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First town in America to ban new gas stations

londons_explore 5y ago
Who would invest in a new gas station today? You're going to spend $1M+ on all the buildings, pumps, tanks, etc. And the population of gas cars in the road is slowly decreasing today, and expected to rapidly decrease in the future. Will you really get a good return in your investment when profits on selling gas are very slim, and the risks of EPA regulations giving you huge fines for gas leaks and soil decontamination costs are so large.
- CivBase 5y ago
  It will be several decades before the vast majority of vehicles on the road are EVs. Even if all new vehicles sold were EVs starting tomorrow, the cars currently out there would account for the majority of road vehicles for at least another decade-and-a-half. There's plenty of time to recoup investment on a gas station. Besides, most money for a "gas station" is made from the convenience store. Like you said, gas profits are slim. They make some money, but their primary purpose is to drive customers to the convenience store. When the tides do change, they'll probably just gradually swap out pumps for chargers and continue business as usual.
  - londons_explore 5y ago
    But if there are already enough gas stations to service all gas cars, then building another when the number of gas cars isn't going up makes little business sense. I'd understand it in a town with regular queues at gas stations. But there aren't many of those left today.
    - CivBase 5y ago
      It's not about there being "enough" gas stations. It's about location. If people are willing to go to a new gas station because it's in a more optimal location for them, then there's a market for it. People often prefer one station over another just to avoid left turns. There may also be other factors at play with the convenience store. Is there a store like that within walking distance? That's another market opportunity. In my home state there is a gas station chain who is very popular for their pizza. They actually opened another station in my home town specifically to keep up with demand for the pizza.
nivenkos 5y ago
We all know that to combat climate change sacrifices will need to be made like fewer cars and smaller houses (for compact, accessible cities). I can't see the US ever being willing to make these sacrifices though. If you compare the $/sqft for housing in the US vs. Europe the difference is shocking (even in big cities like Seattle vs. London), same for gasoline prices, etc. The US has become accustomed to unparalleled comfort and luxury, with central air conditioning and multiple cars practically the norm. If anything, I imagine they'll try to enforce strict emissions controls on developing nations to have the pretence of doing something.
- kiba 5y ago
  We all know that to combat climate change sacrifices will need to be made like fewer cars and smaller houses (for compact, accessible cities). Is this really a sacrifice? I can't see the US ever being willing to make these sacrifices though. If you compare the $/sqft for housing in the US vs. Europe the difference is shocking (even in big cities like Seattle vs. London), same for gasoline prices, etc. I would be more concerned with urban design and zoning than square footage. Bigger house means more maintenance, and bigger lot means more mowing. I for one, hate mowing. The US has become accustomed to unparalleled comfort and luxury, with central air conditioning and multiple cars practically the norm. If anything, I imagine they'll try to enforce strict emissions controls on developing nations to have the pretence of doing something. A car is not a luxury. It is an unfortunate and out of control necessity that helps increases the cost of living and make societies less egalitarian, because it is a requirement to use car to do anything of note.
  - after_care 5y ago
    I live in a suburb of a medium sized city. It’s not particularly dense, probably slightly lower density than the median American lives in. My generation Z neighbors (I have two) are very happy to live without a car. They live within three miles of their jobs and use electric scooters for commuting. They have their food and consumer goods shipped to their house. They say that they don’t need to drive anywhere, and the occasion that they want to go somewhere Uber is available. Meanwhile they are saving hundreds to thousands of dollars a month by not having two cars. I personally (a millennial) have put less than five thousand miles on my car in the last 5 years. People say cars are a requirement for American life, but I find that’s becoming less true for more and more Americans.
cjtrowbridge 5y ago
Lots of towns have already done this. Berkeley did it years ago. It doesn't matter at all. The fact that Berkeley bans certain land uses means that the town next door, Emeryville, falls prey to fiscalization and simply makes their whole urban strategy be making money off of encouraging all the things Berkeley bans. The effect is that there are probably more gas stations than Emeryville than there would otherwise be in both Emeryville and Berkeley. The same goes for big box stores which Berkeley also banned. Emeryville is just a long endless chain of box stores and gas stations right next to Berkeley.
- bombcar 5y ago
  Ojai bans "fast food" though the definition of that is a bit slippery - and so there are fast food places just outside city limits.
  - plussed_reader 5y ago
    Cupertino, CA is like this too.
    - ericbarrett 5y ago
      Santa Cruz, CA—no new "big box" national retail chains allowed since the early 2000s (or maybe even 90s, I forgot). So they're all in Capitola, 5 miles away, creating incredible traffic on Highway 1.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jeffbee 5y ago
  You must be joking. Berkeley loves its gas stations. There is nothing more Berkeley than a Volvo 240 getting 5MPG and spewing smoke all over town. When someone tried to develop apartments at 3000 Shattuck on the site of "Smog and Gas" -- a quite ironic name indeed -- the city's grey NIBMYs went to war, writing the zoning board that "Berkeley Smog & Gas better serves the needs of the working class of my neighborhood than the proposed speculation housing." The ZAB agreed, disapproving the project! It is on-the-record that the people of Berkeley prefer gas stations over housing. Also I have no idea what you are talking about with Emeryville. They have three gas stations, all on Powell St. Berkeley has at least 20.
dmitriid 5y ago
I drove a fully electric car over the weekend within 100 kilometres of Stockholm. No. The tide is not turning. The vast majority of charging stations are inside the city. And the vast majority of places in those stations a slow, 3kW ones, with a sprinkle of 11kW in between. There are maybe ten 50kW ones in the entire Stockholm area. If the only thing you do is commuting, and you have a place to charge your car overnight at/near your home, then you can drive an electric car. For anything else? Good luck.
- usrbin 5y ago
  Charging station availability is a bit of a red herring though. Like you said, it's really dependent on charging overnight/when you're not using the vehicle. Obviously the viability will vary from person to person, but considering that a huge portion of car owners don't need more than 100 miles a day, just charging at home is a viable option. For those people, EVs provide a better overall experience. I agree we need to improve charging station availability. With a few exceptions, EVs are generally not well-suited to long-distance travel.
