Petaluma, CA is the first town in America to ban new gas stations. | Hacker News Reader

Petaluma, CA is the first town in America to ban new gas stations.

theguardian.com

16 pointstoomuchtodo4 comments

Restricting a line of business to incumbents creates government privileges and exacerbates inequality. If you own a gas station, you can continue to run it, but if you want to build one, the government forbids it. People who live in Petaluma will still find gas stations, so this prohibition will do very little to reduce gasoline consumption.

Taking steps to prevent future brownfield remediation costs when the business eventually closes and dumps the cleanup and tank removal costs on the public sounds reasonable, as is making petroleum consumption less convenient (climate change and all). There is a well known worn path of “privatize the gains, socialize the losses.”

No one is entitled to be in a business if the public decides it’s in the interest of the public good to sunset that business (just as new combustion vehicle sales bans come into effect at the end of the decade). Existing gas stations will still be on the hook for remediation and tank removal when gas sales decline below profitability inclusive of their convenience sales; they should probably have to put up a bond for that expense so they can’t walk away from the liability.

(the article also mentions most new gas stations are large chains, not “mom and pops”, so inequality isn’t a factor here; you can still put a convenience store in with only EV fast chargers as well)

I grew up in this town, and it has a really interesting combination that I call the 'Hippie / Farmer duality'. On the one hand Petaluma is the focal point town for a huge amount of Sonoma County's agriculture business. There are multiple places you can buy animal feed in large quantities, and there is still a large cattle auction yard in town. Combined with a local racetrack and a very car centric version of nostalgia for the 1960s and 1950s and this town could very well have been a hotbed for conservative view points in Northern California.

On the other hand, many of the people who have moved to Petaluma since the 1960s have been Hippies and other back to the land folk (or just well off, liberal urbanites looking for small town vibes). Add to this the fact that many of the farmers have been 'mom and pop' operations that have fully embraced and seen the value of the organic farming movement.

What you're left with in Petaluma is a place where some of the traditionally conservative rural families are more into environmentalism and environmental justice than some city folk, and that some of the recent city folk have moved there as a reaction against socially liberal urban life.

The perfect image for me is a Prius with an 'all lives matter' license plate frame next to a lifted truck with a 'Support your farmer: ban GMOs' bumper sticker.

It's a really great place.

> The size of gas stations is increasing as “mom and pop” stops give way to massive fueling sites owned by supermarket chains hoping to lure in shoppers with cheap gas.

> Electric charging presents an existential threat to those gas stations. About 80% of EV charging is done at home, and it currently takes at least 20 minutes to fast charge an EV, far longer than anyone would ever want to spend in a gas station.

So, most new gas stations are to lure people into grocery stores, where the average trip takes ~41 minutes [1]. But EVs are existential threat to this model because it takes 20 minutes to fast charge one?

[1] https://spendmenot.com/blog/grocery-shopping-statistics/

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