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Comment by macNchz | Hacker News Reader

A couple of comments on the article point out that if gas stations start closing due to reduced demand, it will accelerate the effect by making it more cumbersome to own a gas car. Recently, some of the industrial area near my apartment in NYC was rezoned for housing, and nearly all of the local gas stations were torn down (not because of low demand but because a 15 story building would be more profitable). The result is that even though I own a gas car, I now know of more–and more convenient–places in the area where I could charge an electric car than I do gas stations. Interesting shift!

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Owning a gas car will become inconvenient and expensive very soon. The number of gas stations has gone down from 202K to 115K, ~50% down[1]. Gas stations make very little money on gas, most of their income is from people buying cigarette, lotteries, lotto, beer, beverages, and some trinkets in the store. All profits are at the margins. When foot traffic drops, even by 10 - 20%, gas stations are not viable. They can increase gas prices, but that will further reduce foot traffic, because most everyone uses gasbuddy or similar apps to find the cheapest gas. And Costco, Walmart, etc can be extremely competitive on gas and even make these loss leaders to drive foot traffic as well as EV charging spots. Gas stations have no move left to gain foot traffic.

10% EV adoption is not far off, thats when we start seeing collapse of gas station. EVs charge at home or work, except when going on long rides. Gas stations lose this foot traffic forever. Adding EV spots at gas station won't help, there is nothing for people to do to for 15 - 20 mins at a gas station, they'd rather go to Target, Walmart, Costco and do some grocery shopping.

Most people don't understand how quickly things change. We went from flip phones to smart phones in less than decade. Neil DeGrasse Tyson explains How The Horse Industry Vanished in less than 20 years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lvzw7NPmppY

Folks buying new ICE cars will soon (< 10 years) have a rapidly depreciating vehicle, nearly worthless because it will be costly to own and operate. It will be like owning a horse after everyone bought a car.

[1]The first gas station in the United States opened in St. Louis in 1905, and by 1994 there were 202,800 across the country. Fast forward to 2013, and station numbers had decreased by 25% or almost 50,000, and by 2020 that number had shrunk to 115,200. A 2019 report by BCG predicts that 80% of conventional gas stations could be driven (pun intended) out of business by 2035: https://enpowered.com/the-death-of-gas-stations-will-be-far-...

Good observations (and relevant username).

Just pointing out that people spending 15-20 mins at stations is not unrealistic. At least near motorways, gas stations already position themselves as a place where you can do your regular rest during a long drive, with diners, cafes, children's playgrounds, etc., some drivers even catch a quick nap in the parking lot -- this is how it looks in Europe at least.

> Just pointing out that people spending 15-20 mins at stations is not unrealistic.

This is super unrealistic due to volume.

I filled my car at Costco this morning. I spent about 3 minutes pumping 10 gallons. At the same time, 25 other cars filled up at the 25 pumps. And there was a line backed up. To change refuel times from 3-5 minutes to 15-20 (rather optimistic based on my supercharging experience) won’t work unless you increase the charging infrastructure significantly.

People will need to charge at home, not at gas stations. And motorway stops are going to have to have hundreds of chargers not the current dozen or two.

I can't remember the last time I had to wait in line for gas that wasn't at Costco. Costco is a pretty extreme outlier.

But agreed that charging should shift to the home, the problem there is chargers for on-street parking though for people who don't have driveways/garages (of course this might eventually get solved by fully automated vehicles and lowering ownership of vehicles, but that's still vaporware right now while EVs are clearly here right now).

It's not too hard to imagine parking meters having charging ports.

Running a 240v 50A power cable is orders of magnitude cheaper than building a gas pump.

Ports is right. This is only viable if the cars bring the cable.

Seattle tried installing chargers at public street parking spots and the cables were stolen.

There are endless street level, public EV chargers in Seattle with cables.

Some random chargers being vandalized isn't really indicative of anything.

Huh, I can’t think of a single one. All the chargers I know about are in parking garages.

That's a first step, but I don't see parking meters in US suburbs. Some barely have streetlights.

though, In the suburbs, you're more likely to have a house with a garage where there can be a charging port.

It’s not the waiting that’s the important part. It’s that lots of people want to get gas and they can’t all wait 20-30 minutes to recharge.

Especially problematic during peak periods like longer distance holiday travel?

