Republicans love the free market unless it doesn’t suit them. And Republicans secretly want big government, again big and small where it suits their and their donors’ interests.
And what does “equitable” mean here? Are gas stations wanting or planning on giving gas away for free? How can they even remotely control what a business gives away as incentives? Can they ban free mints at restaurants too?
Edit: To everyone mentioning Democrats, note that I did not.
You seem to be insinuating that the only political party that isn't full of shit is the one you align with, when that particular disease is and has always been everywhere.
That is not what is being insinuated. The charge is that Republicans advertise themselves as being the party of small government and the free market. That charge is true or false independent of the hypocrisy of other parties. Those hypocrisies can be brought up another time.
Do you believe the Republican Party in North Carolina is being hypocritical in this instance?
I think four state representatives wrote a bill. State houses are full of idiots and really stupid bills are put forward all the time. Unless we're all residents of North Carolina AND there is a sense that this bill has traction, it is not worth any attention nor should it be thought of as representing a party's position.
Your snarkiness is inappropriate here and your politics a symbol of unhelpful political discourse everywhere in this country.
I don't care what a few politicians wrote in a bill, it doesn't rise to what "North Carolina wants" or what their local party wants. You shouldn't take idiots so seriously or focus on this "ha! gotcha!" kind of political nonsense.
The bill is stupid, the people sponsoring it are stupid, let's not inflate that to saying that everybody in their party is a hypocrite because of a bill they introduced. You want to go on a crusade against these individuals, go ahead, but it's generally uninteresting and unhelpful to anyone.
If we focus on making broad generalizations based on stupid statehouse bills around the country, we will certainly never get anything done besides a lively bit of insulting each other.
Don’t need to make a broad generalization to say that the proposal in question is hypocritical. One can say, “The people who made this proposal are being hypocritical and they are wrong for doing so.” It is always appropriate to admit that someone’s actions are hypocritical regardless of what “side” one is on. I believe the failure of people to point out individual acts of hypocrisy is what leads, overtime, to people making stereotypes.
Importantly one should note that the leadership of the Republican Party fails to admonish those who came up with this dumb proposal. (Yes, Democratic leadership rarely calls out Democratic lawmakers making really bad proposals but right now we are talking about the Republican Party.). For instance, the leadership isn’t saying, “This is contrary to our principle of small government.” So it is OK to use a bit of a broad brush in this case.
Not a follower of US politics, so this might be simple ignorance, but I’m not sure what the democrats represent. Obama for instance didn’t seem to run a campaign on the virtue of big government and socialism. As someone who lives in a socialist country, I’m certain the Affordable Care Act wasn’t socialism, it just sanctioned pre existing monopolies and regulated them, while forcing everyone to buy from the monopolists or pay a fine.
The Republican Party is far more cohesive on its message to voters and on how their elected members vote. Democrats have much more variation. Obama was a right of center President by the standards of 1980. The Affordable Care Act is, in its essence, the same plan that the Republican Mitt Romney instituted as Governor of Massachusetts and it’s the plan endorsed in 1993 by the conservative Heritage Foundation. In spite of this the act was labeled communist by Republicans. The strategy Republicans have employed since 1992 is to go further right of anything a Democratic President wants. Hence the absurd labeling of Biden as a radical leftist.
There are some Democratic Socialists in the Democratic Party but they don’t have enough power to push their agenda through. Since 1992 the the power structure of the Democratic Party has endorsed slow, incremental changes provided those changes don’t disrupt the corporatist polity that we have.
It goes even farther back the Massachusetts health care law was originally a Republican plan dating back to Richard Nixon. The Republican had been holding it in their back pocket for decades planning to implement it as a compromise when the Democrats tried to push for real socialized medicine. Instead the Democrats put it in place undercutting the Republican as they had nothing to push in its place. that's they it has survived despite the Republican holding congress and the white house for several years they just didn't have anything to replace it with.
This is the primary danger. The Republicans have become an extremist group, pulling the entire country into more and more extreme positions, labeling what amounts to middle of the road moderate policies as socialism and communism.
And even this idea of the words socialism and communism being bad is a mislabeling they’ve been successful in deploying. It’s as if public school, libraries, roads, etc. are somehow bad.
Of course socialism is bad though. Statements like this seem terrifying to me, what are we teaching in high school history?
Soviet union, Mao's socialist China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia. All of these were as horrible to live through as Nazi Germany. Empirically, we as humans have tried socialism in every sort of country and it's always a disaster of extreme poverty for regular people and corruption among rulers.
Government run services isn't socialism. Maybe this is like defining "racism" where different people are using wildly different definitions.
Free market capitalism provides the bounty of productivity and wealth creation which can then be skimmed off of to provide safety nets, infrastructure, etc. We should be looking to places like Singapore and Switzerland as models of governance.
That's what I learned in high school history. Then, over the next decade or so, I learned that was indoctrination, and that in reality the US has a brutal history of resisting and toppling socialist regimes and installing capitalist ones. That's before even mentioning the horrible things we've done within our own borders, which rival even Nazi Germany. Did you know the Nazis used our Jim Crow laws as a model for their own?
I'm not saying this to minimize the examples you gave — just to show that things are not neatly binary like that.
Systems are made up of people. Look around the world and throughout history, and you'll see people abusing their power in all sorts of ways. There's no magic system that can prevent that. It's just us in here.
Agree. This extremism has to stop, it's tearing the USA apart. I think I speak for many when I say that capitalism is a wonderful system that is being threatened by corporatist Republicans and moneyed interests who are attempting to turn the USA into a corporate state. This is the new battleground now...do we want a corporate state and an oligarchy? I do not.
When the asshole is in the "other team": "What a scumbag that whole team is!"
When the asshole is in "your team": "They're all equally crooked anyway!"
There are individual politicians who try their darndest to be clean, but heck, if a little bending of principles gets your constituents that funding, it's probably easier to do so rather than fight hard for that funding "the right way" and get nothing at the end. Are lobbyists that evil that they offer money for politicians' noble causes? There's already the "we'll open an office in your constituency" that actually helps people with jobs...
You're not wrong, but the amount of blatant hypocrisy on the right is just on another level, particularly among the hardcore Christians. At least the democrats typically have the decency to be sex positive or openly gay before having a scandalous affair.