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    > Charging station availability is a bit of a red herring though. How is it a red herring? It's a real need that has to be addressed to make EVs viable. On Saturday we drove to a popular destination just 70 kilometres away from Stockholm (that is, 140 kilometres both ways). That popular destination has a total of 6 charging places with may be three of them with 22kW chargers, and the rest of them 7kW and 3kW. To ensure we wouldn't get stuck, on Saturday morning I drove into the city to one of the 50kW chargers hoping they wouldn't be occupied, and spent an hour waiting at a cafe while the car was charging. On Sunday we went for a longer trip. An unimaginable 135 km from Stockholm. I hoped to once again charge the car in the morning, but the 50kW charging spot was taken, so I had to contend with a 43kW one. It didn't charge as fast. We only had 260 km worth of charge in the car, and had to make a 1-hour-long stop at a McDonalds on the highway that had a total of 4 quick chargers that were miraculously unoccupied. > For those people, EVs provide a better overall experience. Somehow you assume that's the only experience "those people" are ever going to have. > just charging at home is a viable option. Ah yes. "Just". It's simple. Just charge at home. You only have to provide charging infrastructure at home. And provide that infrastructure for all homes (because the end goal is to make all cars electric, isn't it?). Right now I live in an apartment complex with 154 apartments. It's one of the Stockholm's suburbs that is basically a village with a commuter train passing through it. Surely, you can get to the city, and public transportation is still excellent, but you do end up driving significantly more than you would in a city (if for the sole reason that all distances are increased compared to the city). So, you need to provide electric outlets to all ~154 parking places near the complex. And to ~200 outlets to the neighboring complex. And to the next one. And to the next one... Who is going to pay for that, I wonder? Though I know. The "revolution" will happen at the expense of people who are told they will benefit from it.
FridayoLeary 5y ago
Electric cars are expensive. You need to have money to buy one. By punishing petrol car owners, you are essentially rewarding rich people for having money.
- dghughes 5y ago
  And can people even charge a electric vehicle at a public charger if they don't have a credit card or a smartphone or both?
  - FridayoLeary 5y ago
    Who doesn't?
    - epistasis 5y ago
      There's a good chunk of lower income people who are unbanked and don't have smart phones. However they typically live where they can get by without a car, as even a cheap car requires unexpected $700 repairs and can not be relied upon. A lot of the car-dependent design of most of the US is to try to keep people like that out of neighborhoods.
    - captainredbeard 5y ago
      A growing set of conscientious objectors.
      - FridayoLeary 5y ago
        I would like to believe that but i think their numbers as a % of the population will make them less and less relevant. More people are adopting technology than giving it up.
        captainredbeard 5y ago
        Do minorities (as in groups, not race) matter? What happened to our pluralistic society?
literallyaduck 5y ago
Market distortions are waste.
vnchr 5y ago
“Single data point observed — is this a trend?”
- ravenstine 5y ago
  That describes so many HN articles, though. ;) They are not my favorite either because the curiosity is based on such wild speculation.
- thesuitonym 5y ago
  When it comes to city planning, changes aren't made unless there's already a trend. A town isn't going to just decide out of the blue to ban new gas station construction unless there was already a trend away from ICE vehicles.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    Deciding to ban something you don't like and then actually going through with it because you're rich enough to afford to shoot yourself in the foot or the people negatively affected are small/powerless enough is "wealthy suburb chock-full-o'-busybodies" 101. Banning gas stations is just the California equivalent of a suburb in North Carolina banning a litany of alcohol related businesses.
    - thesuitonym 5y ago
      I wasn't saying it's right or wrong, in fact, I think outright banning new gas stations may make life difficult for the working poor, who do not buy new vehicles, and are less likely to be able to switch to an electric, but that's not really what I'm talking about here. I'm just saying that the trend has to already exist for a municipality to change something.
- doodlebugging 5y ago
  Reminds me of the old Willie Nelson song, One in a Row. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXLfHJ6fIJo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXLfHJ6fIJo And, since every trend must begin with a single data point, maybe it is a new trend. We just won't know anything about the direction until we accumulate more data points.
nimbius 5y ago
as someone who rides a motorcycle this sort of legislation is infuriating. gas stations are food, rest, and a chance to get my bearings with a map. Frankly California's more gilded counties like Sonoma have a perverse incentive to reduce gas stations: it reduces congregation and attendance by the homeless. This feels like the "cashless" argument playing out all over again. Sure, its perhaps easier and more efficient for the business to simply refuse to accept cash but at the end of the day its a poor people ban.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  I frankly have become very suspicious of arguments that go "poor people who are not me also happen to like this thing I like, so any attempt to curtail it is discriminatory." Is there something about a gas pump that makes poor people more likely to congregate than a similar facility without? An electric charging station, for instance, would presumably be similar and might even be more likely to have places where you can hang out since it takes longer.
  - ravenstine 5y ago
    Probably that people getting out of their cars is an easy opportunity to ask for cash. Happens all the time to me in LA. It isn't a good reason to keep gas stations arpund, though. (however, i do think there aren't many good reasons besides if America actually embraced clean energy)
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      Yeah, as you say, I have a hard time accepting giving people panhandling opportunities as a good rationale for a national network of gas stations.
  - gameswithgo 5y ago
    It is in the category of "Think of the children", "Dats racist" etc. You just say those words, get an emotional reaction.
  - 5y ago
imtringued 5y ago
I don't understand. There has been a gas shortage and waiting lines since the pandemic. Why would you go and outright ban gas stations? If we want less CO2 emissions we have to raise or introduce CO2 prices.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  So that more people will switch to electric cars. I have not seen much in the way of lines for gas.
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  The gas shortage was because of a gas pipeline hack, for which more or less gas stations would not really have had an impact since the stations themselves were empty for lack of gas being transported.
