EVs and smart growth series Archives - Transportation For America

Catching the e-bike wave

A man with dark hair and sunglasses rides a Capitol Bikeshare bicycle down a painted bike lane near a treelined sidewalk.

Electric bikes have enormous potential to deliver affordable, clean, healthy and space-efficient transportation to the masses, but the feds and too many other leaders are passing up this opportunity in favor of electrifying the status quo.

Photo by Elvert Barnes on Flickr.

The best selling type of electric vehicle in the U.S. is traffic-busting, space-efficient, healthy, and doesn’t require a drop of gas—but it’s not an electric car. Talk to anyone who owns an electric bicycle and you’ll get an earful on how practical, fun and life-changing these machines are. You have all the fun of being on a bike, but the power assist makes the hills flat and keeps you from breaking a sweat. E-cargo-bikes make carrying larger loads easy, replacing car-trips to the grocery store and helping to shuttle kids to school and activities. Maybe all this—and their relative affordability—is why, as both markets grow rapidly, e-bike sales continue to outpace electric cars.

The tsunami of e-bikes entering the transportation mix is great news for smart growth. E-bikes and other electric micromobility devices, like electric scooters, are relatively affordable and powerful transportation tools that, like regular bikes, also fit well in dense walkable places. Federal, state and local governments should catch this wave.

Safe infrastructure, parking and incentives

If we’re going to invest public dollars in electric transportation, e-micromobility is a place where we can get equity, environment and smart growth outcomes along with emissions reduction. How do we do it? It comes down to three overarching strategies: safe bike infrastructure, encouraging people to buy and use e-bikes, and creating parking solutions that work for this unique form of transportation.

1. Safe bike infrastructure

Unsafe streets are likely the biggest impediment to e-bike adoption. Safe streets for cycling have always made sense, but the enormous potential of e-bikes is one more reason to invest in these networks.

Piecemeal efforts with only paint are not enough. We need Complete Streets policies and standards, taking bike accessibility into account with every investment. These policies and standards need to be strong enough to build bike networks that are protected from cars and trucks and connected to destinations. This can and should be applied at every level of government.

2. Encouraging people to buy and use e-bikes

Many states and cities are rolling out e-bike purchase incentive programs to good effect. This makes sense. E-bikes deliver all the benefits discussed above, and they’re much more affordable than cars. For a typical public subsidy on an electric car, you could purchase an e-bike outright.

Because of their price tag, getting e-bikes and e-cargo bikes into the hands of families that can’t afford a car is a big transportation equity move. People for Bikes’ E-Bike Incentive Design Tool provides guidance for states and cities looking to launch a local program. At the federal level, Congress should pass the E-BIKE Act and help deserving families acquire e-bikes nationwide.

Bikeshare programs are also seeing a lot of success in delivering clean, healthy, space-efficient mobility while exposing more people to the magic of electric bikes. Bikeshare and electric scooter sharing programs are a great complement to public transit, as they can help close first- and last-mile gaps in people’s commutes and give people an additional option for getting around on nights or weekends when transit runs less frequently. Shared micromobility also provides access to these options for people who can’t afford their own e-bike or don’t have a place to store it. Governments at all levels should view shared micromobility as fundamentally a form of public transit and support it with public investment.

To support shared micromobility in the near term, we need a “dig once” approach to installing charging infrastructure for shared micromobility and EV charging infrastructure. That is, when we install charging infrastructure for cars, we should seek opportunities to co-locate car charging infrastructure with charging for shared micromobility. The North America Bikeshare and Scootershare Association (NABSA, a member of the CHARGE coalition that T4America co-leads) recently released a report on co-locating EV and micromobility charging which decision-makers should take heed of. While the Biden Administration’s Joint Office on Energy and Transportation talks a lot about multimodalism, Community Charging Grants in the infrastructure law’s Charging and Fueling Infrastructure (CFI) program currently only fund car charging. Really, all federally funded charging infrastructure should be built to charge bikes and scooters too.

3. Parking considerations

E-bikes are heavier and more expensive than regular bikes, and their batteries need to be charged. These differences mean that parking for e-bikes requires special consideration. E-bike parking, especially overnight, needs to be secure. Parking facilities in places like apartment buildings and workplaces need to have level entry, and can’t require the owner to lift the bike onto a hook. Accommodating space for cargo bikes is also becoming more important. Most e-bikes have removable batteries that can be charged in the home or at your desk, so charging in the bike room might not be entirely necessary. Local governments will have to develop bike parking standards that take these special considerations into account and JOET can assist by developing guidance.

