Gas Stations for EVs, Streets for People, ChatGPT's Water Use, and USAID's Quiet Victories
Off-Ramps for 10 April 2025
Welcome to Off-Ramps! Today I’ll highlight four interesting pieces that I think you will enjoy reading. Please enjoy these on your morning commute, or save them for your weekend.
1. Re-imagining Gas Stations for EVs
The future of electric-vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure will not look like gas stations of the past. What will it look like? Rove, a company in the business of running EV charging stations, offers one vision with their new Santa Ana location, described in this report from Fast Company.
The article gushes about upscale amenities like Wi-Fi lounges, upscale groceries, and solar canopies, but, to my surprise, fails to make the most obvious observation that this approach isn’t new. It’s something old, and familiar: an urban adaptation of the highway rest stop.
For decades, travelers on long journeys have pulled off highways to eat, shop, use facilities, and stretch their legs before continuing. Rove has recognized that EV charging, because it typically takes around twenty minutes, transforms every refueling stop into a rest break, necessitating the same amenities long-haul travelers require, but now in urban contexts.
This recontextualization faces significant spatial challenges that the article doesn't fully address. Rest stops like the Buc-ee's on the interstates, or ONroutes on Ontario’s 400-series highways, take up vast footprints of relatively-cheap rural land. Urban gas stations, by contrast, occupy compact lots designed for quick turnover, not extended stays. With EV charging requiring “one and a half parking spaces per charger” plus room for queuing vehicles, the standalone super-station model like Rove strikes me as a principally suburban model.
How would this work in a truly urban context? I think such places will need to be integrated with existing amenities. Rather than try to build coffee stands, restrooms, mini-groceries and such into constrained urban gas station footprints, former gas stations will have to ally with adjacent cafés, grocery stores, and other pre-existing amenities.
With only 3% of the USA’s 200,000 gas stations currently offering EV chargers, this urban transformation has only just begun, so if you’ve been looking for an opportunity to seize, this might be it.
2. Streets for People, Not Cars (of Any Sort)
I appreciated this piece from
, which weaves together a personal tragedy—his grandmother's ultimately-fatal injury in a road incident—with his first-hand experience in a Waymo robotaxi. Ryan uses these incidents to warn against an obvious failure mode we may experience as driving automation becomes widespread: namely, the further degradation of the pedestrian experience in our cities.I appreciated the fact that Ryan acknowledges the life-saving potential of vehicles that don't speed, drink, or text, which I continue to believe is the most salient fact about them. But I also appreciate his warning that North American cities have, for as long as there have been cars, reshaping themselves to serve those cars at the expense of people.
Ryan offers a short history of automobility and pedestrianism in New York City, and how, after decades of victim-blaming pedestrians, NYC finally recognized that drivers were typically at fault in fatal crashes. This shift in perspective and consequent policy changes helped New York achieve a traffic death rate less than a quarter of the national average by 2019.
Ryan proposes, and I agree, that other cities should follow where NYC has led: price parking appropriately, build dedicated pick-up-and-drop-off (PUDO) zones, and expand pedestrian infrastructure. I note that PUDO is my term, not Ryan’s; my co-authors and I spend a lot of time talking about what this should look like in The End of Driving. Expect a full post about this soon.
Most importantly, cities have to challenge the culture of driver entitlement. Saying that feels quixotic, given the state of the world: Ontario is still aiming to rip out bike lanes in Toronto in the name of giving drivers more space, and the US President is still aiming to thwart decongestion pricing in NYC. But as Ryan’s personal experience painfully illustrates, the question of who gets to use public space is also a question of who lives and who dies.
The chorus of our hymn remains ‘streets are for people’. We must continue to sing it, even as our voices grow hoarse.
3. Don’t Feel Eco-Guilt for Using ChatGPT
If the climate movement should not focus its efforts on getting individual people to hang dry their clothes, it should definitely not focus on convincing people not to use ChatGPT.
Earlier this year,
cut through the fog of misleading claims about generative AI's environmental impact with refreshing clarity and hard numbers. He makes the case that while it's true that a ChatGPT query, or Claude, or Gemini, or your large-language-model (LLM) of choice, uses about ten times the energy of a Google search, in absolute terms that translates to roughly, and only, 3 watt-hours.In other words, it’s equivalent to watching an LED TV for three minutes, or scrolling TikTok for four minutes.
Put another way, streaming one hour of Netflix consumes the same energy as 300 ChatGPT queries.
But wait, isn’t using an LLM also scandalously wasteful of water? Not really. Each ChatGPT query uses 30ml of water, but compared to other daily activities we never think about, it’s a trivial sum. Skipping one burger saves as much water as foregoing 200,000 uses of ChatGPT.
I care about climate change, but deplore the fact that, because it is coded as an ‘environmental’ issue, it’s grafted into the 1980s discourse about the environment, which is that the central concern is how you, personally, as an individual, are contributing to the problem. Any individual’s personal emissions are negligible to the climate, of course. We should instead be thinking about ways to reduce emissions systemically. A green crusade against AI usage is inconsistent with that approach. It instead exemplifies what Masley calls a “mind-killing” approach to environmentalism: identifying villains rather than pursuing evidence-based solutions.
We should absolutely demand transparency and efficiency improvements from AI developers, and support them in their attempts to build and use sustainable energy to train and maintain their models. But the potential of AI tools to solve our problems, from the personal to the systemic (very much including climate change itself), is immense, and represents a net positive: not only for individuals, but for humanity, and for the planet as a whole.
4. USAID's Quiet Victories
Russia had Moldova on a choke chain. Over a dozen years or so, USAID patiently filed through that chain and broke Moldova loose. Soft power in action. It worked. Nobody knows this story outside Moldova, of course.
Two compelling stories from a USAID contractor's 20-year career illuminate what the USA, and the world, lost when the agency was effectively killed earlier this year.
The first story recounts how USAID methodically freed Moldova's wine industry from Russian economic manipulation. By introducing modern techniques, facilitating EU market access, and navigating complex regulatory barriers, USAID helped redirect Moldova's wine exports from 80% Russian-dependent to just 15%, with the balance now flowing to European markets. This decade-long effort, largely unknown (except to Moldovans), shows the soft power that USAID exercised: improving lives, increasing prosperity, and building up a free people at the mercy of a predatory neighbour.
The second story shifts to the personal: the author's child receiving emergency treatment in a resource-starved hospital where USAID-donated beds and equipment made crucial differences in care. The spontaneous gratitude from local families upon learning the author worked with USAID reveals how America's humanitarian efforts created unparalleled goodwill in an effective, but difficult to notice, fashion.
These stories, to me, suggest that the United States was able to improve the world, inspire its people, and make itself, not a planet, but the sun around which all the other planets revolved… and did this remarkably cheaply, and to its own net benefit. I already have begun to miss the world that the American Century built, and I think that, before too long, Americans will miss it too.
Thank you for the highlight!