- JohnWhigham 5y ago
  This is just another example of how out-of-touch rich CA liberals are with the rest of the world. Allows them to feel morally superior and makes everything in their town more expensive (which they want anyway).
- moate 5y ago
  Just walk me through this: Did the gas stations all catch Covid and die? What is the correlation between pandemic related gas shortages and a need for more fuel pumps (vs. more of the fuel to be delivered to the pumps because of pandemic related supply chain issues)? Also, where are these constant waiting lines currently happening? I'm personally in NJ, an extremely densely populated state, and haven't seen anything other than the normal rush hour "4 pumps, 6 cars" type of lines. The larger filling stations (6+ pumps) almost never have more cars than pumps at any time I've driven past.
  - bobthepanda 5y ago
    I believe they're talking about the Colonial pipeline hack, where there were indeed waiting lines for gas in the South, but that was because of lack of delivery of gas, not lack of gas stations. A gas station is no use if it can't get gas.
The-Bus 5y ago
Another proof point for Betteridge's Law of Headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
CivBase 5y ago
What does this accomplish? A quick search on Google Maps shows this city (Petaluma, CA) already has at least 18 gas stations. Gas stations don't cause people to consume more gas - they are built because people are already consuming the gas. People will certainly just travel a little bit further for their fuel. Nobody is going to buy a new EV because of this. Even for the few people looking to buy a new vehicle there are few "affordable" EVs on the market, the ones which are available are relatively expensive, and plenty of other reasons to consider gas-powered alternatives. Charging is still relatively slow and charge stations are relatively hard to come by compared to gas. The batteries are also still incredibly expensive to repair or replace - in some cases seemingly by design. I really don't understand this. If you want to stop automotive gas consumption, you need to stop people from buying gas-powered vehicles, not stop them from building gas stations.
- ravenstine 5y ago
  If people just took out loans and dumped their savings into the stock market, they too could afford a trendy car with a long tail pipe that relies on lithium mined overseas and is a hassle to repair. /s
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  Gas stations have known environmental impacts. The storage tanks are an environmental hazard that makes redevelopment extremely expensive. The operation of the gas pump itself pollutes the air with toxic fumes, to the point where CA already bans their installation 300 ft from sensitive uses (e.g. schools and playgrounds) and even that may not be sufficient to actually prevent health hazards. While for now they are a necessary part of the transportation system, gas stations have very obvious downsides at least from a local perspective.
  - CivBase 5y ago
    > The operation of the gas pump itself pollutes the air with toxic fumes, to the point where CA already bans their installation 300 ft from sensitive uses (e.g. schools and playgrounds) and even that may not be sufficient to actually prevent health hazards. That's another result of fuel consumption, not the construction of new gas stations. The toxic fumes aren't reduced because a driver goes an extra couple minutes out of their way to use one of the existing stations. The goal is to reduce automotive emissions. Gas stations don't incentivize automotive emissions - it's the other way around.
FridayoLeary 5y ago
>is the tine turning? No. Because it will be quite a few years before anyone even starts noticing any reduction in gas stations. I think it's more of a political posturing than an indication of an emerging trend.
- globular-toast 5y ago
  Which is exactly what the tide turning analogy is supposed to convey. It's difficult to notice when the tide turns, you notice it some 3 hours later which is when it's coming in/out at its fastest rate.
  - FridayoLeary 5y ago
    So in 15 years from now someone living in a town in America will notice he can't find a gas station near him. So he will hop over to the next place for fuel.
doodlebugging 5y ago
I wonder why we need more gas stations. I own several vehicles of various vintages and there is not a single one that I couldn't crank up and drive from an existing gasoline station in my home town to any other connected, accessible location on my continent. Indeed, I can actually drive the 4WD vehicles I own deep into the countryside where there are no gasoline stations and never have a single fuel supply related problem with proper planning and equipment. The fuel tanks on my vehicles range in volume from 10.5 US gallons to 33 US gallons and fuel economy numbers range from 32 mpg down to 12 mpg. That means for any of my vehicles I have a range of more than 300 miles (10.5 * 32 = 336 miles and 33 * 12 = 396 miles). I will encounter lots of existing gasoline stations along any route I choose. I think the idea behind building new stations has to revolve around making it more convenient for people moving to new subdivisions to fuel their vehicles locally. If you don't build out gasoline station infrastructure near new construction then those who choose to live there are required to monitor their fuel consumption closely enough that they always know when they should gas up on the way home. They should be doing this anyway IMHO. I don't think we need new gasoline stations in summary because I think all places are already accessible with our current infrastructure. And I would like to expand on or clarify a statement in the article that is very important and was not stated well. From the article about halfway down: >>But it’s not all good news. The long-term shift to electric and a mass closures of gas stations will create toxic “brown sites” across the country. A typical gas station can spill up to 100 gallons of gasoline annually, ... ...these poisoned plots will present an environmental problem of monumental proportions. This paragraph makes it seem as if the existence of a gas station is environmentally fine until that station is closed or decommissioned at which point it becomes a brown site requiring remediation. That is not true at all. Once you fill the tanks and begin serving gasoline to customers there will always be some spillage at the pumps. The gasoline station becomes a brown site when it begins operation but you are typically only able to begin remediation when the station is shut down and no longer serves gasoline or when there is a documented leak from the underground tanks that makes it critical to shut down the station for repairs. Therefore, all existing gasoline stations are already toxic environmental sites and the problem is indeed monumental today. I see no reason to add to the problem by building new gasoline stations.
rinron 5y ago
As good as it is to see them encouraging the move to ev's. I wonder if it might be a bit premature when 47% of California's power is from natural gas (solar is 2nd at 14%), they import approximately 32% of their total power and they sometimes have rolling blackouts. The ban would be great news to the existing gas stations as well would be interesting to know how busy they currently are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_California

