The aphorism that “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed,” comes up a lot in this newsletter — and right now it might be most apt in the world of cars. Some American towns are filled with ever-larger, pedestrian-endangering gas-powered pickup trucks, while San Franciscans watch eerie, nearly silent robot-piloted vehicles navigate their streets like a scene from “Total Recall” or “Blade Runner.” America’s electric vehicle infrastructure is a big part of this story. For swaths of the nation, electric vehicles are already part of the present, with a charger at every gas station and grocery co-op parking spot. But for many cities and towns, they’re still very much a part of the future — a future they don’t feel particularly well-prepared to step boldly into. The Biden administration is making a hard push for EV adoption. But as POLITICO’s Liz Crampton reports today, a lot of America’s mayors don’t feel like they’re ready to go along with the program. “Our residents are used to a gas station on literally every major intersection,” Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt, a Republican modestly supportive of the EV push, told Liz. “If everybody in the city tomorrow has an EV, we would have some serious infrastructure challenges.” Liz reports that America’s mayors are saying, in effect: Please distribute the future more evenly to us. The rise in EVs is usually seen as a story about car buyers and technology: As electric cars improve as a product and charging becomes more accessible, people are switching away from gas-engine vehicles. But missing from that story are the resources that cities and towns still need to build that sprawling charging infrastructure. Of the 50 mayors polled by POLITICO, 45 of them “strongly or somewhat support” the EV push, while only three oppose it. (One expressed neutrality and one declined to participate.) But less than half said their city is prepared to handle it, with 14 saying they’re “a little prepared” and 12 saying they’re “not at all prepared.” “EV adoption poses a puzzle,” Liz writes. “Consumers won’t feel comfortable buying an EV until they have adequate access to public chargers to avoid getting stranded on the road. But cities don’t currently have enough money to incentivize wide scale adoption by constructing ubiquitous charging stations throughout downtowns, in neighborhoods and along highways.” If this is starting to sound a little bit like the explanations for why people don’t want to use the metaverse yet because there’s nothing to do there, or how ChatGPT hasn’t taken over the world yet because we aren’t quite sure how to use it (see the next item in this newsletter), that’s not a coincidence. New technologies almost uniformly go through what’s called the “Gartner hype cycle,” where an early wave of astonishment and enthusiasm crests on the rocky shores of reality. That cycle is even more potent with something like America’s automobile infrastructure, built over a century spanning Fordism and mass production, Robert Moses’ innovations in auto-induced sprawl, and now the dawning realization that America’s car addiction could prove environmentally fatal. The EV push is meant to reverse that last trend, but it’s up against a century of infrastructure meant to accommodate the opposite. This is largely a technological and economic limitation, rather than one of a lack of will — just look at the major concessions General Motors recently made to striking auto workers in the interest of continuing to develop their own electric vehicle program. Liz notes that costs for installing quick-charging stations that provide roughly 100 to 200 miles of range per 30 minutes of charging can come in at $40,000 to $175,000 per port. So most cities have been using federal funding to install less expensive ports that cost in the low thousands, but only give drivers about 25 miles of range per hour. Fast and cheap-to-build charging just doesn’t exist yet. The Biden administration is giving $700 million to cities for alternative fueling solutions, but applying for and winning those grants is no walk in the park. That means that even a post-EV-revolution American auto landscape might look pretty uneven. The mayors surveyed are largely still struggling to deal with the most basic of transportation problems, with three in five saying their most needed transportation investments are in pothole and road repairs. On one hand, Liz reports, mayors are optimistic that the EV industry can be an economic driver: “Building up the infrastructure and being prepared for it gets people more excited,” the Republican mayor of Columbia, South Carolina, told her. But on the other, even the most enthusiastic, technocratic local administrators still face the grind of partisan politics and industry pushback. Roughly 30 states charge extra fees for drivers to register their EVs, meant to replace gasoline taxes but according to EV advocates, are overly punitive compared to what those taxes would otherwise be. The future, in some instances, might arrive first simply where there’s the least political incentive to obstruct it.
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