Overcoming the Challenges of Owning an EV in a City
Although all by themselves my personal habits aren’t dramatically turning up the dial on global warming, I still want to do what I can for the planet. At home, my Amazon deliveries come bundled, my appliances are Energy Star certified, my toilet is dual flush, and I’ve replaced the oil-burning furnace with a heat pump and installed solar panels. I’d consider getting an electric vehicle, too, except for one problem: I live in New York City and don’t have a private garage. So although I can walk to the curb to deposit my recycling and compost scraps, finding a curbside EV charger for public use isn’t so easy. Of course, charging an EV is not as much of a conundrum for non-urban dwellers because of the greater likelihood that they have access to a private garage or dedicated parking space. There they can connect their car manufacturer-supplied cable into a standard 120-volt outlet, known as Level 1 charging, which can take 60 hours to deliver a full charge. Depending on the vehicle this will get you between 2 and 4 miles of range per hour of charging. Or to charge their cars five to seven times faster, they can install a Level 2 charger that delivers 240 volts of power. Many EVs can add 30 miles of range per hour or more in this case. (A third type of charger, Level 3, or DC fast charging, is even speedier but is not the kind you can install in your home.)Still, all EV owners are affected by the difficulty of accessing public charging. A 2022 Consumer Reports nationally representative survey (PDF) of 8,027 U.S. adults found that charging logistics, such as where and when they’d be able to charge an EV, were the main barrier to purchasing an EV—beating out range anxiety (concern about how far an EV can travel on a single charge) as well as the costs involved with buying, owning, and maintaining an EV.
To reap the benefits of being able to charge their EVs at home, some city dwellers without private garages have figured out their own workarounds for setting up charging systems, sometimes at great personal expense and sometimes in ways that aren’t legal or according to code.
To trench the necessary power cables, “one guy told me to just chop the public sidewalk,” said a contractor recommended to me by HomeAdvisor after I asked for EV charger installation quotes. For $3,500, the contractor—who is not a licensed electrician— said he followed the client’s wishes, which also involved running the power cable through a tree pit and then repaving the sidewalk. “I told him this is not the legal way, and he was like, ‘Okay, bro, just put it in. I wanna charge my car.’”
Needless to say, this type of installation by an unlicensed contractor is illegal and could threaten public safety, says Chris Wortz, a licensed electrician and spokesman for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) union in Bowie, Md. When EV owners don’t have a driveway or garage, a curbside installation is extremely difficult, he says. “Number one, they don’t own the parking space and the actual wiring that supplies power to the charger has to cross public property so that is quite a problem,” Wortz says.
Ilya Knizhnik, 41, of Philadelphia took a different kind of approach in his quest to charge his plug-in hybrid Prius back in 2016. He spent about $100 on electrical cords and pulleys and rigged a treetop hookup system that ran out the second-floor window of his three-story Victorian home down to his car on the street. For a year he charged his car using that system. Then Philadelphia started its Electric Vehicle Parking Space Program (EVPS), intended to let residents install EV chargers on public streets at their own expense. After submitting qualifying documentation and photos of the space, Knizhnik got permission and spent about $2,000 to install a Level 2 charger on the sidewalk outside his home.
Objections that the program allowed EV owners to privatize on-street public parking led Philadelphia to pull the plug on the EVSP program six years ago. But Knizhnik’s charger remains and has become a hub for his EV-driving neighbors—as well as for some who aren’t neighbors at all. “Someone will just pull up and start charging, thinking it’s a free charger,” Knizhnik says. (It is not—Knizhnik has an app that notifies him when a charge is started and permits him to turn the charger off.)
Knizhnik, who is the founder of the Philly EV Club, a group for owners and supporters of EV and plug-in hybrid vehicles in the area, says the benefits of his curbside charger outweigh the installation expense, but he wishes the city would do more, for example by installing more public chargers and discounting the cost for city residents.
In the race to build an EV charging infrastructure and encourage EV ownership, cities across the country are making efforts in a variety of ways.
In New York City, where 50 percent of car owners rely on street parking, an 18-month pilot program brought 100 Level 2 charging stations to city streets. Over 7,000 unique users took advantage, availing themselves of 49,250 charging sessions. The median length of each session was 3 hours, which can deliver more than 90 miles of range—more than enough to deliver power to cover the 29 miles a day the average resident drives, according to the New York City Department of Transportation.