There's a reason I don't align with the political party that's full of shit - because they're full of shit! It didn't used to be this way - I used to be a Republican (I'm no spring chicken, I've been around the block a few times). The Republican Party has earned my repudiation! And hey, the Democratic Party may earn my repudiation also but due to Duverger's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger's_law) I'm pretty much stuck with being a Democrat until they become the worse option than the Republicans. At this point I don't see that happening for quite some time.
I think I'm done donating for a while really. The sheer quantity of spam I get on my phone and email from random, semi-related causes and politicians all around the country is so irritating.
Omg yes. I'm not donating to any political campaigns again unless I can do so without giving my contact information. I donated to a Democratic campaign years ago and I've had hundreds of emails and calls since then, despite clicking several unsubscribe links, telling several people over the phone to take me off their list. It never ends. I've managed to create a Gmail filter that is pretty good at catching them, but it has some false positives every now and then. And I've just been ignoring the calls and texts for the last year.
I would love to give more but I simply cannot abide any organization that has zero respect for privacy as politicians do. I've given to a handful of charities but only when they have a clear privacy policy that is explicit about not sharing or selling information and has explicit opt-in for marketing materials
It is so unbelievably rude the only way I can think to stop it is to just simply never donate again. They must do this because it works for them.
I actually don't get hassled much by charities aside from some occasional junk mail, which I think is fine. They don't seem to pass my info around as aggressively as political causes.
Random thought, would you use a fundraising website to be the middleman in making donations, with commitments to not share personal information beyond your name?
I thought this till I listened to a very nuanced, long discussion on the topic. It turns out that politicians actually need information from the industry to make educated decisions. Where to draw that line between getting information and corruption/ regulatory capture is easy on some cases but hard in general, especially given that those forms of corruption can happen over time not through a single event
Also, the "bad lobbyist" is always someone on the other side, or nebulous wealthy private actors, or big-bad corporations. Rarely do be people consider things like the efforts of their favorite advocacy group "lobbying" - for example the ACLU, AFL-CIO, or League of Women Voters, should they be limited in how their outreach is is performed? Remember Citizens United was NOT about campaign contributions, but rather independent expenditures that were on the same topic of an election, not coordinated with a campaign. Should LGBT+ groups be limited in how much than can spend to stop odious restrictions of their rights, or planned parenthood campaigning for maintaining the Roe/Wade status-quo? The cost of that is advocacy, influence pedaling, and media spending by other groups you may not support. This is why free-speech is always under-pressure. On the other-hand, we can do much more to require transparency.
You can ban or limit financing. Make an upper 10 or 20k limit per campaign per person. Lobbyist can still participate in public comment, offer dinner at three star restaurants, write the law proposition/amendment for the politician, but the checks will be limited.
Lobbying is banned on Brazil but it's ineffective. There's a profession called "doleiro" that basically is a guy that facilitates money laundering and exchange of favors between politicians and business. Corruption is so pervasive that politicians job is basically to create all sorts of bureaucratic impediments for everything so if a company wants to do anything it has to pay for special treatment.
> iirc the ruling is only about donating to pacs (political action committees) and not politicians directly (small distinction i suppose)
It's about independent expenditures groups that do not coordinate with candidate campaigns (which have, after the fact, gotten the name “SuperPACs”; normal PACs can legally coordinate with and donate to campaigns, but cannot receive unlimited donations.)
We can and do limit actual donations and gifts direct to elected officials. Or at least have laws about transparency. Certainly more to be done here, but the margins of the debate are usually around things like media spending.
So, yes, you can buy an ad, or host a rally, or a fundraiser for a city-council candidate, to persuade the city council to raise the speed limit, or make parking free or whatever caused you to get a ticket. You can even schedule a direct meeting, or maybe even take out a representative for a meal to express your concern. The later case might involve some kind of disclosure, but you can probably do it.
Yes, but that is a function of the influence that office has in the world. If the position can influence billion dollar decisions, then there is incentive to influence the office-holder in the direction most favorable to the interested parties. The only way to deal with that is to reduce the scope of government.
It’s practically impossible to donate to campaigns in a meaningful way, especially with the limits on donations removed. Imagine you got 1 million people to donate $10 to a specific candidate, which is a very overly optimistic outlook. How can that possibly compete with companies and people like Robert Mercer throwing tens and hundreds of millions at elections?
We could outlaw private lobbyists. We could limit campaign spending. We could make PACs publically show all their contributors publically. Corporations are not people.
That’s a bit of a non-statement. I’m a big proponent of systems thinking. But in the case of the Republicans, they always like to bring up the “other side” to justify their extremist positions. As if the political spectrum could be placed on a 1D axis, the Republicans like to bring up Democrats as just the opposing opinion. It’s like saying, “look we’re just right of the Democrats and they’re left of us”, without acknowledging that the Republican Party is damn near right of everything and everyone else on this axis. They’re an extremist group who like to soften the perspective of their positions and policies by pointing to the other side. They literally threw their former presidential candidate and state governor under the bus because he was the only one who acknowledged Trump’s instruction as an assault on America.
So, in fact, systems thinking would indeed say to pay strong attention to extremists. It’s the thinking that we keep treating the Republican Party as just another party, the way that they like it while they get away with whatever, is how we have got here.
> systems thinking would indeed say to pay strong attention to extremists.
Incorrect. Systems thinking demands that you look at the system (government, dems, repubs) in their entirety. "System" not "part of system". Anyway, g'day I'll let you have the last word if you'd like.
It's because it's not a fundamental part of their identity. The same is true for all sorts of good-sounding political ideals - free speech, free trade, human rights, world peace, save the environment, anti-racism, etc. The two main parties swap "ownership" of these ideals back and forth through history because they don't actually care and are just using them to appeal to the meandering whims of voters, who also don't actually care and just use them to feel smug about their team.
If you want someone who's consistent on liking the free market, find someone who make that ideal a part of their identity. Perhaps someone who calls themself a libertarian?
How is installing free EV charging at government owned facilities "the free market" ? There is nothing in there about stopping a shopping mall or private company from putting in free chargers.
> First off, the bill wants businesses (restaurants etc.) with free charging stations to print at the bottom of every receipt how much of the customer’s bill goes towards subsidizing charging — whether the customers make use of the service or not.
This is a gross overstep of government power, ignoring everything else in the bill.
>> And Republicans secretly want big government, again big and small where it suits their and their donors’ interests
The Democrats want to increase spending (services) and the Republicans want to increase control.