The bottom line

The investments needed for us to catch the e-bike wave are relatively modest compared to the pay-off. If we succeed, we’ll be sitting on top of the world! Following the strategies outlined above can help maximize the potential of this small but mighty form of electric transportation.

In our EV blog series, we’ve shared strategies in the zero-emission fleet transition which work in concert with smart growth. These strategies can both advance the EV transition and reduce the need to drive so much. They include electric carshare services, charger-oriented development, the NEVI program, equitable access to chargers, integrating smart parking policy with EV-charging, and electric micromobility. To learn more about reducing transportation emissions, check out our report Driving Down Emissions and go here to learn more about CHARGE, the coalition we co-lead on EV issues.

Don’t curb your e-thusiasm: Charging and the curb

Electric vehicle charging at the curb presents unique challenges to meet equity, accessibility, and eligibility for federal programs.

An electric vehicle fast-charging point in Hyderabad, Telangana, India, which can charge all types of electric vehicles. Photo by Ather Energy on Unsplash

In our last post in this series on integrating the electric vehicle (EV) transition and smart growth, we talked about the reality that many apartment dwellers will lack access to at-home charging in the foreseeable future, whether because the parking for their building doesn’t have charging, or they don’t have at-home parking. Charging at the curb will be important to meet the needs of these residents as well as folks away from home who need a charge.

Charging is parking

As we look to integrate EV charging in smart growth communities, inevitably we need to come to terms with the profound implications of our approach to parking. EV charging is, after all, a form of parking. Once we are talking about parking, we must address the inescapable fact that misguided parking policies have, over decades, pushed destinations further apart, leaving communities less walkable, hollowing out downtowns, and creating longer trip times for everyone.

Reforming American parking policy has been the subject of several books, including the foundational treatise The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup, and the more recently influential Paved Paradise by Henry Grabar. The consensus among parking reformers is that communities must eliminate minimum off-street parking requirements to allow more affordable and denser development. Managing on-street parking—with parking meters, permits, or other time-limiting features—can also pave the way for more sustainable development patterns while still making it reasonably easy to find a parking space. Fees collected in a given neighborhood can be re-invested in improved streetscapes or used to fund clean transportation options like public transit or bikeshare.

We know that the curb, as the access point to everything off-street, has additional value beyond just parking. Loading zones for passengers and goods, parklets, streateries, bike lanes, bus lanes, bike parking, bikeshare stations and more, are all potential uses for limited curb space. Many of these uses rose to greater prominence during the pandemic and have stuck around. Now we’re adding curbside EV charging to an already crowded interface.

This all adds up to the need to be thoughtful about how we place and price curbside EV charging stations. Communities should be careful to place curbside chargers where they don’t preclude other uses that enhance smart growth livability. This means curbside chargers would likely be better-placed on quiet residential side streets and municipal garages, rather than major commercial corridors in denser urban areas. This way, they won’t get in the way of the other curbside uses that enrich smart growth livability.

But we shouldn’t stop there. Below are several ways to think about curbside EV-charging, including what Congress and the Biden administration should do to fix current programs to give local governments the flexibility to better address these issues.

1. Pricing

Before making any decisions around pricing, cities should take account of the curb space available. How much space needs to be set aside for other important curb uses, like bike lanes, bus lanes, and streateries? The remaining space will be available for vehicle parking (and charging).

These parking spaces should be regulated and priced for 85 percent occupancy. At that occupancy level, usage is maximized with enough turnover that there’s pretty much always a parking spot available on every block face. That is ideal to maximize drivers’ access to the curb and businesses’ access to customers.

EV-charging in denser urban environments where space is at a premium adds another consideration into the mix. A charging spot has value for access to the neighborhood AND access to charging. Cities will need to right-price charging in these highly desirable locations to get outcomes that maximize the use of the chargers—and also achieve appropriate turnover access to the curb. To accomplish this, they may need to charge for both parking and charging in the same spot.