Who would invest in a new gas station today? You're going to spend $1M+ on all the buildings, pumps, tanks, etc. And the population of gas cars in the road is slowly decreasing today, and expected to rapidly decrease in the future. Will you really get a good return in your investment when profits on selling gas are very slim, and the risks of EPA regulations giving you huge fines for gas leaks and soil decontamination costs are so large.

CivBase 5y ago
It will be several decades before the vast majority of vehicles on the road are EVs. Even if all new vehicles sold were EVs starting tomorrow, the cars currently out there would account for the majority of road vehicles for at least another decade-and-a-half. There's plenty of time to recoup investment on a gas station. Besides, most money for a "gas station" is made from the convenience store. Like you said, gas profits are slim. They make some money, but their primary purpose is to drive customers to the convenience store. When the tides do change, they'll probably just gradually swap out pumps for chargers and continue business as usual.
- londons_explore 5y ago
  But if there are already enough gas stations to service all gas cars, then building another when the number of gas cars isn't going up makes little business sense. I'd understand it in a town with regular queues at gas stations. But there aren't many of those left today.
  - CivBase 5y ago
    It's not about there being "enough" gas stations. It's about location. If people are willing to go to a new gas station because it's in a more optimal location for them, then there's a market for it. People often prefer one station over another just to avoid left turns. There may also be other factors at play with the convenience store. Is there a store like that within walking distance? That's another market opportunity. In my home state there is a gas station chain who is very popular for their pizza. They actually opened another station in my home town specifically to keep up with demand for the pizza.