Rather than "left" and "right" I once drew a 2D graph and placed a bunch of political parties (ideologies) on it. I don't recall what the axis were unfortunately. All I remember is that anarchy was in the lower left and totalitarian state was the upper right. It turns out the parties don't pull us back and forth left-right, one pulls us UP and the other to (on my graph) the right. Since what they want is not actually opposite, this seems to be pulling us ever more toward the totalitarian state in the far upper right.
Democrats and Republicans all want to spend money, just on different things. Republicans do not want to pay for it and indeed lower government revenues to profit the 1%. Dems want to spend it on pork and social programs. This is the undeniable truth of American politics. Also republicans are becoming more fascistic and attempting to put agents in places (state government mostly) to overthrow the next Presidential election via throwing out Electors if they need to and the American public knows this but doesn't care.
>The Democrats want to increase spending (services) and the Republicans want to increase control.
I don't think this really captures it at all. At this point the median Democratic and Republican seems to want low grade autocracy to enforce their vision of what is right on everybody. (I chose the word median carefully, not everyone believes this way, but it also isn't an extremest view, something like what somebody right in the middle of the party acts like)
Political jackassery such as this is probably the main reason we don't move back to NC.
"First off, the bill wants businesses (restaurants etc.) with free charging stations to print at the bottom of every receipt how much of the customer’s bill goes towards subsidizing charging"
Yeah, let's put the burden of this legislation on small businesses, for starters. I will rhetorically ask, who exactly are these legislators bending over for?
This will backfire anyway, because the printed amount will be very low.
Let's say a customer charges for an hour at 5 kilowatt, so 5 kilowatt-hour. So the restaurant subsidizes less than a dollar worth of electricity. And not everyone uses an EV, so the bill would say something like "10 cents of your bill went towards subsidizing free charging for customers with an EV". Everybody will compare this to gasoline prices and conclude EVs are cheap to operate.
> And not everyone uses an EV, so the bill would say something like "10 cents of your bill went towards subsidizing free charging for customers with an EV". Everybody will compare this to gasoline prices and conclude EVs are cheap to operate.
On reflection, yeah, bring it on. I can see it now: "well shit, Edna, maybe those damn hippies have the right idea after all."
> Everybody will compare this to gasoline prices and conclude EVs are cheap to operate.
Sorry, no. A particularly loud subset of the population has a "Don't tell me what to do. I tell YOU what to do" mentality. They will scream for a refund. You cannot reason with these people. At best, you can ignore them.
Why not require WalMart etc. to print on the bottom of receipts what proportions of their workforce are on public aid programs, barely scraping by on minimum wage?
"An additional $XXXX of wages to our employees is paid out of your taxes, and we avoid an additional $XXXX of tax liability, which is also sposonred by the public"
Require? I'll guess that quite a few restaurant owners would happily editorialize by adding disclosures of how much the "free" non-EV parking spaces cost, how much the "free" customer bathrooms cost, etc., etc. And maybe the "free" cost of complying with all the control-freak state regulations.
I thought the CVS receipt thing was a joke the first time I saw it. It's not a joke and it's not an exaggeration. CVS receipts really are 2 metres long.
key statement at the top of the bill:
"UNLESS GASOLINE AND DIESEL FUEL FOR MOTOR VEHICLES IS PROVIDED TO THE PUBLIC AT NO CHARGE."
At best this is legislators upset about missing tax revenue from fossil fuels, but
its more realistically just reactionary bureaucrats stomping their feet as gas and diesel prices soar north of $5 a gallon. I suspect more than a few are stuck eating crow in their oversized SUV's and pickup trucks.
> I suspect more than a few are stuck eating crow in their oversized SUV's and pickup trucks.
I am no fan of trucks and a big fan of EVs, but those SUV's pay the taxes that keep the roads (somewhat) functional for the EVs to drive on. NC revenue from gas taxes has been declining already which is why the infrastructure is so bad.
You should be realistic that some kind of tax is coming for electric vehicles and you will not be happy when they tell you to report your EV's milage to the IRS every year to make up for the shortfall in gas taxes.
> those SUV's pay the taxes that keep the roads (somewhat) functional for the EVs to drive on
Hi, I live in North Carolina. I pay more road taxes on my EV than I ever paid in state gas taxes, so I guess it's the other way around: I'm keeping the roads functional for the SUVs to drive on. North Carolina, like 30+ other states, already charges an annual fee to all electric vehicle owners to make up for the gas tax. It's been collected since 2014. It's $130 per year, which brings my annual registration and property tax bill to about $500 per vehicle.
Here's a map of the states with EV taxes to make up for gas taxes. It's from 2021, so already out of date, but most of the US map is colored in with fees ranging from $50 to $235. North Carolina proposed raising the tax from $130 to $275 in 2019, but the bill didn't pass.
The average people pay in gas tax in NC is $200. So you are getting a discount, and one that does not increase the more you drive. You get to lower your overall tax just by driving more, so the more you drive the less you pay. The more you damage the roads the less you pay.
I'm not getting a discount, as my previous vehicle did not get only 22 miles per gallon, nor did I drive 12000 miles a year. I'm paying more than twice as much towards the roads now. Saying that I will pay less taxes by driving more is nonsense, since the tax does not change whether I drive 1 mile or a million. Anecdotally, all the roads in my area (northeast Raleigh) are in pristine shape, as were I85/I95 in NC when I took road trips in the past.
Raleigh is not North Carolina. It's a pretty big state. But that is the problem, we do not think communally anymore. As long as I am ok, so what, right?
You're really on the attack, huh. That report puts North Carolina right in the middle on road conditions, with just 6% in poor shape. I've driven from the Cherokee reservations on the western border to the islands off the east coast without running into any bad roads. They were much worse when I lived in Pennsylvania, since Pennsylvania has actual winters to tear up the asphalt.
Washington, D.C.-based transportation nonprofit TRIP says deteriorating, congested and unsafe roads across North Carolina cost the state’s drivers a total of $10.3 billion annually. In the Raleigh and Durham areas, it works out to $1,442 per driver each year.
The NC Chamber Foundation is calling for the state to phase out the gas tax and replace it with other sources of revenue. It advocates for a mileage-based user fee, adjustments to the highway use tax and dedicating part of the statewide sales tax to transportation projects to help make up the difference.
But essentially no light vehicles damage the roads at all. Virtually all road damage is caused by heavy trucks. If legislators cared about charging for road damage, they would heavily tax diesel.
