different by geography, with falling fertility rated reducing population in the developed world, while rising mortality will be the bigger factor in the rest of the world. One of the larger variables will be disease, and whether a lack of drugs and a resurgence of infectious diseases will increase mortality rates even further. In the developed world, life expectancies will be reduced due to lack of health care and social supports, as was the experience in the post Soviet Union.

With regard to localization, we should consider travel by people, transportation of goods, and communications separately.

The chief effect of energy price rises will be to end the era of mass travel which began in the mid-1800s with railroads and steamships and continued in the 1900s with automobiles, buses, and airplanes. These are generally very energy inefficient because a large mass of vehicle is used to move a small mass of people.

Contrast this with the transport of goods, where the cargo makes up a larger percentage of laden vehicle weight. Also, due to the critical nature of some goods and the great attraction of others, transportation has always been a feature of civilization. Neolithic people imported flint from the best quarries to make their tools. Native Americans quarried pipestone in Minnesota for trading over a wide range in the Midwest. Bronze and Iron Age cultures traded spices, gems, perfumes, textiles, etc. over thousands of miles, while grains and oils were traded over shorter distances. In the era just before steamships, tea, coffee, chocolate, sugar, and other valued products were traded by sailing ship.

So I anticipate that localization will take place by first limiting mass leisure travel and long distance transport of low value goods. As energy prices rise, business travel will be limited and travel will decline to only that with specific governmental or economic purposes, sort of like in the USSR where permissions and paper were required for travel. Transportation of goods will be less affected, but it will be limited by the decline of the cash economy and the cost of transportation relative to the price differentials between places. By the decline in the cash economy I mean, for example, the inability of a farmer to sell produce for cash and therefore the inability to purchase fertilizer transported from sources of phosphorous and potassium bearing rocks and natural gas for the production of nitrogen.

A main difference between this future scenario and the pre-1850 world, is the existence of communications. Communications networks can be made very energy efficient, especially if they are limited to non-video signals. If the use of communications networks for entertainment is abolished, they can continue to operate world-wide in almost any energy price regime. Therefore, communications can be used to compensate for lack of travel, and they will be used to continue to knit together humanity in a way that was impossible before the 1850s.

Travel will become local, production and trade of goods will be less local, and information will become global.

[GliderGuider]

32. That brings a lot of clarity to the localization issue.

Last edited Wed Mar 28, 2012, 03:44 PM - Edit history (1)

Thank you, your people/goods/information distinction was just the insight I needed.

I suspect that the internet has the potential to persist even in very bad times. I hope so, because it's the greatest human invention since the printing press (or even since speech according to my Comp Sci advisor back in the 1980's.) A lot depends on how well the technological infrastructure stands up I guess. But we now have the knowledge in books to recreate anything from the pony express to fiber optics, and that counts for a lot.

Again, thanks. This has been an very productive conversation. It's good to know there are others who share this awareness.

[The Midway Rebel]

8. Merriam will be fine...

It is inside the I-435 loop and fairly compact. However, sprawling Overland Park on the south side of the I-435 loop might be fooked.

[Yavapai]

10. We are very worried also.

We live near Seligman, Arizona, about half way between Kingman and Flagstaff. But we don't live in town, so we have to travel 62 miles round trip to get our mail. The USPS doesn't deliver mail out here (or even in town.) For groceries the closest is 160 miles round trip.

In fair dry weather we drive our VW Jetta with a diesel engine (40 miles per gallon). When the weather is bad, we have to drive our four wheel drive pick-up that gets 12 miles per gallon.

For good Chinese food we have to travel 200 miles round trip.

There isn't any buses, trains or any other public transportation anywhere near here. Any time we go anywhere, we plan extensively and car pool when we can.

[Javaman]

12. I'm curious...

did you move there? or were you raised there?

[Johnny Rico]

13. Choosing to live in the middle of nowhere has consequences.

It has its advantages and disadvantages, and it's up to each person to weigh them.

[closeupready]

19. That is a stunningly beautiful area, but very remote.

I guess there's a correlation there, but I'm envious of your life.