nivenkos 5y ago

We all know that to combat climate change sacrifices will need to be made like fewer cars and smaller houses (for compact, accessible cities). I can't see the US ever being willing to make these sacrifices though. If you compare the $/sqft for housing in the US vs. Europe the difference is shocking (even in big cities like Seattle vs. London), same for gasoline prices, etc. The US has become accustomed to unparalleled comfort and luxury, with central air conditioning and multiple cars practically the norm. If anything, I imagine they'll try to enforce strict emissions controls on developing nations to have the pretence of doing something.

kiba 5y ago
We all know that to combat climate change sacrifices will need to be made like fewer cars and smaller houses (for compact, accessible cities). Is this really a sacrifice? I can't see the US ever being willing to make these sacrifices though. If you compare the $/sqft for housing in the US vs. Europe the difference is shocking (even in big cities like Seattle vs. London), same for gasoline prices, etc. I would be more concerned with urban design and zoning than square footage. Bigger house means more maintenance, and bigger lot means more mowing. I for one, hate mowing. The US has become accustomed to unparalleled comfort and luxury, with central air conditioning and multiple cars practically the norm. If anything, I imagine they'll try to enforce strict emissions controls on developing nations to have the pretence of doing something. A car is not a luxury. It is an unfortunate and out of control necessity that helps increases the cost of living and make societies less egalitarian, because it is a requirement to use car to do anything of note.
- after_care 5y ago
  I live in a suburb of a medium sized city. It’s not particularly dense, probably slightly lower density than the median American lives in. My generation Z neighbors (I have two) are very happy to live without a car. They live within three miles of their jobs and use electric scooters for commuting. They have their food and consumer goods shipped to their house. They say that they don’t need to drive anywhere, and the occasion that they want to go somewhere Uber is available. Meanwhile they are saving hundreds to thousands of dollars a month by not having two cars. I personally (a millennial) have put less than five thousand miles on my car in the last 5 years. People say cars are a requirement for American life, but I find that’s becoming less true for more and more Americans.

cjtrowbridge 5y ago

Lots of towns have already done this. Berkeley did it years ago. It doesn't matter at all. The fact that Berkeley bans certain land uses means that the town next door, Emeryville, falls prey to fiscalization and simply makes their whole urban strategy be making money off of encouraging all the things Berkeley bans. The effect is that there are probably more gas stations than Emeryville than there would otherwise be in both Emeryville and Berkeley. The same goes for big box stores which Berkeley also banned. Emeryville is just a long endless chain of box stores and gas stations right next to Berkeley.