Or maybe if politicians had put together a bill to improve roads and bridges and highways. Some kind of bill to improve the Infrastructure of the country everywhere...
Now why don't politicians do something like that...
This bill has a very-low likelihood of moving forward. It is a political statement. Its sponsor's might be dumb enough to actually want it, but I suspect they are just trying to score points and get media attention.
Put a sign up that tells EV customers that they have to pay $0.01 for charging with their bill, then never actually charge them.
Better yet, start a political group in NC that accepts donations from restaurants for the amount paid for by EV drivers to charge. The majority of EV drivers would happily pay it, and the money might go to a good cause.
I will rhetorically ask "which is the party of small government?"
(the same party that forces every package of non-hormone-boosted dairy to feature a disclaimer that hormone dairy is the same blah blah blah. More small government!)
People say this as a gotcha but it's really not, "small government" has always just been a euphemism for austerity and anti-welfare politics. It's like "family values" or "states rights", you're not really going to get anywhere useful by taking these euphemisms at face value.
This sounds like it's a bill meant to allow gas stations to pivot into becoming paid EV charging stations.
Which kind of makes sense, since the switch to EVs will probably cause acute financial distress, such as destroying the financial situation of any family that owns/runs a gas station. A pitiless free marketer probably wouldn't care about that destruction (and they may even celebrate it), but I'm at least sympathetic to measures that would lessen the blow or make the transition less painful.
It might make more sense to just buy those people out, but that would take budget, and a proposal like this doesn't.
>Which kind of makes sense, since the switch to EVs will probably cause acute financial distress, such as destroying the financial situation of any family that owns/runs a gas station
There are tons and tons of people who live in apartments with no chargers or electrical sockets near parking spots, and who would like to purchase an EV. Gas stations can install non-free EV charging stations right now, and it will actually increase their non-gas business since EV charging takes longer, so the customer is incentivised to shop the convenience store to stretch their legs. Gas stations can install things like game kiosks etc. to help them pass time while making money. I am sure they can get more creative.For example, a small best selling books/magazines stall that people can read for free while waiting, and then buy if they want to continue reading. Paid massage chairs, VR playing stations, VR viewing chairs etc. etc.
We need to provide social welfare and basic income so that we don't have to pump poison into air, cause global warming, and basically pay for dependence, cause instability and war in the Middle East and now in Eastern Europe.
Gas stations typically had zero or near zero margins on gasoline itself and made money in the convenience stores, notably tobacco products.
EVs should be a great for their business. Level 3 / DC Fast should be too difficult for a lot of places to want to construct and maintain, should be more easy to site and permit than a gas station, should have less remediation problems, and have longer stops and high opportunities to upsell customers on food or other high margin retail goods or services.
Exactly, this would actually be history repeating itself. The original "gas stations" were pharmacies that added a gas pump to bring in customers, sold at a price that didn't bring in much profit but got customers in the door.
That’s not at all the same. The example you provide was augmentation or expansion of their market/products. This is not that at all. At best it is a supplanting of the market with a clearly imposed and forced product and system.
Those are cleverly not free choices, they aren’t even just biased through subsidies; they are actively sabotaging and commanding major shifts in society and the economy, which has never gone well when it has ever been tried under any other communist, utopian, command economy, self-righteous system of a minority of conceited rulers imposing things on people unnaturally, based on pontifications emanating from ivory towers.
Dedicated, paid EV stations can also differentiate themselves by providing fast DC charging. This requires more expensive equipment and quite possibly an upgrade to the property's connection to the grid - something that probably isn't worth it to businesses just providing a few free level 1/2 chargers as a courtesy to customers.
Of course, the lower income people living in apartments who can afford the min. ~$60,000 EV will of course then spend even more at charging stations. Poor people should try not being poor, right?
I sometimes wonder if this whole EV thing will be known as the “let them eat cake” type of moment, capturing a sentiment of ruling strata detached from reality on the ground until their heads end up rolling around on it.
“Just buy a $60,000 EV”, tells the HN technocrat to someone who delivers them food to their $1M+ home, working for a delivery service that digs them deeper into a financial hole as millions more low wage foreign laborers stream into the country and inflation eats away at any progress that the HN technocrat has only benefited from.
- A Nissan LEAF costs $19,990 when taking the federal tax credit for purchasing a new electric vehicle
- VW ID.4 with the tax credit is $33.5K
- Kia Niro EV with the tax credit is $32.5K
- Hyundai Kona Electric with the tax credit is $26.5K
- Hyundai Ioniq 5 with the tax credit is $32.5K
- Chevy Bolt with no incentives is $26K
- Chevy Bolt EUV with no incentives is $27K
If you don't have any tax liability to take the federal tax credit, you can lease and the leasing company takes the credit and rolls the discount into the payments.
If demand drops a bit as the economy cools down, you will be able to buy used electric cars for cheap again as well.
Entry level EVs exist that are under $30k USD new. Used EVs and Plug-in Hybrids exist that are under $20k USD.
I spend less on electricity for my Chevy Volt than I would for any combustion vehicle.
Sure, your example "low income people" won't be driving around in a brand new Tesla, but anyone who's buying power includes a $15k-30k vehicle can just as easily buy a plug-in hybrid or entry level EV.
It would be cheaper, easier, and much more desirable for the rental units to provide charging in their parking areas than for the gas stations to do it, though.
It's just a competition thing. Gas stations will never compete with a 240V outlet. There will never be an EV equivalent of an urban gas station (superchargers for distance travel are a real requirement though).
This is an interesting second order factor for public charging. The critical part may not be cost of electricity but the extended parking space required. If a ICE refuel space is used for <10m and a EV recharge space is used for 30m then the station's total capacity was just cut in third.
Gas stations have a lot of space taken up by the pumps, bollards to prevent collisions with them, and traffic flow since most stops are only a few minutes. I expect a fully realized commercial charging station would look more like a Starbucks, parking lot and all. So probably a lot more dense.
This brings up the question - forget gas stations, what other businesses can leverage their omnipresence to become defacto "the charging spot" and increase their foot traffic commensurately?
The vast majority of Electrify America charging stations are in Walmart and Target parking lots. They are positioning themselves for that role already. When I take a road trip in my electric car, it can feel like a tour of Wal-Marts across America.
