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Gas stations are not here to stay. As automobility turns electric, we will no longer need them. Their tempo is all wrong; the zippiness of pumping gas far quicker than the unhurried rhythm of the electric vehicle charging station. You know it. Pulling in, filling up the tank, nip into the shop, pay, pee, buy a chocolate bar, coffee, and then out on the road again. Electric cars just don’t work this way. But if they are slower to fill, they can do that filling anywhere they park: at a shopping mall, on a street side, in a parking garage, wherever.
There is a tendency to forget how still cars are. The average privately owned motor vehicle is parked for 23 hours of its day (or 96 percent of the time). And yet, we think of them as things in motion and their infrastructures as designed to enable this movement. Streets, highways, freeways, ferries, bridges, and gas stations appear as their “natural” home, but it is the parked stillness of cars that gives shape to the future of their filling, innovatively (in hubs for example) or by simply installing a public charging point wherever a car might come to rest. There will be no need for the speed the gas station promises, its cadence, smells, and brightly colored pumps are already growing into obsolescence.
Last term, I asked my students if they ever go to gas stations to put gas in a car. They do not own cars. One tentatively raised her hand, yes. Everyone turned their heads her way, their eyes on her, the one among many. But don’t you go to the shop sometimes? I asked. Their eyes on me, heads shaking, no. This is Germany. They take trains, ride bikes, Uber, car share. But shops close on Sundays in Germany (and in much of Europe). One cannot buy food unless one stops in at the gas station’s Qwikimart. Milk, frozen pizza, soup in a cup, giant yeasted pretzels, mass-produced sausages in paper sleeves. On Sunday, gas station markets are open. The law has been bent to house them. They live in a parallel world. Even so, because young people do not use them, they’re already passé. Dying, even though ubiquitous. It is difficult to fathom a world in which they no longer exist. This demise is upon us and yet we cannot see it.
This photo essay is a way to say goodbye, a first exercise in petronostalgia, a moment of pause to see a most mundane of worlds passing out of being. I take pictures of them now so that later we might remember how they were. I will take pictures of these same gas stations later as well, revisiting them every decade to see what they become—coffee shops, empty lots, storage bunkers, ruins, apartment buildings. Some torn down, some repurposed, some memorialized, some allowed to molder and decay. They are toxic, literally. Work must be done and money spent to unbuild them properly, dig up their tanks, replace their concrete and dirt. And so it is that many will likely remain, poisoned testaments of our fossil-fueled era.
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