bombcar 5y ago
Ojai bans "fast food" though the definition of that is a bit slippery - and so there are fast food places just outside city limits.
- plussed_reader 5y ago
  Cupertino, CA is like this too.
  - ericbarrett 5y ago
    Santa Cruz, CA—no new "big box" national retail chains allowed since the early 2000s (or maybe even 90s, I forgot). So they're all in Capitola, 5 miles away, creating incredible traffic on Highway 1.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jeffbee 5y ago
You must be joking. Berkeley loves its gas stations. There is nothing more Berkeley than a Volvo 240 getting 5MPG and spewing smoke all over town. When someone tried to develop apartments at 3000 Shattuck on the site of "Smog and Gas" -- a quite ironic name indeed -- the city's grey NIBMYs went to war, writing the zoning board that "Berkeley Smog & Gas better serves the needs of the working class of my neighborhood than the proposed speculation housing." The ZAB agreed, disapproving the project! It is on-the-record that the people of Berkeley prefer gas stations over housing. Also I have no idea what you are talking about with Emeryville. They have three gas stations, all on Powell St. Berkeley has at least 20.

dmitriid 5y ago

I drove a fully electric car over the weekend within 100 kilometres of Stockholm. No. The tide is not turning. The vast majority of charging stations are inside the city. And the vast majority of places in those stations a slow, 3kW ones, with a sprinkle of 11kW in between. There are maybe ten 50kW ones in the entire Stockholm area. If the only thing you do is commuting, and you have a place to charge your car overnight at/near your home, then you can drive an electric car. For anything else? Good luck.

usrbin 5y ago
Charging station availability is a bit of a red herring though. Like you said, it's really dependent on charging overnight/when you're not using the vehicle. Obviously the viability will vary from person to person, but considering that a huge portion of car owners don't need more than 100 miles a day, just charging at home is a viable option. For those people, EVs provide a better overall experience. I agree we need to improve charging station availability. With a few exceptions, EVs are generally not well-suited to long-distance travel.
- dmitriid 5y ago
  > Charging station availability is a bit of a red herring though. How is it a red herring? It's a real need that has to be addressed to make EVs viable. On Saturday we drove to a popular destination just 70 kilometres away from Stockholm (that is, 140 kilometres both ways). That popular destination has a total of 6 charging places with may be three of them with 22kW chargers, and the rest of them 7kW and 3kW. To ensure we wouldn't get stuck, on Saturday morning I drove into the city to one of the 50kW chargers hoping they wouldn't be occupied, and spent an hour waiting at a cafe while the car was charging. On Sunday we went for a longer trip. An unimaginable 135 km from Stockholm. I hoped to once again charge the car in the morning, but the 50kW charging spot was taken, so I had to contend with a 43kW one. It didn't charge as fast. We only had 260 km worth of charge in the car, and had to make a 1-hour-long stop at a McDonalds on the highway that had a total of 4 quick chargers that were miraculously unoccupied. > For those people, EVs provide a better overall experience. Somehow you assume that's the only experience "those people" are ever going to have. > just charging at home is a viable option. Ah yes. "Just". It's simple. Just charge at home. You only have to provide charging infrastructure at home. And provide that infrastructure for all homes (because the end goal is to make all cars electric, isn't it?). Right now I live in an apartment complex with 154 apartments. It's one of the Stockholm's suburbs that is basically a village with a commuter train passing through it. Surely, you can get to the city, and public transportation is still excellent, but you do end up driving significantly more than you would in a city (if for the sole reason that all distances are increased compared to the city). So, you need to provide electric outlets to all ~154 parking places near the complex. And to ~200 outlets to the neighboring complex. And to the next one. And to the next one... Who is going to pay for that, I wonder? Though I know. The "revolution" will happen at the expense of people who are told they will benefit from it.

FridayoLeary 5y ago

Electric cars are expensive. You need to have money to buy one. By punishing petrol car owners, you are essentially rewarding rich people for having money.

dghughes 5y ago
And can people even charge a electric vehicle at a public charger if they don't have a credit card or a smartphone or both?
- FridayoLeary 5y ago
  Who doesn't?
  - epistasis 5y ago
    There's a good chunk of lower income people who are unbanked and don't have smart phones. However they typically live where they can get by without a car, as even a cheap car requires unexpected $700 repairs and can not be relied upon. A lot of the car-dependent design of most of the US is to try to keep people like that out of neighborhoods.
  - captainredbeard 5y ago
    A growing set of conscientious objectors.
    - FridayoLeary 5y ago
      I would like to believe that but i think their numbers as a % of the population will make them less and less relevant. More people are adopting technology than giving it up.
      - captainredbeard 5y ago
        Do minorities (as in groups, not race) matter? What happened to our pluralistic society?

literallyaduck 5y ago

Market distortions are waste.