I figured broader decentralization-- every supermarket has 10 or 20 charging spots, every strip mall 2-5. There's a huge synergy there in that you've now got customers who may feel "I've got 30 minutes to kill, I'll buy another coffee/cycle around the store and pick up another impulse buy item."
There may easily be a point where subsidizing the charge to attract EV customers is a net positive for business.
That's partly because it's hard for apartment/condo users to charge EVs, so they buy them less compared to home owners or renters, and thus underrepresented in your stats in spite of demand for EVs among them. It's a classic chicken and egg problem.
Not every apartment is pet friendly. Not every apartment can have an electric charger.
I agree that it’s going to get a lot more common at apartments but won’t apply to everyone. My last apartment had a massive garage with electric charging. It was $400/mo. My current apartment doesn’t have anything beyond street parking which definitely has no electric charging spots.
Careful with taking that number at face value. For the longest time the EV market was an upper-class market, so first adopters most likely were people who are wealthy enough to have their own home and thus the option to install their own chargers, particularly as the charging networks weren't really in place yet 10 years ago.
But over time that % is bound to shift heavily as EVs become more affordable, the charging networks become more dense, and more people, who don't own their own property, get into the market.
This will very likely increase demand for "not at home" charging, particularly considering how in many urban places people already struggle with finding a place to park, let alone one with a charger.
But most people charging at a gas station will be mostly apartment dwellers that don't have EV charging in their nightly parking spots yet. Home owners or renters can charge at home most of the time. The gas station charging eliminates range anxiety for them and helps EVs with smaller batteries and shorter ranges like the Leaf. Even for the apartment dwellers, there will be more and more EV chargers at parking spots near grocery stores, malls, movie theaters, amusement parks, offices etc.
> Gas stations can install non-free EV charging stations right now, and it will actually increase their non-gas business since EV charging takes longer, so the customer is incentivised to shop the convenience store to stretch their legs
But those apartment dwellers probably won't do that if there's a nearby restaurant with free EV charging stations, which appear to be exactly what this bill is outlawing.
To me, this bill seems to designed to make the plan you outlined more likely to actually work for gas station owners.
FWIW, free EV charging stations are often incredibly slow, on the order of 7 kW. At that rate, it would take over 10 hours to completely recharge a Model 3.
People with BEVs don't use free charging stations for their daily driving unless the charger is at work. They're typically not going to leave their car plugged in at the grocery store for 4+ hours.
> They also won't do it if there's public transit, but that's already been defunded.
What does that have to do with gas station owners and their families, and helping them transition as technology changes?
Also, public transit is not really a very desirable total substitute for a private car except in the densest of cities, so I don't think a merely "funding" it would take many private cars out of people homes.
It's because you don't really know public transit. I'd rather take my three hour ride in a train (with free wifi and electricity) than drive for 5 hours on a mind-numbing highway. it cost me less too. I still subsidize cars and highways, don't get me wrong, but the energy efficiency of one of the most inefficient modern electric train is so much better than a car that it cost me less despite a third of my local taxes going into road and parking infrastructure.
Ok, i get that. I'd rather rent or borrow a car when i need one (some weekends, for a road trip...). My point was that city density isn't really needed to go full public transit. I lived 5 years in a city with a density of 304 hab./km2 (twice that in summer), without a car. I used the bus when i did not felt like riding my bike, and the train for large distances. Now i'm in a city with 2.2k hab./km2, and yes, it is easier, but you don't need that much density to go full public transport.
While it is important to highlight subsidies to oil and gas industry, those numbers in particular is one I usually avoid because it uses things like traffic accidents cause by using cars and traffic congestion, and then uses that to calculate a value that can be compared to GDP.
What that mean is that some of those subsidies included in that number also apply to EV cars, which makes it a bit nonsensical. It also means that if we apply it to GDP we get a GDP that is greater than 100%, which is also nonsensical.
Gas stations going insolvent because of EVs and the effects is something I have been documenting at https://postpump.org
The problem is that I think outside of highway and freeway infrastructure most stations are doomed. You simply don’t want to stay in a 711 parking lot that long.
There’s a lot of people who seem to think an ev charging area will look basically like a gas station with the pumps switched. That is not going to happen.
A ev charging area will be a coffee shop or lounge, something that will be nice to hang around for 20 minutes. Gambling states should be ecstatic at the prospect.
Gas stations as they look today are not going to exist except to service legacy ice vehicles
The challege will be that nobody wants to spend an extra 20-30 minutes hanging around someplace doing something that they weren't needing or planning to do anyway. For example I'm not going to want to start hanging out at an EV coffee shop when I don't go to coffee shops now.
Pretty much the only time one should need to charge away from home is when driving a long distance, in which case a 20 min nap, a stroll to get the blood flowing, or a coffee every three to four hours of driving is probably a good thing. It’s like the “eating your vegetables thing” some people won’t pay to order them but they’ll eat them if they come as a side.
Won't it be a good thing for 711 and walkable stores in the area? Convenience stores can come up with ideas for people to pass their time beyond shopping and coffee/food. Maybe game kiosks like you see in bars that allow people to stand and stretch their legs instead of sitting in a car? They don't take up that much space. Maybe even a couple of restaurant style tables for people to eat, drink or just hang out.
The problem is that as these gas stations go insolvent the land will be a liability instead of an asset because you have to cleanup the tanks and likely will find damage to soil or ground water.
Except a gas station can currently serve X people per hour with fuel tanks but Y per hour with electric charging. Under the assumption that Y is not only less than X but substantially less than X, they'd need to find a lot of methods to extract money form those customers, which ends up with their own risks and costs.
There are a lot of chains we traditionally think of as "gas stations" which operate stores which don't sell gas. These stores are opening more and more locations which don't sell gas. Especially in cities where gas stations are difficult or impossible to open.
> You simply don’t want to stay in a 711 parking lot that long.
From what I can tell, people are going to be charging at restaurants or stores, if not at home. Charging stations are constantly being put in at grocery stores around where I live.
Plus, you don't need to charge completely at every stop. Apparently the IONIQ 5 can do 10-80% in 17 minutes at a DC fast charger. So most people could probably get a 30-40% charge in the time it takes to go in and pick up a drink or something.
The problem is that Gas stations are usually franchisees of the gasoline producers so they may not be able to install EV charging if say Chevron or Texaco don't give the green light.
