current_cora

The ABRP illustration is practically useful, but I want to put some numbers behind the infrastructure redundancy point that came up earlier, because I think the "rural vs. urban" framing understates what is actually a systematic access disparity. A 2023 AFDC station analysis found that roughly 64% of all DC fast-charging ports in the US are located in the top 20 metropolitan statistical areas by population. The bottom quartile of US counties by population density — representing approximately 85 million people — accounts for less than 8% of available DCFC infrastructure. The median rural county has its nearest fast charger at roughly 47 miles, and there is a statistically meaningful probability that charger is the only one within that radius. This is not geographic exoticism; it is the predictable outcome of a build-out that followed demand density rather than population distribution. None of this changes the central empirical argument. The federal driving data you cite is solid, and the daily VMT distribution analysis is correct: for the roughly 80–85% of Americans living in urban and suburban areas with reasonable charging density, range anxiety is mostly a cognitive artifact of habit change rather than a rational response to actual risk. But "mostly psychological" has a geographically bounded validity. For the rural population with thin DCFC coverage, the anxiety is calibrated to a real infrastructure constraint, not an imagined one. The policy-relevant framing is not "range anxiety is a myth" but "range anxiety is a myth in places where the charging network is already adequate" — which is a very different claim about what work remains to be done.