Now imagine if instead of those 25 pumps, each parking spot in the regular costco parking lot had a charging station. Suddenly 25 min isn't a big deal, and you "fuel" just as many, if not more cars in the same time frame as the mega large gas station, which itself could be even more charging spots.

Yea, exactly, I have been telling friends to think hard about buying a new ICE vehicle for this reason. Gas isn’t a utility like electric or water. Stations are all privately owned, as soon as it’s no longer profitable to operate, it’ll shut down. If you’re in a small town and it’s the only one, sorry, you now have to drive extra distance to get to the next one. The whole thing will collapse like a house of cards relatively soon and the bag holders will be people with ICE cars that they can only sell for scrap metal.

I guess if you have to, then leasing is the only reasonable way to go?

The stations won't "collapse", but merely the number of them will start declining proportionally to the gas vehicles losing popularity (assuming it actually happens). This way, each of the remaining gas stations will have a greater share of the (decreased) foot trafic, thus still maintaining profitability.

That's not how it works in Norway. A lot of stations are so far from the closest neighbour that they have a quasi-monopoly in their area, and "so far" is a surprisingly low number, according to the hearsay I've heard.

The hearsay also says that they close when they need expensive maintenance, not before.

In remote areas with low population density, the stations are like you say quasi-monopolies, so they can just raise the prices if the foot traffic declines. The closures caused by need for expensive maintenance can be a problem, though.

Raised prices in the coming years are what people expect, and is a reason to get an electric car. The gas stations only have a monopoly among the owners of ICE vehicles, people don't have to stay in that group.

You're citing a decline in gas stations that happened during a period where EVs' share of new vehicle sales went from being nonexistent to, at the very tail end, low single digits. So, obviously other factors were driving that trend, and unless you want to claim that gas sales were trending toward zero even in the absence of any alternative, I think we have to assume that the gas sales industry was continuing to meet consumer demand in spite of said decline. If anything, that tells me it will be more robust to EV encroachment, rather than being at some kind of tipping point where it's poised to collapse overnight despite the fact that the vast majority of vehicles on the road today run on gasoline.

The analogy with smartphones is also not a very convincing one, because a smartphone is a fundamentally different (vastly more capable) product than a flip phone. A current-gen electric car is just a car, with some advantages and some disadvantages that will each matter more or less to you depending on your circumstances.

I don't really have any reason to doubt mainstream EV market share predictions, which IIUC have them at about 50% new vehicle sales share nationwide in 2030, and I expect that will make it harder to buy gas, probably much harder in certain locations with above-mean adoption. But projections like that need to be (and I presume are) based on more than what you're offering here.

> So, obviously other factors were driving that trend

Yes, gas sales are nearly zero in US, they are just starting. I agree other factors were driving that trend. Probably gas stations figuring out that its not a viable business. But now, EV sales have started. 25% of cars sold in California are EVs and growing. If gas stations have gone down 50% (202K to 115K) without any EVs, we can predict they will go down faster with EVs.

> gas sales industry was continuing to meet consumer demand

There is no consumer demand for gas sales, any more than there is a demand for whale oil or kerosene. There is a consumer demand for lighting, and whale oil, then kerosene were used in lamps obsoleted by electric lamps. Similarly, there is a consumer demand for going from point A to point B, most people are not gas-holics, they'll use whatever fuel is cheapest (first and foremost) and convenient. Well, EVs are most convenient, you can charge anywhere you park, it is hard to think of any building (home, work, shop) without electricity. If the biggest challenge that mankind is faced with is running a cable from a building to parking lot and we fail spectacularly at that, we are doomed. However, we have precedence that we can do this. Standard oil is built in consumer demand for lighting and kerosene lamps. When light bulb was invented, its not just about convincing people to buy electric lamps. It is also about doing the far harder things of producing electricity and distributing it. This grid was built and people switched to electric lamps. So, I am someone confident people will figure out how to run a cable from a building to parking spot. US has 2 billion parking spots and ~250 million cars, just converting a small fraction to EVs is enough.

An EV is a bigger breakthrough than a smartphone (which is primarily a content/addiction delivery mechanism). An EV solves energy storage, an unsolved problem of civilization. EVs can provide passive income. Folks who participated in a VPP pilot with powerwalls made $150/day [1], this is the very definition of passive income. A powerwall has 13.5kWh capacity vs car batteries of 80kWh, there is nothing preventing cars from supplying power to the grid at peak prices and making bank. Most of our electricity bill is for peak power, which is from costly natural gas peaker plants. These will all be replaced.

