What Might Gas Stations Look Like When Hardly Anyone Uses Gas?

The car of the future will require the city of the future to change dramatically, too. We can’t simply swap out minivans for self-driving solar pods, pick-ups for electric three-wheeled rockets. America has spent decades building a vast infrastructure for the internal-combustion car, and we’ll have to change all of that, too.

This will mean rethinking a lot of things: roads, intersections, parking garages. But first and foremost, we’re talking about the gas-guzzling vehicle’s essential companion: the lowly but omnipresent gas station. As of 2008, according to the Census Bureau, we had 116,855 of them in America. That’s one gas station for every 2,500 people (although there are usually none per 2,500 people in the neighborhoods where you really need one, right this second).