Finally, it’s important to note that the federal government’s primary program for investing in charging infrastructure in communities—the Community Fueling Infrastructure (CFI) program’s Community Charging and Fueling Grants—allows pricing for both parking and charging for curb sites, but unfortunately not for parking lots. In dense neighborhoods and downtowns with lots of demand for the curb, a gated municipal garage may be the most sensible place for chargers. The program needs to be fixed so that cities have the flexibility they need to apply the appropriate price in the appropriate location—as long as it’s transparent, simple and seamless for the user.

2. Opportunism

We’re in the early stages of the EV transition, and we need to accelerate if we’re to reduce transportation emissions fast enough to avert the worst impacts of climate change. Since access to charging is one of the biggest impediments to drivers purchasing EVs, we need to get a bunch of it out there quickly and cheaply. It makes sense right now to be opportunistic and take advantage of existing grid infrastructure, even as we know we need to invest in the grid to build a more substantial charging network.

There’s a lot we can do quickly. For one, some EV owners are charging their cars at the curb with a cord that runs from their house across the sidewalk. Cities like Portland have adopted rules to allow Level 1 charging from house to curb as long as the cord runs through an ADA-compliant cord cover across the sidewalk. This can be a good way to quickly provide more access to charging for those without off-street parking, as long as residents aren’t misled to think they own the public parking in front of their house.

Cities are also looking at ways to deliver curbside, public, Level 2 charging using existing grid infrastructure. Los Angeles and other cities have been installing Level 2 chargers at streetlights. The electricity service is already there, so it’s a great place to put one or two charger ports. The private company Itselectric has developed a technique for using spare capacity in buildings fronting the street to install a Level 2 charger at the curb.

Federal programs are failing to support any of these opportunistic solutions. The Community Charging Grants arbitrarily require all charging stations funded by the program to have four ports. This precludes funding for the sensible, quick solutions above. It also reflects a gas station mindset of having a bunch of charging in a centralized location. As we discussed in the post in this series on Charger Oriented Development, this approach fails to maximize the potential of EV-charging. When all you need is access to a plug, especially for Level 1 and Level 2 charging, there is no reason why we can’t have charging infrastructure distributed more diffusely in the urban environment.

The bottom line

Communities are navigating brand new territory as they figure out what works best for public charging in their communities. New ideas and challenges will continue to emerge, and consensus on the most urgent needs will evolve as the EV transition continues to gain momentum. Public agencies will need to be flexible and nimble for us to get the most out of investments in public charging.

Charging up EVs: Bridging the apartment gap

A woman leans against her EV while it charges outside of an apartment building

With the electric vehicle transition, access to transportation options like transit, walking and biking needs to come first. But—for smart growth and equity—equitable access to charging for apartment dwelling car-owners is an essential part of the picture.

Much of the group-think around the transition to electric vehicles comes from the picture in many people’s heads of the suburban built form, where every house is a detached single family home with its own garage where the electric vehicle (EV) sits charging.

Guess what? Not everyone lives in a single family home. If we’re going to integrate the EV transition with smart growth, and make it more equitable, we have to make sure people living in apartments have access to great mobility options. Apartments are good for smart growth, and low income and Black and Brown communities disproportionately rely on them for housing. So, if we want to advance smart growth and equity, there shouldn’t be a mobility penalty for living in apartments. Let’s talk about how to approach this issue.

Don’t: Require parking

For some EV enthusiasts, it’s tempting to focus on EVs first and start with the idea that apartment buildings should be required to have plenty of parking with access to an EV charger in every spot. Not so fast! Parking requirements significantly increase the cost of housing, make it difficult to create walkable environments, and incentivize car ownership and driving which increases emissions.

There is not enough space here to lay out all the problems with off-street parking requirements. Go here, here and here to learn how these outdated and misguided regulations increase housing costs, hamper efforts to create more walkable neighborhoods, generate traffic and more. Suffice to say that the best practice is to eliminate off-street parking requirements, allow the market to determine the number of parking spaces, and focus public standards and investment on biking and walking infrastructure and transit service.

Eliminating off-street parking requirements won’t change the world overnight. In most communities and particularly car-centric ones, developers will build apartments with parking even if they aren’t required to, and many residents will still own cars. Recognizing that it takes some time for communities to become less car-reliant, we need to address charging, the biggest impediment to the EV transition.