I've seen exactly one gas station that had EV chargers... and it wasn't in the US. At least in 2020 (last time I was up there), the Petrol-Canada somewhere along BC Hwy 17 between Swartz Bay and Victoria had (paid) DC rapid chargers. It was pretty neat. Never have seen such a thing stateside.
> This is just political vindictiveness against the EV industry and virtue signaling their support for the fossil fuel industry.
Show me proof of that, then. Otherwise, it's just condemnation based on baseless speculation.
There's probably far more reason to say the backlash here against the bill is just "political vindictiveness against the fossil fuel industry and virtue signaling their support for the EV industry," since there are actual comments with enough emotional tone to infer the commenters feelings.
The problem with gas stations becoming EV charging stations is that EV charging takes substantially longer than filling a gas tank and no one wants to hang out at a gas station.
Gas stations are also just too small. Most in my area can accommodate 4-8 cars at a time.
EV charging is much more suitable for places like Supermarkets, Malls, Restaurants - places where people spend much longer amounts of time and with larger areas to park.
Like 9 minutes versus 5 minutes, for a comparison of our stop at a fast charger on the way to LA from the Bay Area versus gas fillup. Such a long time.
But yes it’s good to have places to go for the longer (30 minutes say) charges.
> It might make more sense to just buy those people out, but that would take budget, and a proposal like this doesn't.
Gas stations (underground tanks especially) have a finite life span. As tanks age out, most simply won't get replaced, so the amount of gas stations will shrink that way over time. Owners will quit taking care of the buildings when they realize the tanks won't make sense to replace in a few years.
It's not like we're going to be closing vibrant, well-kept businesses - there will be a natural attrition as the ownership starts investing in other businesses instead of re-investing in keeping the gas station up to date.
It's not like we burned every horse barn to the ground when cars were invented - rather they were re-purposed or not replaced over time.
> This sounds like it's a bill meant to allow gas stations to pivot into becoming paid EV charging stations.
Which won't work, regardless of which stupid laws are deployed to try and force it to happen. I've had an EV for a just under a year now and have not charged it anywhere other than my home even once. There's no reason to besides long trips (which are nowhere near as common as people think)
Gas stations have already turned into convenience stores that happen to also fill your car with gas.
They'll continue to do so as EV charging stations, and with a captive audience for a longer duration will be able to sell even more stuff/services from their store.
It's well understood they make far more money from the overpriced junk inside than stuff at the pump as-is.
The convenience store/gas station business model is unworkable as an EV charging station. A convenience store with two or four pumps can still service many dozens of cars per hour, because a fill-up only takes a few minutes. The same space could only charge a handful of EVs in that time, because it takes 15-30 minutes per car. That's less customers per hour who might also potentially come in and buy something. These places will not be able to afford to exist.
EV charging makes more sense as a value-added service for a restaurant, or supermarket, because most customers will be there for 30 minutes anyway.
I don't disagree re: it making sense as a value-added service at a restaurant.
But for many, folks already treat the gas station as their cheap convenient restaurant, grocer, gambling den, etc. I have the impression that being a gas station has already kind of ceased to be the primary source of profit.
Why isn't there room for all of the above? With how many folks rent/park in the street, demand for convenient charging when the entire fleet is electric is going to be substantial. Especially if there are a lot of cheaper short-range compacts that need frequent top-ups around town... Such vehicles might also get down into the 5-10 minutes charge times too.
At least around here gas stations also tend to have way more parking spaces than pumps. Isn't it rather trivial to electrify all the spots vs. putting gas pumps at all of them? Gasoline presents some unique safety and cost barriers to doing that... EVs still need to be washed as well, which many gas stations already provide and restaurants probably won't.
> gas stations [...] becoming paid EV charging stations [...] kind of makes sense
It actually doesn't, except for the tiny handful of gas stations on major rural arteries that can service long distance EV travel. The overwhelming bulk of EV charging outside of distance road trips happens at home (where it is a vastly nicer experience than pulling into any service station ever could be), whereas the overwhelming bulk of gas stations are in the urban cores catering to customers near where they live and work.
And even then, a "gas station" is an expensive piece of infrastructure with underground tanks and paid employees and elaborate lighting and maintenance. It competes very poorly with a EV fast charger, which is quite literally just a few parking spaces and an electrical junction box.
>> This sounds like it's a bill meant to allow gas stations to pivot into becoming paid EV charging stations. Which kind of makes sense...
No it doesn't. The reason is that charging takes much longer than pumping gas. For a typical daily commute you can charge at home over night at low power. On longer trips you need to charge long enough at high power that a human is going to need something to do to kill time. My bet is on McDonalds as a big player since they are already present along lots of highways, and they do have food and a place to sit. Other restaurants would be better but McDonalds already exist in the right places. Burger King and Wendys too of course but fewer of them (hint hint - ad chargers to be more popular).
"Smithfield's Chicken 'N Bar-B-Q" in NC is a huge supporter of Tesla chargers. I believe there are multiple charging stations at most/all of his stores. I expect other food places to start supporting paid charging in the near future. We even have a couple of local breweries that have charging spots!
But if you are charging at home or in the parking garage or at the restaurant you have no reason to be at the petrol station any more and therefore no opportunity to buy overpriced things!
> around half of 7/11’s are selling gas and locations without pumps seem to do just fine.
This has got to be somewhere densely populated. The closest thing to this out in the 'burbs and sticks is a Dollar General, usually. Gas stations have gas—if they don't, they don't get enough traffic to survive. But I've seen a couple cases of what you're talking about, in the core of our own city. Ex-gas-stations with the pumps removed and surviving as purely convenience stores.
> Long term people in EV’s will still want to get a cold drink and a snack on a long trip and someone is going to be selling that.
There'll be fewer fueling stops overall, is the thing. Especially locally. Longer stops, yes, but way fewer. Why? Well, for local-only driving, between home charging and places like grocery stores often having chargers, I could well go all year without visiting a dedicated gas+charging station. With an ICE car, my wife and I probably fill up at local gas stations 60+ times a year (and that's with only one of us commuting!), just for local driving, not counting long-distance travel. With EV, that drops to maybe once or twice a year, if not zero. Even if we spent 2-3 weeks a year on EV-driving road trips, I bet our total time at fueling stations would be way lower than with an ICE car, despite those charging stops taking way longer than filling a gas tank, so I don't think "come up with more stuff for people to do, and charge for it" will come even close to making up the difference.