Next, there is significant curtailment of renewables, which overproduce and there is no demand. Power prices go negative (200 million times/year [2]), which means an EV owner can be paid for the privilege of charging his car. I can think of at least a few people who'd be interested in getting paid for charging their car, or even charge for free.

An EV is primarily an energy storage device (idle in parking lot 95% of the time), which provides elastic demand, as well as supply. Nothing else on the grid has this capability. This capability changes things permanently. Think of a time before information storage, youtube/instagram/tiktok -- all of this content and businesses were not possible before we figured out how to store information (hard disks, ssds). EVs bring that capability. This is a significant civilization upgrade that will enable many things in the future.

[1] https://electrek.co/2023/07/05/tesla-electric-customers-repo... [2] Wholesale prices went negative about 200 million times across the seven US grids in 2021: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-30/trapped-r...

I just can't take you seriously when you say things that are gross oversimplifications at best or outright falsehoods at worst—for instance that selling gas isn't "a viable business" (and hasn't been since peak gas station!), or that the only practical difficulty standing in the way of a full nationwide rollout of charging services to provide for EV drivers' needs at scale is as simple as "running a cable from a building to parking lot". It reads like you're trying to convince somebody these things are true by rhetorical sleight-of-hand rather than well-founded argument, and it's not going to work on me.

> An EV is a bigger breakthrough than a smartphone (which is primarily a content/addiction delivery mechanism).

These are consumer products! The average consumer's eyes are going to glaze over if you try to give them this spiel; they'll probably pull out their iPhone and start scrolling.

EV ownership saves a lot of people money and time, which I assume is the primary reason their market share is growing so rapidly right now—those people see the value proposition. Schemes like distributed grid energy storage via EV battery have the potential to save consumers even more money, but those schemes will have to be implemented on the garden path of EV ownership to actually move the consumer demand needle.

>Gas stations make very little money on gas, most of their income is from people buying cigarette, lotteries, lotto, beer, beverages, and some trinkets in the store.

This omits a significant factor, which is that it used to be many gas stations also had several repair bays, employing a mechanic or two.

Anecdata: between mid-1980s and 2000, four such gas station/repair businesses within a mile of my house closed, leaving three gas/convenience store businesses remaining within that same radius, some of which used to have repair service as well.

This used to be a solid small business opportunity for a solo or partnership owner/worker. I suspect that as cars became more computerized the repair business became too specialized, and also some of the stations which were leased from large oil companies were sold out from under the operator.

I suspect car longevity has also been a factor. During my lifetime cars had 5-digit odometers. Cars now regularly last 200,000 to 300,000 miles. Oil changes have gone from 3,000 miles to 5,000 or as much as 15,000. Even more in a hybrid.

Those repairs that are necessary are harder than they used to be. I recently had to have a headlight bulb changed professionally because I just didn't want to dismount the wheel well mud guard. Some, I've heard, require you to remove the bumper.

But I think a lot of those service bays just stopped seeing as much traffic as they used to.

If that's the case, then why are they making it more convenient to pay?

Where I am (in Europe) all the major petrol stations have mobile apps you can pay with. One even launched a system where you can register your license plate, and whatever you fill up is automatically charged to your account.

If foot traffic is all that makes money, it seems they should want you to go into the store, not pay from your phone.

I question how much foot traffic Costco's gas station generate.

Regular gas stations have matched the time it takes to fill up gas with the time it takes to get in and out of the convenience store. A 20-30 minute typical shopping round in a Costco doesn't match up with a 4-5 minute gas fill.

It does incidentally match up with an EV charge up.

ICE cars don't need to fill up near home, because it is so quick. EVs ideally fill up where they're going to be unattended, because it takes longer.

It makes sense that you'd find more EV charging in residential areas and more gas stations near where people travel and work.

if you have to drive 15 minutes there and 15 minutes back, that's not faster than a fast-charge top-up at the fast charge point down the street, though. There's a critical density below which if you have a charge point nearby the nuisance of "going out for gas" and not being able to do anything else during that time isn't worth it compared to plugging in your car, and then just walking away for an hour. Especially if it's just down the road and you can just walk home, then walk back an hour later to pick up your car.

Because that's what's really in competition: you have to be with your car the entire drive to and from the gas station, plus the few minutes it takes to fill up and pay, whereas you don't have to be with your car when you're plugging it in to charge: that time is now yours.

