Week 18: It's MUCH worse in Toronto

Today, I went back to Toronto on the train. I am going back to University of Toronto. It was a chore just getting to the train station. It is out in the suburbs, and since gas costs $2.15 a litre now, taking the car was out of the question. I took the bus, which was an adventure. Kingston Transit has started running a lot of school buses on regular bus routes. There are more drivers now, because the provincial government has relaxed restrictions on licensing; a former truck driver can now drive a bus with nothing more than a day of training. As a result, yellow school buses, which go to the train station, run every 3 minutes or so in front of my house. Getting on is a challenge, because there is only one door on school buses and so stops take twice as long as they did before. Also, there is barely enough room for my one suitcase - I have to pack light - under my seat. It ended up taking an hour to get to the train station on the bus, because the bus stopped everywhere to pick people up and drop them off.

When I got to the station, the platform was PACKED. There was a line of 5 school buses letting kids like us off, suitcases in hand. There weren't even very many parents wishing their kids goodbye - there wasn't enough room on the bus. The parking lot was, of course, almost empty, except for a few Mercedes and Lexuses owned by people who could afford to buy gas. Some of us, like me, were going to Toronto, but a lot of people were also going to Ottawa and Montreal. Apparently, tickets for this train sold out in July - it is September now, and luckily I thought ahead and bought a ticket early. There are extra trains running, but not nearly enough to cope with the demand. The train was 30 minutes late (VIA trains are never on time) and when it arrived, hundreds of people got off - presumably, they were Queen's students. We got on, taking all their seats.

On the train, I chatted with the girl sitting beside me. Her name was Sarah and she was also a student at U of T. She was studying environmental studies, so she was keenly aware of the issues surrounding peak oil, sustainable energy and global warming. Even before the oil crisis hit, she was worried about the consequences of our excessive oil consumption (largely due to the private automobile). She was active in the university's environmental club, which is raising funds to put solar panels on the roofs of university buildings and to make older buildings more energy efficient. It is also lobbying for better public transit, including a $6 billion dollar light rail plan for the city, and lower fares for students and the poor. She described how she bicycles everywhere, even in the winter. We exchanged email addresses before getting off the train.

I got off the train in Toronto. It was afternoon rush hour by then, and the train station was extremely packed, mostly due to people taking the GO Train (commuter trains). The subway was so packed that staff wouldn't let us in, so I decided to walk - people were walking on the streets, which were almost completely empty. It's quite a long walk to the university, especially with a heavy suitcase in hand - it took an hour to get to my residence. I checked in, and had only just gotten up to my room when the don called everybody to an "emergency meeting".

Usually, the meeting at the beginning of the year serves only to introduce ourselves to the people on the floor, and to go over basic rules (which I already knew, being in 2nd year). However, there were some new rules due to the oil crisis. Food rationing was now in effect in Toronto. There was a scary-looking police officer there, who distributed ration cards to everybody on our floor, after carefully checking our ID. He explained that to buy food, whether in the residence cafeteria or in grocery stores or restaurants, we had to present our ration cards. Our rations of meat and certain imported foods, like coffee, were very limited. In the cafeteria, we were no longer entitled to eat as much as we wanted. We had to swipe our ration cards when entering, and each meal cost 6 points; we were not allowed to take seconds. We were issued small portions of some vegetarian dish topped with a tiny amount of meat if we wanted, one slice of bread, one small glass of milk, and an apple. A dinner was probably about 800 calories, and a breakfast much less than that. It was never enough.

After eating a very small dinner, I went to the common room and watched TV. The news was sad. There were riots in the U.S., and even in Toronto there were reports of youths burning cars and assaulting drivers of SUVs. Gas cost $2.55 a litre, much more than it did in Kingston, and unemployment had reached 30% in the city of Toronto and up to 50% in the suburbs. To cheer myself up, I changed the channel - but watching Survivor hardly changed the new reality. Things were much worse in Toronto than they were in Kingston. I hoped that people like Sarah, the girl I met on the train, held solutions to this oil crisis. Could we get through the crisis with a little ingenuity - by developing alternative energy sources and by decreasing energy use? Did we still have hope?

Week 17: You're Fired

As I feared, like many of my co-workers, I got laid off from my summer job at McDonald's. There simply weren't enough customers coming in in an area that was designed for the car, when very little oil was available. In addition, we had to raise the prices of the food to pay for the costs of transportation, and we had occasional shortages. The unemployment rate in Kingston, Canada has skyrocketed; Statistics Canada figures for this month place the unemployment rate at 27%, and it's bound to get higher. So far, there haven't been any layoffs in the public sector here, but if tax revenue stops coming in then those will be inevitable too. At least I was one of the lucky ones - I managed to make over $3000 this summer. Inflation has been so high, though, that $3000 is worth about $2000 in last year's dollars. It's almost the end of the summer, and I'll be going back to Toronto for school next week anyways.