Then consider what might happen to even that remaining slice of the market if highway rest-stops started including chargers (paid ones), along with the free playgrounds and free bathrooms and walking trails and picnic tables and local info they already have. EV charging infrastructure's much simpler than gas. No deliveries. Low maintenance. Very little space required (no huge underground tanks, for one thing). No spills. The only thing stopping those from going in might be desire not to compete with businesses (even if the result would be better services for people, overall).
There's the rural market that'll probably remain ICE for a long time... but really rural folks may already refuel from tanks on their property, buying in bulk (and possibly a mix of taxed and untaxed fuels, depending on what they'll be used for) and the rest (small-town dwellers) may not do enough driving that they really need ICE over EV, as long as the EV can manage a 60-mile round trip to the nearest Wal-Mart.
> lol, why buy them out? They made money for decades. It's alright to hang up a successful business after a good run imo.
Come on, put yourself in their shoes. It's a small business. They made money, but probably not tons. Their personal capital is tied up in an obsolete business, which has had its value drop due to technology changes, so they probably can't sell it for whatever they expected. They'll probably see large personal losses, and it's never easy transitioning to a new line of work.
Thought experiment time: say you're a 40 year old software engineer, and some new AI gizmo comes out an obsoletes your career and all your work experience. You're going to have to start at the entry level in some new industry. On top of that, the gizmo can out-compete all those tech stocks you invested in, so your net worth is down 50%. You've got a family and 25 years left in your career. Should I be like "LOL. You made money for decades. It's alright to hang up a successful career after a good run imo"?
Things change. People pour capital into small businesses all the time only to have them fail. If a company is able to run for a time until facts change and their business is no longer viable then that's a very similar thing. Having your business fail sucks, no question. But generally I don't think we need to compensate every failed business. I don't see why it matters if the business failed after running for 6 months vs 60 years.
I definitely sympathize and maybe there's some other use they can get out of their investment but that's a business problem for them to solve.
I absolutely think there should be a social safety net, more widely available than what we've got now, but people with failed businesses shouldn't get any special treatment beyond what anyone would get.
> Come on, put yourself in their shoes. It's a small business. They made money, but probably not tons. Their personal capital is tied up in an obsolete business, which has had its value drop due to technology changes, so they probably can't sell it for whatever they expected. They'll probably see large personal losses, and it's never easy transitioning to a new line of work.
Yea but think of all the other small businesses not getting this extra help. This bill is meant to stop restaurants from using EV charging as an incentive for people to spend money. It’s well discussed that gas stations make money from the convenience store not from gas. A restaurant that gives away free EV charging is essentially the same idea, except electricity is so cheap they don’t bother selling it to you at cost.
Why should we be thinking of the gas station owner selling a toxic fuel destroying the planet instead of the local restauranteur thoughtfully adding a hook to her sell. Besides, what ever happened to the free market? If we stop subsidizing gas and people go to gas stations less, then I’d be sympathetic to the gas station owners. But I still wouldn’t want it to come at the expense of other businesses!
I would much rather support and pass laws that help restaurant and shop owners than gas station owners.
PS I Think a healthy welfare system that supports the gas station owner and her family would also be a good thing.
> I mean...yeah that's exactly what would happen. Who are we kidding?
I know that's what would happen, because many people are callous jerks. However, I'm (probably foolishly) hoping the people who tend to say things like that may have at least a little change of heart if they imagine themselves in a similar situation.
The only way this makes sense to me is if government action is the cause of their business failing. I'm sure some of these mom and pop gas station owners will pivot into being more general stores, restaurants. Maybe even fast charging stations or some other thing. The ones who can't can try to sell the business or liquidate the assets and move on.
If there's a gov doing otherwise then maybe I'd reconsider but I think this is just how running a business works.
That's just not providing free parking. Banning it would be disallowing malls, stores, gas stations (heh) etc from providing parking without charging for it.
This is currently a hot potato in Norway. The local government wants to force malls to charge for their parking at rates to be decided by the government, but aren't allowed due to national regulation.
So there is a political battle to determine whether the law will be changed to allow it. The malls aren't at all happy about it, of course.
That is very cheap, if you want to rent a similar sized piece of land in the same place it costs orders of magnitude more. Just think about how much a restaurant with some tables on the sidewalk is paying.
I want my city to do this, because it will mean that people won't just store their unused cars on the streets, which means that it will be much easier for people who actually live here to park.
You can defeat this law by detailing everything you're giving away for free including parking, ketchup packets, napkins, EV charging, etc..
Then it will become just some extra government-mandated printing that nobody reads, like the stuff they print on the receipt asking you to go online and fill out a survey.
I think that with enough spaces disbursed evenly enough, this would actually be good. And I love to drive and park.
Technically if you park in the supermarket free parking, you can't leave your car there while you pop in to the bar around the corner. Instead you're supposed to move the car to the bar's parking. If the parking was independent of either business, you could park once and visit as many businesses as you cared to walk to from your car.
Establishments need to itemize how much free parking is adding to the cost of each meal or other product/service purchase so that non-drivers, carpoolers, etc, can fully appreciate how much they are losing to pinkos like the AAA.
Sure, if you want to build and maintain your own parking lot on your taxed land that is cool. Street parking should endeavor to be at least cost-neutral though, and free just means that taxpayers are subsidizing it.
I think all road use should require some type of fee and maybe tracking. Why should people using cars be subsidising the pedestrians and bikers by huge amounts of money. They should pay for their own roads.
Cars don't subsidize pedestrians or bikers, at all. The maintenance on roads from pedestrian traffic is essentially 0. bikes to almost no damage to roads compared to cars, much less tractor trailers. Doubles the weight of a vehicle increases maintenance costs by a factor of 4 per axle... bicycles and pedestrians are nothing. And without cars, we could go with much cheaper gravel, dirt, cobblestone, etc with no issues.
Actually surface roads in my state in the US mostly have another 4 ft of the outside lane (typically 12ft) for bikes. So 16ft frequently, with approx 25% of that for bikes. I have no problem with that. Just trying to be accurate.
The actual reason for that space is a shoulder for breakdowns. They paint a line on it and call it a bike lane for PR. A usable bike lane needs physical protection (and not be usable by cars at all).
I want to believe this is some kind of dry sarcasm but cars don't subsidize pedestrians. If anything, urban walkable, bikable neighborhoods subsidize cars and suburban areas.