I don't think most people make a special trip just to get gas. It's usually a quick added stop along the way of another trip, which is less of a nuisance than having to make two small walks to move and plug/unplug your car.

The GP was responding to a point about the closure of gas stations accelerating the decline of ICE vehicles. If all the stations near where you normally travel close, then you are forced to make a special trip to fill up.

The last gas stations standing won't be in remote areas far from everything else. They'll be in heavily trafficked areas that everybody goes to regularly, particularly near grocery stores.

And in those cases plugging in your EV amounts to no net gain or loss, but there absolutely are people who already have to make a dedicated trip to the gas station because their own town where they do their shopping simply doesn't have one.

Sure, but this conversation was about an urban area being converted from industrial to residential.

The people who will be living there with ICEs will certainly be driving them past gas stations elsewhere in the city.

No, we're not. We're talking about Norway as a whole, a country where for the vast majority of people, "urban centers" are few and far between. With an anecdote that highlights that even in urban setting there are areas where it's apparently easier to drive an EV than ICE.

But if there's no longer any gas stations on any of my usual trips, it'll become a special trip.

Also it's not fun having to make your trip even longer stopping to get gas. I'd prefer to just leave the house with a full tank every time.

Even if like 80% of gas stations close, the remaining 20% will be situated along major transportation arteries. I expect there will be a gas station somewhere along someone's regular weekly driving route for all but the most remote dwellers.

Few people make a special trip to fill an ICE car. It is almost always a side trip on the way to another activity.

Few people today

I don’t know anyone that often drives somewhere specifically to get gas. As long as you occasionally drive past a gas station during your travels you just stop in for 3-5 minutes and fill the car up.

Even if there isn’t one directly on your route, we’re talking a long ways off I think that you need to travel 15 or minutes from every point of your trip to each a gas station. Like, we've reached such a low density that the entire distribution network is barely even sustainable anymore.

Time to move to the country side. Discover a whole new aspect of "...so you're saying I can get basic groceries in town, but gas is 15 minutes further in the opposite direction of where I live?".

Maybe Canada's just a bit different then. I've lived in a few rural areas and do currently. Previously I was located 1.5 hours and two ferry rides from the nearest police detachment. The acreage I'm on right now is in the catchment area for a town of 500 people. Spent some time in the prairies where, if you're not living in the two major cities, there's 1/10 the population of Norway spread out over almost double the land area.

A gas station has never been hard to come by in my experience. Anywhere I've been that's big enough to have a grocery store has a gas station. Anywhere not big enough to have a grocery store has a gas station, and that gas station probably has a limited selection of groceries. And if you live somewhere small enough that you don't have either, chances are you're occasionally driving your car to somewhere that does because you generally need to buy groceries and other supplies.

What you're descriving is a lot of Norway. Low density, and employees cost a lot per hour.

Where do you see convenient charging stations? Tesla shows 4 superchargers in all of Manhattan and 3 in Brooklyn, not including 3rd party stations that can take 2 hours to charge the car. What is the population of Manhattan and Brooklyn?

Just a friendly reminder that Tesla isn’t the only show in town. Chargepoint shows several thousand charging stations just in manhattan.

You don’t need the superchargers

Oh yes, because people in Manhattan lives usually have driveway. Of course.

You don’t need driveways either???

There are curbside charging locations popping up around my neighborhood and most parking garages seem to have some charging capacity now. There certainly isn’t enough infrastructure for the whole population of car owners to go electric tomorrow, but it’s interesting to see big changes happening in real time.

I have had a tesla for 4 years, I have used super chargers maybe a dozen times total. And I do about 15,000 miles/yr.

I only use Superchargers for long journeys, and I don’t do many. Even when I do it’s only 20mins max and then off.

I haven’t used any public charging in the last 3 months.

Perhaps not applicable to NYC, but isnt it kind of troubling that people who cant afford a luxury vehicle (55-100k) could be put in a position where they have to spend more money (gas) to go fill up out of their way, taxed for being poor, or shut up and take public transit (if it even exists where they live)?

Surely no one driving an EV ever got to their position to buy one driving an ICE.

Edit: happy this comment inspired lots of spirited discussion. Would like to stress the "Perhaps not in NYC" part and if this trend spreads to say Oklahoma.

China has EVs that aren't luxury and I'm pretty sure Europe does as well if I am reading your comment correct you are trying to insinuate that EVs are luxury. If not your comment needs some clarity.

