Voila! A New Measure of Oil Vulnerability for Cities

Abstract

Abstract:Peak oil, and the ensuing global decline in oil supplies, will adversely affect automobile-dependent personal transport systems. This places users at risk if they are unable to access their activities without oil consumption. This research develops a new measure of oil vulnerability, combining spatial data of vehicle fuel use with a novel transport energy-accessibility metric, the Minimum Energy Transport Activity Access characterisation (METAA), overcoming many of the limitations seen in previous studies. The Vulnerability to Oil: Income, Land-Use and Accessibility (VOILA) assessment identifies vulnerable areas as those where residents might lose access to activities during oil price rises as they can neither afford to spend more on fuel nor adapt their travel patterns to reduce consumption. This new metric allows planners to analyse where, how and why residents are vulnerable. Assessing the oil vulnerability of Christchurch, New Zealand, indicated that although the majority of areas are adaptable, residents in most areas are already spending over 10% of their income on transport, leaving the less adaptable areas OPEN ACCESS 2 vulnerable. A comparative mapping exercise highlighted the distribution of vulnerability and identified potential mitigation strategies. The research has important implications for urban and transport planning.

The tale of two (very different) cities – Mapping the urban transport oil vulnerability of Brisbane and Hong Kong

“…Mapping oil vulnerability from census data has since been used in Canada (Akbari and Nurul Habib, 2014;Arico, 2007), Melbourne (Fishman and Brennan, 2009), South-East Queensland (Runting et al, 2011) and in the US (Sipe and Dodson, 2013). Advanced simulation techniques have been employed in more recent studies in the UK and New Zealand (Lovelace and Philips, 2014;Rendall et al, 2014). However these studies has not been conducted in Asia.…”

“…Public transport access was considered by Runting et al's (2011) research, using a 1 kilometre Euclidian buffer to public transport stops, and with no consideration of service quality. Active transport was considered by Rendall et al's (2014) method to estimate the ability to use active travel to reach activity destinations (e.g. : shops and services) but this requires intensive computing methods and good quality activity location datasets.…”

The peak oil and oil vulnerability discourse in urban transport policy: A comparative discourse analysis of Hong Kong and Brisbane

“…In later studies, advances in methodology were seen to take account of commuting distance and trip volumes derived from journey to work data (Li et al, 2015;Runting et al, 2011). Sophisticated simulation and modelling techniques, such as spatial agent-based microsimulation (Lovelace and Philips, 2014) and minimum energy activity modelling (Rendall et al, 2014), have recently been experimented with in this area. The notion of vulnerability has also been expanded to look at the adaptive capacity (the level of resilience), exposure (oil use patterns) and sensitivity (the ability to absorb higher prices) to oil price increases (Leung et al, 2015).…”

O transporte público em uma estratégia de avaliação da resiliência na mobilidade urbana

“…Realizando outro estudo de caso na mesma região, Rendall, Page e Krumdieck (2014) desenvolveram um método para avaliar a vulnerabilidade do petróleo nas cidades (VOILA). O método proposto considera a adaptabilidade do viajante para modos com menor gasto energético ou seleção de destino que necessite menor deslocamento.…”