Need for Reporting Community Gas Consumption Statistics

Supply and demand will never fix the oil crisis. Miles per gallon is a pacifier. This narrow focus treats consumers like babies. A broader, adult perspective is warranted thinking in terms of reducing our per capita oil consumption on a community wide scale. Until we do that, government and oil companies will dictate the agenda, while transportation policies falter.

Commuter gas consumption is proportional to time and distance traveled, which aren't directly observable. SOV and SUV drivers are merely scapegoats. With built in time delays, public transit penalizes long distance commuters. So they opt out. But we need commuters to opt in, with time saving alternatives. Time is oil!

Theoretically, great gains in energy conservation are achievable by self-organizing commuters. If those who work in the same vicinity were neighbors, then direct point-to-point bus, van, or carpool service would reduce gas consumption while relieving traffic congestion, when measured at the community level.

Seeing how self-organization works at a job site is simple using this low-tech technique: display a street map with pins marking commuter home locations, so people can organize themselves. Getting people to see problems in a different light is the first hurdle. Moving the pins to cluster together means moving residences. The obstacle to implementing this idea is changing behavior in the real estate market. Raising consumer awareness to new perspectives is just the beginning.

Commuting is akin to a sorting problem. From computer science the fastest sorting algorithm for repetitive sorts is a presort. Let me explain. Take a deck of cards and try to rearrange it into numerical order by suit. If the deck is presorted then it's already in goal order. Anything out of order takes time. The greater the disorder the longer the time penalty. Commuters are the largest transportation segment of repetitive sorting, traveling the same route every workday for months or years. As a group over time, work and home locations change little.

The best theoretical solution is for commuters to live within walking distance of work, but cities aren't designed to support this option. Why not? Rehabilitating disaster areas, like New Orleans after Katrina, should seriously consider this game plan. The next best solution is for commuters, who work in the same vicinity, to live within the same neighborhood. This is the presort solution. A computer disk defragment program is an analogy. Buses line up at park and ride lots to deliver fans to sports games. This is more of the same idea.

Neighborhoods could organize themselves to shop "downtown" or at Wal-Mart en masse, supported by business sponsored point-to-point transportation services. Local governments could tax businesses on the number of parking spots they maintain, offset by the number of pooled transportation patrons they serve. This would get corporate America involved in finding oil smart solutions and aid efforts to modify consumer behavior. Reinforcing policy changes like these are needed at all levels of government.

Using analogies, the weakness of existing public transit alternatives is easy to expose. Scatter a deck of cards face down. Pick four company locations, one for each suit. Design a set of transit lines with stations along the route to serve this mock community. Turn the cards face up and check the results. Repeat this exercise with sports trading cards, which have many more teams to represent companies.

Experiment! Analogies allow us to fathom the incomprehensible, better than any other method. We're missing the big picture on oil policy because the problem space is beyond our grasp. We need to open our minds eye to better solutions than the current batch have hatched. Education leads the way.

How did we get into this mess? The government tax and spend strategy favors mass transit over citizen mobilization efforts. Supply side economics favors disorganized consumers. Effective organization requires better ideas with tailored information so individuals can best serve their own long range interests, not just short term whims. At its core we need a market forces strategy, with better informed producers and consumers.

One of my colleagues pioneered the simple rules for simulating flocking behavior, used in the computer graphics and artificial intelligence fields. But flocking behavior rules, like estimated gas mileage and oil prices, are proving inadequate. We need to model migration behavior, which encompasses a longer range perspective. We need to introduce new attitudes to help visualize how migration is possible, since migration is necessary.

Oil is a non-renewable resource. We need to instill survivable and sustainable habits to better judge our heading in our collective migration forward. Measuring and reporting energy consumption is a start. Successfully avoiding a catastrophic collapse of civilization may depend upon it. A rapid return to normal is impossible. Higher oil prices are the new norm.

Calculating seasonally adjusted per capita gas consumption statistics and reporting them at the local level would help promote a mature, migratory mindset. The data should be available, but it's not in this format or widely publicized. Differing by location, it's the volume of all oil deliveries over time divided by the number of local residents.

Factors like heating and tourism will make spatial comparisons unreliable. Temporal comparisons will be more instructive. Like a report card tracking progress, temporal trends should encourage much needed hope, incentive, innovation, and action. The competition between regions could prove interesting. Just imagine. What would Los Angeles be like if commuters were self-organized?