vnchr 5y ago

“Single data point observed — is this a trend?”

ravenstine 5y ago
That describes so many HN articles, though. ;) They are not my favorite either because the curiosity is based on such wild speculation.
thesuitonym 5y ago
When it comes to city planning, changes aren't made unless there's already a trend. A town isn't going to just decide out of the blue to ban new gas station construction unless there was already a trend away from ICE vehicles.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  Deciding to ban something you don't like and then actually going through with it because you're rich enough to afford to shoot yourself in the foot or the people negatively affected are small/powerless enough is "wealthy suburb chock-full-o'-busybodies" 101. Banning gas stations is just the California equivalent of a suburb in North Carolina banning a litany of alcohol related businesses.
  - thesuitonym 5y ago
    I wasn't saying it's right or wrong, in fact, I think outright banning new gas stations may make life difficult for the working poor, who do not buy new vehicles, and are less likely to be able to switch to an electric, but that's not really what I'm talking about here. I'm just saying that the trend has to already exist for a municipality to change something.
doodlebugging 5y ago
Reminds me of the old Willie Nelson song, One in a Row. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXLfHJ6fIJo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXLfHJ6fIJo And, since every trend must begin with a single data point, maybe it is a new trend. We just won't know anything about the direction until we accumulate more data points.

nimbius 5y ago

as someone who rides a motorcycle this sort of legislation is infuriating. gas stations are food, rest, and a chance to get my bearings with a map. Frankly California's more gilded counties like Sonoma have a perverse incentive to reduce gas stations: it reduces congregation and attendance by the homeless. This feels like the "cashless" argument playing out all over again. Sure, its perhaps easier and more efficient for the business to simply refuse to accept cash but at the end of the day its a poor people ban.

emodendroket 5y ago
I frankly have become very suspicious of arguments that go "poor people who are not me also happen to like this thing I like, so any attempt to curtail it is discriminatory." Is there something about a gas pump that makes poor people more likely to congregate than a similar facility without? An electric charging station, for instance, would presumably be similar and might even be more likely to have places where you can hang out since it takes longer.
- ravenstine 5y ago
  Probably that people getting out of their cars is an easy opportunity to ask for cash. Happens all the time to me in LA. It isn't a good reason to keep gas stations arpund, though. (however, i do think there aren't many good reasons besides if America actually embraced clean energy)
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    Yeah, as you say, I have a hard time accepting giving people panhandling opportunities as a good rationale for a national network of gas stations.
- gameswithgo 5y ago
  It is in the category of "Think of the children", "Dats racist" etc. You just say those words, get an emotional reaction.
- 5y ago

imtringued 5y ago

I don't understand. There has been a gas shortage and waiting lines since the pandemic. Why would you go and outright ban gas stations? If we want less CO2 emissions we have to raise or introduce CO2 prices.

emodendroket 5y ago
So that more people will switch to electric cars. I have not seen much in the way of lines for gas.
bobthepanda 5y ago
The gas shortage was because of a gas pipeline hack, for which more or less gas stations would not really have had an impact since the stations themselves were empty for lack of gas being transported.
JohnWhigham 5y ago
This is just another example of how out-of-touch rich CA liberals are with the rest of the world. Allows them to feel morally superior and makes everything in their town more expensive (which they want anyway).
moate 5y ago
Just walk me through this: Did the gas stations all catch Covid and die? What is the correlation between pandemic related gas shortages and a need for more fuel pumps (vs. more of the fuel to be delivered to the pumps because of pandemic related supply chain issues)? Also, where are these constant waiting lines currently happening? I'm personally in NJ, an extremely densely populated state, and haven't seen anything other than the normal rush hour "4 pumps, 6 cars" type of lines. The larger filling stations (6+ pumps) almost never have more cars than pumps at any time I've driven past.
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  I believe they're talking about the Colonial pipeline hack, where there were indeed waiting lines for gas in the South, but that was because of lack of delivery of gas, not lack of gas stations. A gas station is no use if it can't get gas.

