The government/local councils seem to be able to work out how to power the parking meters. There's no reason why each parking spot couldn't have a charging pole installed with smartcard or NFC via mobile app registration and payment.
There are plenty of solutions, what's needed is the will of government to deploy those solutions.
Street parking can have outlets, too. It's going to take some municipal power to get there and right now maybe not a lot of cities are thinking that far ahead, but it is something that eventually cities will have to ask themselves if they want to help fix and how.
Many cities already have electrically wired parking meters today and adding a plug on the side of that isn't a major technical hurdle, it's much more a sociopolitical hurdle.
Exactly. Not a chance until 1) street parking has charging sockets built into the meters, and 2) apartments/condos/parkades catch up and provide power at stalls.
> They could put little parking-meter size boxes by the side of the road—tapped off of existing residential power infrastructure—with credit card tap to pay.
Most of that is private property. They could probably treat it like a telephone pole, but it's not as simple as "just go install 400,000 chargers wherever their is street parking."
In a purely electric car world, all street parking will have charger stations like they would have analog parking meters a few decades ago. In my western European city of ~100k people there's hundreds of such spots already. Capacity is rapidly being added too.
On the scale of obstacles, this one is pretty minor, just requiring enough (political) willpower to achieve.
Not to mention that Mitsubishi and others are working on good solutions for inductive chargers that could be mounted into the street, making the parking spot itself the charger, at which point nearly every parking spot in a city has the space to be electric (it just needs the infrastructure investment).
Why doesn't the city install gas pumps along the streets as well?
Parking meters are not comparable infrastructure. They often run on a small solar cell with almost no maintenance burden. Charging stations require a substantive amount of power and regular maintenance. Installing street chargers essentially requires entirely net new infrastructure.
I am interested in how you are seeing that working. Are you imagining neighbourhoods would maintain tens of thousands of street outlets and pay for the electricity too? Many people have to park on the street away from their houses, so how do you decide who to charge for it? Smart meters would be a disaster. Just another privatized rent seeking apparatus waiting to turn the screws, and if it public then our income taxes shelling out for private car owners yet again. I don't think city's own taxes are likely to afford such a network, depends on the city of course. But if we are talking about mass adoption then it has to work for poorer neighborhoods, such places struggle to keep the roads maintained let alone a charging network that covers every parking space.
Sorry I hope I am not being too dismissive, I am interested in if you have thought some of it through and have answers.
Street level charging is very possible (and growing quickly in Europe). Any street with lamps or parking meters already has easy opportunities for chargers to be added.
So powered parking meters? Seems viable at least for cities. You'd also have a substantial amount of parking without those because most drivers wouldn't need to charge daily.
The running the cable out to the curb was more meant as a municipal or collective effort. I don't think that running a cord from your window to your car is practical. More that the infrastructure to put a few charging stations on every block is already existent in every first world town and city.
A government will instantly approve of a plan to install dozens of parking meters per block at a cost of thousands and thousands, and then employ an entire department to wander the city and enforce the rules. It really can't be that much harder to make it so that some of those meters also work as a charging station.
I imagine as battery and charging tech progresses, the difference between getting petrol and charging a car will narrow to the point that it really doesn't matter. e.g. For the better part of a decade Tesla had been able to charge to 80% in ~30 min. That's more than enough for the average city dweller to get their shopping done. This is one area where I think techno-optimism is extremely warranted.
Hence we need to develop public charging infrastructure, like has been already happening in Europe. Not a big deal. Installing chargers in apartment parking lots is even easier.
Street parking solutions are being proposed. Many streets already have power to the street (street lamps and similar street furniture) and chargers become the new parking meter. Also, there's experiments in street-installed inductive chargers (like the wireless chargers you can buy for many phones these days) and even companies exploring the logical extreme of street-level inductive chargers the "power road" (where the car can draw an inductive charge even while driving), which seems unlikely to be pragmatic but still interesting to experiment with.
There are plenty of solutions, what's needed is the will of government to deploy those solutions.
reply