What is the least expensive EV one could buy in the middle of nowhere North America?

I'm open to anyones knowledge in this area I dont have but our primary mode of transportation when we were struggling was a $2,000 USD 30 year old Toyota.

If you don't think EVs are a luxury than we both need some clarity.

On cars.com right now it looks like the electric price floor is roughly $5k, which gets you a 10 year old Nissan Leaf, though it looks like they mostly have lower mileage than comparable-age ICE cars.

Used car prices have ballooned in recent years, so I’m not sure how much lower you can go without buying a complete heap. As a comparison I looked at the cheapest Nissan Sentras and Versas on the market, which are about $4k, a bit older, and have 200k miles.

A car with a 40 mile effective range is not a realistic solution.

Why not? It would have done my commute when I was struggling in Idaho and would easily do my commute since moving to civilization.

> I'm pretty sure Europe does as well

Does it? A cursory search seems to put an (used) EV at around 10k$ at best. Poor people definitely do not drive 10k$ cars here. Hell, even my tech-adjacent friends in their twenties rarely own anything more expensive than 3k$-ish.

The scrap value of a car is now $3k, so cars that actually run are north of that price these days.

They may not drive a $10k used ICE, but if you add up the cost in fuel & oil changes, it's likely equivalent.

The real problem is that right now a $10k used EV is almost certainly an old Leaf or Kia Soul EV etc with extremely low range and degraded battery (because they lacked proper thermal mgmt, mainly). So they're not really directly usable by most people. This will eventually change though; in 10 years there'll be boatloads of Model 3s or Ioniqs or Bolts etc on the used market. And yes, they'll be more expensive than a used ICE but they'll also be cheaper to maintain.

ICE are to EV as HDs are to SSDs. My intuition is that because there’s a floor to the cost of HDs (I think at some point it was around $35) and no practical floor to SSDs, there might be a similar story with cars. I know it’s really a bad analogy.

Cars still need brakes (for now) and tires and lots of other stuff, but there’s a huge amount of infrastructure built in a car to help it blow up million year old leaves. EVs are simpler so should be able to be made cheaper (eventually).

Maybe that means that what we expect from a car changes. If it costs you $10,000 to do all the stuff for a gasoline engine then a $1,000 AC isn’t a huge addition and there are maybe a bunch of other thousand dollar decisions that get added to make the cars cost what they cost.

Makes me think of stuff that used to be luxury items that came in expensive packaging and came with expensive accessories and now the actual item is so cheap the old packaging costs more than the actual item.

Sorta, but. It's not really analogous. The "floor" on EV cost is the battery. It's the hugest bottleneck and although prices / kWh have come down drastically it's still extremely high because supply is just not there.

Meanwhile the floor on an ICE is more the complexity of manufacturing and labour. Some of which exists also for EVs.

Not in New York... But our Bolt, while not the cheapest car ever, certainly doesn't match your description here. One doesn't have to buy a Tesla to get an EV.

Would you be willing to share what the car has cost in total (maint, elec, insur, ect) over the years? Genuinely curious.

Not who you originally asked, but I bought one of the cheaper EVs earlier this year (Hyundai Kona, slightly more expensive than the Bolt but in a similar class). With fuel savings included, (which, for our use case was between $100-$130/month), it was hard to find an ICE vehicle that met our needs for cheaper when we were shopping. We did have to compromise slightly on size (it's smaller than we wanted) in a way that we wouldn't have had to with an ICE vehicle, but so far, it's absolutely been cheaper and easier than my previous ICE vehicles. As I said to some relatives not that long ago: even if I found out 100% conclusively that electric vehicles had exactly zero environmental benefit over ICE vehicles, I'm not sure I'd ever go back. I just like it more as a vehicle.

> We did have to compromise slightly on size

This is my main trouble with EVs available so far. If I want something that's not substantially smaller than what our current Ford Galaxy has, and I want to still have the tow bar and roof box, there are very few EVs available and they cost $$$.

We're talking stuff like the Nio ES8 at $70k+, or the Mercedes EQS at $105k+.

Or you can go down the van route and get a Peugeot e-Traveller ($65k) or Mercedes EQV ($85k) or something like this, you get even more space but your range is abysmal at 150 to 200 miles.

Meanwhile on the ICE side you can get the spacious Dacia Jogger for just $15k new! Then you have $40k+ left to spend on gas and maintenance...