However, we don’t need to perpetuate the misguided parking policies of the past and the sprawl they generate. There are better approaches than parking requirements for ensuring people have the mobility choices they need including access to a car. For example, incentivizing or encouraging the integration of EV carshare service with low-car development is a great way to give a lot of folks access to a car on the occasions they need it.

Do: Require parking to be EV-ready

When a municipality eliminates minimum off-street parking requirements, builders still put parking in many of their projects. These buildings will be around for 50 years or more, and we need to be at zero emissions by 2050. With EV adoption doubling every two years, we’re risking a drastic shortfall of charging options for apartment dwellers much sooner, one that could see apartment dwellers relegated to gas-powered cars.

One of the benefits of EVs (if you can charge at home) is that you never have to go somewhere to fuel up unless you are driving more than your car’s range in a single day. Since American drivers cover an average of 37 miles each day, and less than one percent of trips exceed 100 miles, EVs are much more convenient and much more affordable to fuel than ICE vehicles, if you have at-home charging.

For EV-owners who can’t charge at home, convenient, affordable, publicly accessible neighborhood charging is really important. We’ll talk in greater detail about getting public charging right in the next blog in this series. However, it’s worth noting that of the $7.5 billion in the infrastructure law dedicated to public charging, 83 percent is dedicated to fast chargers out by the highway, leaving comparably few resources for public charging that serves those who can’t charge at home. This is very inequitable.

It’s pretty clear that all new residential parking spaces constructed from now on should have charging options. The cost of running electricity to parking as a retrofit is orders of magnitude more expensive, so we need to make sure any parking serving residential built today is EV-ready. In short, don’t require parking, but require parking to be EV-ready.

What is EV readiness?

Our partners at EV Charging for All have just released an EV Building Codes Toolkit on this piece of the puzzle—how building codes should dictate EV readiness for parking in newly-constructed apartments:

If you have parking, you should have access to charging—period. Every housing unit that has parking needs to have access to charging in at least one parking spot.
Low level 2 charging is good enough, and can be provided via a receptacle/outlet. The meters need to be set up so that electric use can be easily billed directly to the resident. This prevents middlemen from charging a surcharge on apartment residents, saves the building manager from the hassle of figuring out how to bill appropriately for electricity use, and allows multi-family residents to benefit from future ‘vehicle-to-home’ resilience measures (where the EV battery can provide backup for the apartment if the grid goes down).
Get the word out. Install prominent signage so residents know the spaces are EV-ready.

While this is the right approach for new buildings, remodeling existing buildings to provide access to charging is going to be challenging and necessary. Currently, multifamily property owners are eligible for the same Inflation Reduction Act 30 percent tax credit for installing charging infrastructure as home-owners. Decision-makers should keep an eye on how this program performs to determine whether the challenges of charging access for apartment dwellers warrant a bigger incentive for existing apartment buildings.

The big picture

Municipalities can aid in the EV transition by ensuring that parking is EV-ready, while also supporting other publicly accessible, equitably priced charging options, which we’ll describe in further detail in our next blog in this series. They don’t need to require that more parking be built in order to support EV users—and in fact, building more parking could take us further from our emissions goals.

Congress and the administration can do a lot to support this approach. The Joint Office on Energy and Transportation (JOET) could develop guidance and sample building codes. The Department of Housing and Urban Development could include EV readiness as a criterion when prioritizing affordable housing investments. Besides fundamentally re-orienting the transportation program from highway expansion to better support transit, walking, and biking infrastructure, Congress could support JOET’s work on guidance and provide support for low-income multifamily housing projects to incorporate clean mobility options like EV carshare and affordable EV charging.

Why NEVI needs an upgrade

The $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program is an important investment in the build-out of the nation’s EV charging infrastructure, but decision makers are moving forward with the same old approach. The program’s strict one-mile rule and a preference for gas stations and truck stops are a missed opportunity for investments that should prioritize flexibility, equity, and local communities.