Gas prices dropped slightly to $1.97 a litre, but there are still shortages of gasoline everywhere. Owners of diesel cars are slightly luckier - they only have to pay $1.78 a litre, and shortages of diesel are less common, due to the massive reduction in trucking resulting from the poor economy.
Bicycles are still everywhere, there are few cars on the road, and the buses are still packed - it will be worse when the Queen's University students come for the fall. Kingston Transit has started to run school buses on its regular bus routes, a move which promises to greatly increase capacity, but so far, it does not have enough drivers.

People's leisure activities have changed - the movie theatres, stores and restaurants are empty, and many of them have closed. There's still TV, if you want to watch news of the oil crisis south of the border (it's much worse there), and the video rental store is still open (and still quite popular). It is nice out, and a lot of people are doing things outdoors - everything from walking and biking to sailing, swimming, rowing, canoeing, and flying kites. The parks are full of people playing basketball, volleyball, baseball and many other sports - none of which require a drop of oil. However, the skating rinks and indoor pools have closed as an "energy conservation measure". The market downtown is busy, as it is the cheapest place to buy food - locally produced food is much cheaper than food shipped from thousands of kilometers away, which no one is buying anymore.

I'll be going back to school next week. I suspect that things will be much worse in Toronto, but I'll see.

Note: This is a World Without Oil post. All events referenced herein are fictional.

Week 16: No Cars, Packed Buses, Lots of Bikes

I am a university student at the University of Toronto. For the summer, I am living back home in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. I have a summer job at a McDonald's in the suburbs, which I am lucky to have kept (several of my coworkers were laid off due to the oil shock). Normally my dad would drive me to work, but he can't afford gas so I am riding my bike to work - which is over 10km away, in an area normally dominated by the car. The buses are so full that I hardly ever use them, except last week after my bike was stolen. It is getting near the end of the summer, which means that I'm going back to school soon. I booked my train ticket at the beginning of July, and I'm sure all the trains are sold out by now.

Ina city usually dominated by the car, there is hardly a car in sight. Gas is around $2 a litre, if you can find a gas station that still has any gas. When someone finds a gas station that actually has gas in stock, word spreads and people go and buy as much as they can, and inevitably the gas runs out quickly despite the ridiculous price. There are way fewer cars on the road, and the shopping mall in the west end is almost empty since it is hard to get to without a car. Downtown hasn't suffered as much, being walkable and close to Queen's University, the city's main university. There have been mass layoffs in the suburban shopping malls and the factories, but most of the employees in the stores downtown have kept their jobs. Public sector jobs, mostly at the university, college, hospitals, and prisons, have been unaffected. I am fortunate in that I have kept my job, but many are not so lucky.

The city's bus system, Kingston Transit, is packed. Normally, the buses run around town half-empty. Often, the buses are so full that I can't even get on. Fortunately, public transit systems haven't had any problems obtaining diesel fuel so far due to emergency measures instituted by the federal government. Normally, the buses run infrequently and there is no service at all on Saturday and Sunday evenings. Kingston Transit has pressed every bus into service and made its bus drivers work 80 hours a week so that it can cope with the increased demand. Old buses which were waiting to be scrapped have been pressed into service Kingston Transit is desperately trying to hire drivers and is even retraining former truck drivers who are out of work. Unfortunately, it will be a year before new hybrid buses, which have doubled in price, can be delivered. The buses now run 24/7, which they never did before, and frequencies have been increased dramatically. Fares were $2.25 before, but they have increased them to $3.00. The municipal government is talking seriously about trolleybuses and is even considering light rail, both of which can run off electricity.

There are hardly any cars anymore, but bicycles are everywhere. At rush hour, there is a steady stream of bicycles on the roads, interrupted by the occasional car or bus. A lot of people are walking as well. It looks like one of those Critical Mass protests. Bicycle prices have tripled, and bike theft is rampant. Last week, someone broke into my garage and stole my bike, which isn't even in very good condition. I later found it for sale in a bike shop, but the bike shop owner refused to return it even though I had a record of the serial number and the original receipt. I suspect that the bike shop was stealing the bikes itself. I ended up buying a second-hand bike from another bike shop - it was a junker and it cost me $300!

Food remains fairly cheap here mostly because a lot of it is locally produced. Imported foods, like bananas and coffee, have become incredibly expensive, but locally produced food like lettuce, tomatoes, and raspberries are still fairly plentiful and relatively cheap. Come winter, though, if this oil crisis continues, there will be

Fortunately, there haven't been any blackouts here, since most of our electricity comes from nuclear, hydro and coal. The government's campaign to get us to turn off our air conditioners has helped, too. The provincial government is talking about building more reactors, but those will take years to come online. Unfortunately, it dismissed renewable energy as "too expensive". Let's hope that the government changes its mind. Uranium is a finite resource like oil and nuclear power is dangerous.

I hope that the situation improves. Unfortunately, since oil is a finite resource, it is unlikely that it will ever be cheap again; indeed, it is likely to get even more scarce in the future. If oil prices remain this high, then it will take years of investments in alternative energy and energy conservation before our economy returns to normal.

Note: This is a World Without Oil post. All events referenced herein are fictional.