So that got me thinking about how many gas stations there must be in the US. I figured there had to be a million of them, but all the figures I see say that there are barely 100,000, and that the number is dropping.
What I haven't found anywhere is any total number of gas pumps in the US. If Mom and Pop gas stations with 4 pumps each are being put out of business by convenience stores with 16 pumps each, then the actual number of gas pumps could be rising while the number of gas stations drops. If the average is something like 8 pumps per gas station, that would make a total of roughly 1 million gas pumps in the US, and with over 250 million gas-burning vehicles, that makes over 250 vehicles per pump.
Let's compare this to the ratio of electric vehicles per public charging outlets. The US had 57,187 public charging outlets at the end of 2018. 250 electric vehicles per each one of those outlets would've made a total of 14,296,750. Were there 14 million EV's on the US roads in December 2018? Would've been nice, but no, the number was more like 1.2 million. Which means that there were less than 21 electric vehicles per charging station.
The whole point of this post has to do with something which afficianados of electric vehicles refer to as "range anxiety" -- the worry that you can't drive around very far or very freely in an electric vehicle because of the danger that you'll run out of electricity and be stranded and nothing can be done and oh my God it'll be so horrible. As people who know about EV's are constantly attemptinbg to point out to anyone who'll listen, range anxiety, like many other kinds of anxiety, is completely irrational. Yes, it's possible to run out of electricity in an electric vehicle, but it's also possible to run out of gas in an internal-combustion, and you'd have to be pretty careless to do either one.
And, actually, electric vehicles have a huge advantage over gasoline-burning vehicles in this regard. Most of us can't get gasoline anywhere in the US except at one of those 100,000 or so public gas stations. But there are a lot of ways to get electricity into an EV, including hooking them up to outlets which look like this:
There are a lot more than 57,000 of those outlets in the US, there are a lot more than a million of them, and every single electric vehicle can plug into every one of them. A lot of electric vehicles never or rarely have to visit public charging stations, because their owners just plug them in overnight every night, significantly lowering the average number of EV's which actually rely on that swiftly-increasing number of public charging stations. Becoming actually completely stranded in an EV in the US, with no access to electricity, would, I sincerely believe, be a lot harder than being stranded because your gas-burning car ran out of gas. To be completely stranded in an electric vehicle, you'd have to really work hard at it, and be exceptionally careless, and be way out in the boonies at the same time.
So, enough with range anxiety! Enough with worrying that you can't drive where you need to go in an electric vehicle! You can! If anything, there's quite an overkill in the charging infrastructure! That's the actual facts! Learn the facts, get an EV, or even better, take the electric train! That'd be even better for the environment. What electric train? Well, yeah, for that, you have to be in certain parts of the US, or in Europe or Japan or vast areas of the rest of the Earth. That's a good subject for another blog post. But for now, even in Murrka, there's just no rational reason to be afraid to drive an EV. Only irrational reasons.
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