Just across the river from Boston, the city of Cambridge, where 5,000 residents have registered EVs, to date there are only 18 Level 2 charging stations on city streets and in municipal parking lots. But in July the city launched its Electric Vehicle Charging Pilot Program, which will let Cambridge residents without access to off-street parking apply for an electric vehicle charging permit for Level 1 charging on a sidewalk near them. Along with a $200 fee, applicants must submit a letter from a certified electrician confirming that they have access to a ground-floor outdoor outlet that is protected by a ground fault circuit interrupter. The power cord also must be covered by an ADA compliant cord cover to ensure the sidewalk remains accessible for pedestrians.
Similarly, in Montgomery County, Md. (near Washington, D.C., and nearby Silver Spring and Bethesda, Md.), residents may apply for a right-of-way permit to install curbside charging equipment on the street outside their property. Homeowners cover the cost of permitting, purchasing, installing, using, and maintaining the curbside EV charging station with the express understanding that the parking space adjacent to a curbside charging station is available for anyone’s use. But as cities allow residents to install chargers in public spaces, experts urge that they also need to make more public charging stations available.“We need to have a charging option for every driver, we don’t need a charger for every car,” says Gil Tal, PhD, director at the Electric Vehicle Research Center of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis. Tal believes a distance of half a mile from home is a comfortable walking range for routine charging.
Corey Smith, of Putnam Valley, N.Y., is a ride-share driver who taxis people around in a 2021 Tesla Model S. He bought the car after being impressed by a Tesla Model Y he rented to make a road trip from New York to Atlanta. Though he was living in a garage-less house in Brooklyn at the time, he was so enamored by the car he hadn’t figured out how he was going to charge it first.
When he attempted to charge the car by running an extension cord, it tripped the home’s main circuit breaker, shutting down power to the entire house. To make charging the car feasible “we probably would have needed to rewire the entire house, and that wasn’t possible,” Smith says. Instead, he had to rely on public chargers across the city, many of which were located in parking facilities that required a fee for entry in addition to the charging costs. “It almost brought the price of operating the car up to as much as paying for gas,” says Smith, who now lives 50 miles outside of New York City after having purchased a home that had a preexisting charger in place.
For prospective EV owners not fortunate enough to have inherited a charging setup, local EV groups on platforms like Facebook, Nextdoor, or Reddit can be a resource for advice on everything from understanding local ordinances to finding deals on charging cables.
At least for now, many urban EV owners will likely have to continue the nightly charging routine that finds cords snaking through trees and across sidewalks. But USC’s Tal is hopeful about the future of public charging. One day, he predicts, “finding a charger may be easier than finding a parking spot because we are already thinking of options to make it a little bit smarter.”
Fortunately, in the U.S., access to public chargers is improving—albeit slowly—and more positive change is coming soon. The Department of Energy’s Alternative Fuels Data Center says there are presently 60,000 public electric charging stations across the country. Some of those charging stations are in the parking lots of familiar retailers, like Kohl’s, Kroger, and Walgreens, creating the opportunity to power up while checking off your to-do list.
Additionally, as part of the Infrastructure and Jobs Act, passed in November 2021, the Biden administration is making a $7.5 billion investment in EV charging, building a network of 500,000 public Level 2 and Level 3 chargers along highways and within communities by 2030. Biden’s goal for that same year is to have EVs account for at least 50 percent of new car sales.“There’s a lot of work to be done,” says Ingrid Malmgren, project director at Plug In America, an EV advocacy nonprofit. For her, access to inexpensive public charging is a major concern. Because of fees and surcharges, “it typically costs at least three times as much to use public charging as it would if you could plug in at home into your home meter,” she says. According to the sustainability site Treehugger, on average public charging stations charge 30 to 60 cents per kilowatt-hour, while the U.S. Energy Information Administration reports the national average for residential power is 16 cents per kilowatt-hour.Of course, even as public charging infrastructure grows, many people will continue to consider charging an EV at home preferable to using a public network, and not just because it is cheaper, says Alex Knizek, manager of automotive testing and insights at Consumer Reports. “It reduces trips to the charging station, and means you can start each day with a full battery.”