The-Bus 5y ago

Another proof point for Betteridge's Law of Headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

CivBase 5y ago

What does this accomplish? A quick search on Google Maps shows this city (Petaluma, CA) already has at least 18 gas stations. Gas stations don't cause people to consume more gas - they are built because people are already consuming the gas. People will certainly just travel a little bit further for their fuel. Nobody is going to buy a new EV because of this. Even for the few people looking to buy a new vehicle there are few "affordable" EVs on the market, the ones which are available are relatively expensive, and plenty of other reasons to consider gas-powered alternatives. Charging is still relatively slow and charge stations are relatively hard to come by compared to gas. The batteries are also still incredibly expensive to repair or replace - in some cases seemingly by design. I really don't understand this. If you want to stop automotive gas consumption, you need to stop people from buying gas-powered vehicles, not stop them from building gas stations.

ravenstine 5y ago
If people just took out loans and dumped their savings into the stock market, they too could afford a trendy car with a long tail pipe that relies on lithium mined overseas and is a hassle to repair. /s
bobthepanda 5y ago
Gas stations have known environmental impacts. The storage tanks are an environmental hazard that makes redevelopment extremely expensive. The operation of the gas pump itself pollutes the air with toxic fumes, to the point where CA already bans their installation 300 ft from sensitive uses (e.g. schools and playgrounds) and even that may not be sufficient to actually prevent health hazards. While for now they are a necessary part of the transportation system, gas stations have very obvious downsides at least from a local perspective.
- CivBase 5y ago
  > The operation of the gas pump itself pollutes the air with toxic fumes, to the point where CA already bans their installation 300 ft from sensitive uses (e.g. schools and playgrounds) and even that may not be sufficient to actually prevent health hazards. That's another result of fuel consumption, not the construction of new gas stations. The toxic fumes aren't reduced because a driver goes an extra couple minutes out of their way to use one of the existing stations. The goal is to reduce automotive emissions. Gas stations don't incentivize automotive emissions - it's the other way around.

FridayoLeary 5y ago

>is the tine turning? No. Because it will be quite a few years before anyone even starts noticing any reduction in gas stations. I think it's more of a political posturing than an indication of an emerging trend.

globular-toast 5y ago
Which is exactly what the tide turning analogy is supposed to convey. It's difficult to notice when the tide turns, you notice it some 3 hours later which is when it's coming in/out at its fastest rate.
- FridayoLeary 5y ago
  So in 15 years from now someone living in a town in America will notice he can't find a gas station near him. So he will hop over to the next place for fuel.

doodlebugging 5y ago

I wonder why we need more gas stations. I own several vehicles of various vintages and there is not a single one that I couldn't crank up and drive from an existing gasoline station in my home town to any other connected, accessible location on my continent. Indeed, I can actually drive the 4WD vehicles I own deep into the countryside where there are no gasoline stations and never have a single fuel supply related problem with proper planning and equipment. The fuel tanks on my vehicles range in volume from 10.5 US gallons to 33 US gallons and fuel economy numbers range from 32 mpg down to 12 mpg. That means for any of my vehicles I have a range of more than 300 miles (10.5 * 32 = 336 miles and 33 * 12 = 396 miles). I will encounter lots of existing gasoline stations along any route I choose. I think the idea behind building new stations has to revolve around making it more convenient for people moving to new subdivisions to fuel their vehicles locally. If you don't build out gasoline station infrastructure near new construction then those who choose to live there are required to monitor their fuel consumption closely enough that they always know when they should gas up on the way home. They should be doing this anyway IMHO. I don't think we need new gasoline stations in summary because I think all places are already accessible with our current infrastructure. And I would like to expand on or clarify a statement in the article that is very important and was not stated well. From the article about halfway down: >>But it’s not all good news. The long-term shift to electric and a mass closures of gas stations will create toxic “brown sites” across the country. A typical gas station can spill up to 100 gallons of gasoline annually, ... ...these poisoned plots will present an environmental problem of monumental proportions. This paragraph makes it seem as if the existence of a gas station is environmentally fine until that station is closed or decommissioned at which point it becomes a brown site requiring remediation. That is not true at all. Once you fill the tanks and begin serving gasoline to customers there will always be some spillage at the pumps. The gasoline station becomes a brown site when it begins operation but you are typically only able to begin remediation when the station is shut down and no longer serves gasoline or when there is a documented leak from the underground tanks that makes it critical to shut down the station for repairs. Therefore, all existing gasoline stations are already toxic environmental sites and the problem is indeed monumental today. I see no reason to add to the problem by building new gasoline stations.

rinron 5y ago

As good as it is to see them encouraging the move to ev's. I wonder if it might be a bit premature when 47% of California's power is from natural gas (solar is 2nd at 14%), they import approximately 32% of their total power and they sometimes have rolling blackouts. The ban would be great news to the existing gas stations as well would be interesting to know how busy they currently are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_California