The way it works in some places is that road tax is funded from taxes from general population plus road tax for cars, trucks and motorcycles plus, for highways, extra taxes for cars and trucks. The car use of pedestrians and bicycles has minimal to no impact on maintenance (I know sidewalks built more than 50 years ago that never needed any maintenance), while the part of the road where cars drive is impacted by the cars and a lot more by trucks, so the system above seems quite fair. Also highway taxes funded only by cars and trucks is very fair, pedestrians or cyclists are not allowed there.
What I am saying is that they are not broken. Pedestrians walking on asphalt sidewalks cannot break it. And no, in most cases rain is the only cleaning.
Wear from bikes and pedestrians is too small to be worth metering. You'd spend more on tracking and enforcement than it costs.
It's true that automobile use-in-terms-of-road-wear taxes would look very different from what they are now. A compact ICE car's total tax burden would drop to almost nothing. Ditto motorcycles. Truck and large SUV taxes would increase significantly. 18-wheelers would see enormous tax increases (road shipping is effectively heavily subsidized, now).
> I don't see why taxpayers should subsidise your Tesla
Because it's in the taxpayers' interest for everyone to move to EVs ( if nothing else for the cleaner air), thus it's something that should be incentivised.
Then this money should go to poor people so they can replace their car with EV, not to the richest segment of the population who will buy it anyway. The main cost of EV is not charging, it is the car itself, actually many people will be happy to pay for charging rather than petrol, it is just that they can't afford the price of a new EV.
By EV I surmise you mean battery-powered vehicle. You do realize that batteries do not produce energy. They merely store it.
Somewhere, off in the distance, a coal or gas-fired generator is producing a significant majority portion of that electric energy.
Also the "taxpayers" that want an EV, have one. The break-even folk who get as much back as they pay in taxes may be wanna-be owners of EVs. The folks who are net receivers of tax dollars aren't likely EV candidates.
>Somewhere, off in the distance, a coal or gas-fired generator is producing a significant majority portion of that electric energy
For every car that is produced, two things are true:
(1) It takes fossil fuels to make and deliver them.
(2) It takes fossil fuels to run them.
For every internal combustion engine car produced in 2022, both (1) and (2) will true for the entire life of the vehicle, which in the US is around 12 years.
For every electric car, only (1) is guaranteed to be true for the life of the car. (2) is a choice, one that we can change in the 12 years that vehicle in on the road.
If this is targeted as an fair competition measure, it is not a good idea. If anyone does not like that his preferred bar is offering free EV charge, it is reasonably easy to talk to the owner(s) about it and eventually have a different preferred bar.
That is discretionary spending, you have a choice. If it is paid by your taxes, that is a different story.
Good! Why do already rich people who can afford these cars get all the benefits? They are already saving boatloads in costs, why not tax the nation's and use that money to help more people get electric cars or subsidize people to build charging stations>
Should be noted that Duke Energy spilled a massive amount of coal ash into the river near Wilmington during hurricane Florence in 2018.
Also, dozens of pig waste ponds the size of football fields overflow and wind up in rivers during every hurricane as well. 33 of those overflowed during Florence. 46 in the storm before that.
Something tells me that North Carolina's conservatives are far less concerned about open-pit storage of hazardous waste than cars sold from an out of state dealer.
Stick a sign charging 1cent/hour on the non-free charger that requires no steps to prepay or sign up for anything for charging. Install a box for the honest citizens of North Carolina to deposit what they calculate their own bill to be.
I don't have a problem with private companies providing free charging but I wouldn't want my tax money spent on it. If I understand this right this is only government owned buildings/sites. If you can afford an EV, you can afford to charge it up. If they compromise and put meters on the charging to pay for it then that would be a decent compromise as it could pay for itself.
There was a moment for a while during the 2010s where NC was being touted as a new tech hub to rival SF/Austin/Portland. However, southern politicians (both republican and democrat) have tried their damndest to make that not happen.
The Triangle in NC has in fact turned into quite a tech hub. Lots of tech jobs and lots of employers with more opening shop every day. There are many large employers here like Apple, Google, Cisco, Microsoft, Github, Redhat, SAAS, Epic Games, etc.
Can attest to this. We have been here almost 25yrs in RTP and absolutely love it. And, the list keeps growing (see the medical companies popping-up in Holly Springs). So many employment choices, places to shop, recreation parks to enjoy. Not to mention the awesome education options (Duke, NC State, UNC plus a ton of great high-schools).
I have been on travel trips to CA, TX, NV, and MA. In my experience, NC is the best place to live...
> There are many large employers here like Apple, Google, Cisco, Microsoft, Github, Redhat, SAAS, Epic Games, etc.
Yeah. And based on the idiotic bills coming out of the NC state government (bathroom bills, now this anti-EV nonsense), these organizations need to step up their lobbying.
It's free in the same sense as "free wifi", a perk to get your attention/money.
I hardly think anyone expects it, but if I have to choose between two restaurants/workplaces/whatever where one offers free EV charging, well... it's an easy choice, at least for me.
North Carolina is interesting. I view the 'free energy!' marketing ploy for BEVs as a marketing gambit which will end once people are on the hook. I'm not sure this is as simple as being a 'Republican', it's more about societal symmetry around energy availability, cost and usage.
Electricity isn't free to create and pollution is created elsewhere than the vehicle tailpipe. We are currently in a very irrational period of history where people are being seduced with the idea energy is 'free'. It isn't.
If you have control of your major electricity use (HVAC, electric dryer, electric oven, EV charging), it can be a lot cheaper. The downside is if you do need to use a large amount of power during the “critical peak” period, it will cost you 35¢/kWh
Wow - thanks for this! I had no idea. I just looked at our last bill from May, and the electrical usage was 517KWh and the cost was $68.25 ($0.13/KWh). I guess this must be the result of the on-peak and off-peak costs.
That’s precisely $0.1029/kWh when you remove the $15.05 “Customer Charge” base rate, so you’re on the flat Residential Service rate. You should check your usage and see if TOU rates would be cheaper overall.
That sounds about right at the moment for the bay area. Regardless of state/price...not free. I can't bring my own electric heater into a retail store with a heater in winter and plug it in to warm up. That same retail store factors in their energy costs into the goods/services it sells.
And what does “equitable” mean here? Are gas stations wanting or planning on giving gas away for free? How can they even remotely control what a business gives away as incentives? Can they ban free mints at restaurants too?
Edit: To everyone mentioning Democrats, note that I did not.