I daily a 2015 LEAF, bought in Dec 2014.

It had a warranty battery repair (to replace a failing module, free of charge to me but a possible concern long-term).

As the guy who turns all the wrenches on the family cars, it’s been incredibly low maintenance. Wiper blades twice, cabin air filter three times, and I had to charge the 12V battery once in the peak of COVID shutdowns when the car sat for 8 weeks or so with a Bluetooth adapter plugged into the OBD2 port. It’s about due for tires all around.

It was $32K before $10K in government cheese, so $22K for a new car was pretty good, but, like any then-new car, it has been a lot more expensive than buying a 2011 Honda CR-V would have been. I paid that premium in order to see if I'd enjoy having an EV. Overall, I have, but only because we have a 2005 Honda CR-V for long-distance travel/road trips, etc. The LEAF is entirely impractical as an only car (though other EVs are better in this regard).

Our electricity is expensive in MA, so energy costs about $0.06 per mile. That compares slightly favorably (about half) to a 35 mpg car buying $3.70/gal gas and doing periodic oil changes.

Around town or to neighboring towns, we choose to drive the LEAF almost 100% of the time. If it had a better CarPlay story, we'd probably choose it 100% of the time. (If I'm not sure where I'm going, the aftermarket Android head unit with CarPlay maps that I installed in the CR-V is easier and safer than the terrible factory nav in the LEAF.)

The newer model Leaf has CarPlay, and as you say, it’s a deciding factor in which car we take.

It’s NYC. There’s going to be an underground gas distribution that fills that gap.

"""The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.""" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory

This effect is true but the thesis is dumb. The rich are rich because of the compounding effects of wealth. Not that small fraction spent on durable goods.

I think the OP demonstrates the compounding effects of wealth, just not in a direct money-creates-money way.

Shrug. It’s a tiny drop in the bucket.

When you're rich, it is.

When you're poor, you can't afford the bucket.

Having the drop in the bucket is not, however, a path to being rich.

It is when your standard for "rich" is framed in terms of "can afford to buy good boots".

Which is not the definition implied by the original quote so great. We agree.

What are you even talking about? This is literally called "boots theory" and is explicitly giving boots as an example. That's what "framing in terms of" means.

If you read the discussion, the quote responded to included the claim

> The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Which is a dumb claim. As you’ll note, I said that the general effect was true but this claim was wrong.

You appear to be arguing something tangential

> The rich are rich because of the compounding effects of wealth. Not that small fraction spent on durable goods.

The less you (have to) spend on goods and services the more you can keep invested to compound.

If 100% (or more) of your income is taken up by paying for necessities (shelter, food, transportation), what do you have to compound?

* https://ofdollarsanddata.com/the-biggest-lie-in-personal-fin...

No, this is the misleading thing. Which your article is largely agreeing with me on.

The compounding effect of wealth scales with the amount of wealth you have more than the incremental savings you’re likely to earn. Trimming your expenses won’t make a difference. If you have no wealth and low income then the compounding is irrelevant. Even if your income is high it’s very hard to acquire “wealth”.

Poor folks will be poor even if you chop their expenses by half.

I think it’s more troubling to view owning a car as a base right that everyone should have. It’s better as a luxury. We want fewer cars and for people to live in walkable areas where cars are not needed.

100% agree. But…. how do we get there? A LOT of people in the US living in very (gross) spread-out areas where there is horrible pedestrian infrastructure. The infrastructure that does exist seems like it was put in place to mock those without cars (sidewalks on extremely loud stroads). I currently live in such a place.

The end-point I want is for people to live in dense walkable areas by default. But people don’t live there and the few places that exist like that are disgustingly expensive because they are (surprise surprise) desirable patterns of building cities. So we need to build more of it. It will be a very big very energy intensive build-out program that will take decades. So the question is: Is it better or worse for the environment to move people to ICE so they can live in their existing buildings or is it better to build entirely new infrastructure so they can walk.

Maybe my thinking is too black and white. I want the latter but I’m not sure the costs to the environment in the short term are justified. Maybe the long term benefit justifies it. I don’t know.

I think there are two key moves: one is removing the subsidies for private car usage so the true costs are more visible and people can make better choices (c.f. The High Cost of Free Parking), and another would be removing low-density requirements – most expensive cities could increase density rapidly if, say, every homeowner had the ability by-right to add an ADU or convert a single house into a multi-family without decades of recreational lawsuits from the neighborhood NIMBYs. Anywhere built before 1950 probably has a bunch of neighborhoods with little business zones which are marginally profitable because there isn’t quite enough local business but would do well if the density went up by 20-30%, and the profits would probably encourage a virtuous cycle of other neighbors upgrading.

