Here’s an article on the woes of electric vehicle charging in my home city of Philadelphia. On the plus side, electric vehicles are becoming more common.
As of January, there were 6,615 all-electric vehicles and 3,149 plug-in hybrids registered in Philadelphia, according to data from the state Department of Transportation (PennDOT). Combined, those represent 1.3% of the city’s nearly 767,000 registered vehicles. That doesn’t include cars used by the many commuters and visitors who drive into Philly every day.
To fully charge a typical EV on a standard Level 2 charger, the owner may have to leave their car parked there eight hours, which means there need to be more chargers per EV than gas pumps per gas car.
Yet Philly has only 145 publicly accessible charging stations with 378 charging ports, according to U.S. Department of Energy data. Most of the stations have Level 2 chargers, but 13 of them have Level 3 or DC Fast chargers, which typically charge a car in an hour or less, depending on the vehicle’s battery capacity and other factors. Pennsylvania as a whole has 1,785 public stations with 4,598 ports.
Philadelphia is a large city with many neighborhoods, some quite car-dependent. That is where chargers belong, not in the walkable urban core. What we need there are safe, separated, protected lanes for bicycles and light electric vehicles, like e-bikes and scooters and even light-weight golf carts. These need their own signals and they need to never, ever, ever be in conflict with highway vehicles, whether those are electric or not. So I wouldn’t prioritize chargers there, but on the other hand we should be thinking about air pollution. Replacing fossil-fueled vehicles with electric ones is certainly a win for all the lungs of all the people walking and using those light-weight electric vehicles, so that is one argument in their favor, even in urban cores.
I still autonomous vehicles will eventually solve the charging problem, even in urban cores. Because your vehicle will be able to drop you off at your home or another walkable location, then go park itself somewhere it will not be in the way, then come pick you up again when you need it. So ideally we will be able to have walkable urban cores not ruined by private vehicles, and the ability to take trips to car-dependent locations when we need to. I want to believe this is a decade or less in the future, but it seems to be coming along very slowly.