[lonestarnot]

26. Whiskey Tango Bravo are you doing out there and are you a hermit or do you just like rattle snakes?

[Yavapai]

27. To answer, should any of you come back to look,

We moved here when we retired several years ago.

Guess we read too many Mother Earth magazines.

We did carefully weigh the pros and cons and wanted to simplify our life.

After 20 years of living next to a nosey batshit crazy person next door we wanted a bit of elbow room. Our nearest neighbor is two miles away.

We love nature and spent most every day off camping in a place just like this.

We have become almost carbon neutral with solar electric, a well with great water, wood heater, a large garden, a car that gets 40mpg+, and great people around who live much the same life. We see regularly elk, deer, antelope (pronghorn), Javelina, rabbits and yes, snakes.

We have seen Mexican wolves from our deck. When we do travel, if we see more than two cars on the dirt road, we call it "rush hour." I have a heart condition and probably wouldn't make it to a hospital, but I choose that and am comfortable with it.

I can play my stereo at full blast, shoot my guns from the front or back door without worry. Our beloved dog can run at his heart's content and has made friends with the coyotes and birds and the rabbits. Rattlesnakes? If they a ways from the house I never hurt them, after all this is their home also.

I am really happy that the internet is available via satellite and so is TV.

[lonestarnot]

33. Cool, but you may want to consider a mule team if the gas continues to rise.

[cbdo2007]

16. Not really that big of a deal....many cities will adapt.....and many will disappear

It's the story of civilization. Not really a new thing. Geographic areas and populations change constantly based on whatever the latest means of travel is.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

18. I voted with my moving van

When I left Portland to move back to Minneapolis, I chose a neighborhood that has every necessity within walking distance and is on a bus line that runs between a major mall and the University of Minnesota.

I find it impossibly inconvenient to be fully car-free here as I was in Portland, but I fill the gas tank only every 4 to 6 weeks.

Those of you who are moving from one city to another might want to consider that although you may have higher housing costs in a more convenient area, the reduction in driving may make up for it. You may also want to reconsider your stereotypes about cities being "too dangerous." One of the most dangerous things you can do is drive or ride in a car. Far more Americans are involved in car crashes than are victims of crime.

[Spider Jerusalem]

20. Too bad.

This is the price of 70 years of urban planning based on the ready availability of cheap oil; oil is no longer cheap and will probably never be again. In the long run it's probably a good thing as it will lead to more sustainable development, but there's going to be a lot of pain for a lot of people in the short term.

[n2doc]

21. People will adapt- electric or very high efficiency hybrid

electric powered by local solar or wind. Scooters work well once the behemoth SUV's and trucks fall silent. Not everything has to be in walking distance. Not everyone has to be Lance Armstrong.

I'd rather live in a place where you can grow your own food, frankly, than be in a place where everything has to be trucked in....

[diane in sf]

22. Time to buy an electric car and a solar panel.

[lonestarnot]

25. The ant hole will be our future.

[hfojvt]

34. That seems kinda silly to use Merriam as an example

the little suburb is only three miles long, north to south and less than two miles wide, east to west. However, I-35 as well as Turkey Creek, sorta cut the town in two, north to south, probably making foot travel a challenge. Barring an urban collapse, there will always be thousands of people living within ten miles of anywhere in Merriam. Driving twenty miles a day round trip only works out to $30 a week even with $6 a gallon gas and a lousy 20 MPG. I'm not seeing a huge hit for Merriam.

[bart95]

35. i thought merriam was an odd example, as well

i lived next to it, and could almost throw a rock off my balcony into turkey creek next to i35

[hfojvt]

36. I did find that to be a law of urban areas though

there is always some barrier, like an interstate, a creek, an industrial park - something to stop most streets from going through the town. Therefore, if you want to go across town, you are sorta stuck using a really busy street which is not at all good for bicycling.

But a small town like Onaga which currently has no grocery store and perhaps depends on drives to Manhattan or Topeka for city services, as well as having many people commuting long distances to work in the hospital there. That town is probably gonna hurt more than Merriam. Towns like Elwood and Wathena which currently depend on commuting to St. Joseph for both services and jobs, will have a harder go of it. But they are also much smaller towns. The three of them combined are less people than Merriam, actually less than half.