Emissionless Mobility’s Post

6,500 miles later, the journey is over. As we say goodbye to 2024, a new journey starts in 2025. We made it to our new home, Los Angeles CA! On December 3rd we left NYC, marched across Pennsylvania and Ohio, up through Michigan to Detroit, across Illinois to St. Louis Missouri then up to Kansas City, across the windy plains of Kansas to the Rockies of Colorado to Denver, up and over through Wyoming to Salt Lake City Utah, through the rolling timber forests of the PNW in Seattle Washington and Portland Oregon, then finally down the I-5 from California’s political capital to its cultural capital. Sacramento CA reminds me of Denver: a blend of new and old, growing rapidly, divided by interstate junctions. There’s trains everywhere - like Manhattan’s subway network just on the surface level. Old Sacramento feels like a living museum or a movie set, a scene from Gunsmoke. Back on the road, I saw a side of California that you don’t often hear about: California’s Central Valley, home to nearly 20% of the nations irrigated land. Towering evergreens give way to olive trees, almond plantations, citrus groves, and bovine feed lots. Homemade billboards on the farms call on Gavin Newsum to save our dam water and Make California Great Again. Pleas for lower inflation and food and fuel costs sit aside Trump / Vance 2024 signs, as if the coming tariffs won’t make it worse. Smoot-Hawley, but in 2024. Once I passed through the notorious Grapevine, it finally hit me that I’m not going back. That in a few hours and few hundred miles, we can finally just - stop. There’s no charging plan, no new city to research to find metamorphosizing neighborhoods and the best pizza. I write this message from the roof of my Airbnb in DTLA on Spring Street, my home for the month of January while I find an apartment. I allowed myself to be a tourist for a day, trying to view my new home through the same critical lense that I viewed all these other cities over the past month. Los Angeles was once the quitessesntial example of all I felt was wrong about urban design: a sprawling, car-centric city with no public transit and traffic-packed interstates masquerading as a fast and efficient way to get from one end of the city to the other. These same freeways and interstates serving as artificial borders. A historic downtown left to rot and decay - where undesirables are contained to a few blocks like cattle - invisible to the motorists whizzing by over head. But times have changed. The cars are still essential and the traffic still outrageous, but there’s also metro rail lines. There’s micromobility (bikes and scooters) but not yet sufficient dedicated / protected infrastructure. DTLA is evolving. There’s even good pizza now! Maybe just Pizzeria Sei and Brooklyn transplant Roberta’s, but I’ll take it. Los Angeles, I’m home. Emissionless Mobility #GNXRoadTrip #2024GrandNationalExperimentTour #NYCtoLA #CoastToCoast #6500Miles #AllElectric