I am homeless and live in a 2001 Dodge grand Caravan. So they’re not even thinking about people like me. Nor the hundreds of people I see parked out in the deserts of Arizona because they can’t afford housing.

If they want EV adoption, they also have to Provide housing.

That's a great position to have—anywhere in the developed world but the USA.

Here, it's a great aspirational position to have, but wholly impractical in the short or medium term.

Perhaps, if the Republican Party genuinely collapses within the next couple of years, it might become possible to pass the kinds of massive infrastructure overhauls required to make owning a car anything but a necessity in the vast majority of this country. Until and unless something that drastic happens, their adamant resistance to that kind of measure makes it very clearly impossible.

In short, high density housing, apartments. Not everyone wants to rent a little apartment the rest of their lives, particularly with the incredible limitations they bring with what you can do at home. There's a whole world out there that apartment dwellers can't participate in, and most people would prefer not to live in an apartment if given the choice and the financial means.

That’s fine but it’s not a fantasy that we should be specifically subsidizing for people that cannot afford it.

It is simply unnecessary to own a car in New York city and my impression is that poor folks in the city already largely don't own a car. The only way to maintain more gas stations than the market naturally demands is to subsidize them or otherwise distort the market. In NYC it would involve taxing everyone including the poor to subsidize the well off.

This is a lazy line of thinking that argues we should always maintain the status quo, no matter how lousy, if the transition costs money: won't somebody think of the poor!

"If we outlaw child labor, isn't it kind of troubling that families who particularly rely on their 8-year old's wages will be the ones losing the most..."

The fact of the matter is that EVs have gotten cheaper, they are getting cheaper, and there are government subsidies to help people buy them. Maybe those subsidies could be even larger, or better targeted, or means-tested? Or, yes, in fact we could improve public transit!

Anyway, I'd give this argument more credence if the same partisans for sticking with fossil fuels had demonstrated any kind of consistent care for the world's poor in any other context, but I haven't seen that.

EVs don’t have to cost 55k. Most of the people I know who drive them paid under $30k, almost half of the average gas-powered vehicle, and they’re so much cheaper than ICE vehicles to maintain and operate that they’re saving considerably more over the life of the vehicle.

Transit is cheaper still but has the problem that it’s nowhere near as subsidized as private vehicle travel but expected to have high fare box recovery, and the transit experience is directly worsened by private vehicle use. Simply subsidizing car ownership less would help there by not masking the true costs and reducing congestion.

Basically all EV sales are new EVs and the used EV market is still very hot.

There will be a lot more “cheap” EVs in 5-10 years as the first EVs depreciate and sell for $3,000 type thing.

It is crazy how fast that is happening here in the UK. Just over a year ago a friend bought an ev VW Golf and was convinced by the delay telling him the current resale value for a year old 2nd hand ev Golf was only a 10% drop.

He took the car to tide him over to a great deal we were supposed to be getting at work on EV cars. Went back to sell the car to the dealer and the chap said best he could offer would be £8k (well over a 50 percent drop), and he actually didn't want it even at that price as he had 5 on his forecourt already.

Last summer we wanted an automatic, and vaguely looked at EVs - and they were totally out of our budget. This year we totally could have bought one.

I'd say it is possible to geta £5k ev here in the uk now, and in the next year or two it will get even better for the 2nd hand market.

> Perhaps not applicable to NYC, but isnt it kind of troubling that people who cant afford a luxury vehicle (55-100k) could be put in a position where they have to spend more money (gas) to go fill up out of their way, taxed for being poor, or shut up and take public transit?

Base electric vehicles like the Fiat 500e can be had for ~35k [1], if all you're interested in is commuting without getting wet choose a Twizy for ~10k [2], and if you're fine with whatever and just need something cheap, get a motorcycle for ~5k.

[1] https://ev-database.org/car/1328/Fiat-500e-3plus1-42-kWh

[2] https://evcompare.io/cars/renault/renault_twizy/

Twizy's doors don't have glass windows, so you will get wet in it. Also, it doesn't have heating (or cooling), so in terms of thermal and rain comfort, it's closer to riding a motorcycle than driving a car.

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