A black sedan charges near a large building

Congress’s and the Biden administration’s down payment on electric vehicle charging

In a previous post in this series on transportation electrification and smart growth, we talked about the concept of charger-oriented development and argued that electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure should be located in vibrant places that have an abundance of diverse businesses and attractions easily accessible within walking distance. Most EV drivers will be able to charge overnight and rarely need to refuel on a trip. However, when they do need to refuel mid-trip, it takes at least 20 minutes for EV vehicles to recharge, even when using DC Fast Chargers. During that time charging or waiting for a charger, travelers will only have access to their immediate surroundings within a walkable distance. While gas stations have grown efficient at serving cars stopping for 5 minutes or less, their auto-oriented environment will leave electrified travelers, stuck in places with very little to do.

Already, surveyed EV users recognize boredom while charging as an impediment to their experience, potentially slowing their adoption. By locating new EV chargers in existing downtowns, town centers, and main streets, federal policy has the chance to align equity, local economic development, and climate goals. Siting chargers at locations built for cars, like gas stations, not only introduces quality of life concerns but also safety concerns. These sites are often poorly lit and isolated from the public eye, fostering environments that lead many people to feel unsafe.

With $7.5 billion in funding for electric vehicle chargers, the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) and Charging and Fueling Infrastructure (CFI) programs represent the United States’ down payment toward a national publicly accessible EV charging network. NEVI, a new $5 billion formula program, offers $1 billion per year for states to implement their own EV Charger deployment plans. The CFI program, a smaller $2.5 billion discretionary program, was made for smaller government organizations, such as counties and cities. Half of CFI funding will go to community-based chargers, and half will go to chargers less than one mile from designated Alternative Fuel Corridor (AFC), highway routes designated for chargers.

Problematic requirements

Earlier this year, the federal government published final eligibility requirements for the NEVI and CFI programs, including rules on where NEVI chargers can be located. To be eligible for NEVI formula funding, chargers must be spaced at most 50 miles away from each other, be sited less than one mile away from an AFC, and have a minimum of four charging ports. States do not get flexibility with siting their federally funded EV Chargers until they are certified as “built out” by USDOT, meaning their entire statewide network fulfills these requirements.

Strict adherence to the one-mile rule, which prioritizes minimizing travel time to a charging site, neglects that users will spend relatively little time getting to the charger compared to the time they will spend charging. NEVI’s one-mile rule limits a state’s opportunity to place chargers in areas that could be more comfortable for users, provide sustainable local economic development benefits, and advance climate and equity goals. Unfortunately, due to guidance from the Federal Highway Administration, states are being pushed toward an approach that is highway-oriented rather than driver-oriented, let alone people-oriented.

Missed opportunities

While all states have published their NEVI deployment plans, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Colorado, and Maine are the first to provide specific locations for the initial round of federally funded EV Chargers. Hawaii has also released sites but has not finalized exact locations. Based on what these states have shared, federal requirements are already creating barriers to equitable Charger Oriented Development that supports locally-owned businesses. Approximately three out of four EV charging sites proposed in this first round of awards have gone to truck stops and gas stations.

Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania is one of many communities in the US located just outside of the NEVI program’s maximum range from the highway. Once a major coal mining town, Mahanoy City’s main street starts 2 miles west of Pennsylvania’s I-81 Alternative Fuel Corridor and has a disadvantaged census tract. The city, recognized by the state governor for its recent financial recovery, is home to dozens of small businesses and small parks along its main corridor, a newly refurbished train station, and has been recognized for its growing population.

At just a little over 2 miles away from the highway exit, this vibrant area is reasonably close to the corridor but was ineligible for federally funded chargers under the NEVI program. Instead, PennDOT has so far prioritized awarding gas stations, convenience stores, truck stops, and travel centers, with little access to services other than those provided by the gas stations and convenience stores. Instead of locating the site in an area where EV users could exit their vehicles and contribute to local economies, the site that will serve this 50-mile stretch of I-81 near Mahanoy City will be located in a gas station with an attached fast food chain, at a location that the EPA’s Walkability Index defines as “least walkable,” among the lowest of all of Pennsylvania’s selected NEVI sites. On average, Pennsylvania DOT’s NEVI sites are extremely unfriendly to pedestrians with an average Walkscore of just 35 of 100.

A google maps view of PA-54 in downtown Mahonoy City, PA — *Downtown Mahanoy City, PA was passed up as a fast-charging site because, at just 2 miles, it’s too far off the highway.* *Google Maps*

A google map aerial view of roads, trees, parking lots, and large warehouses off I-81 in Pennsylvania — The location of a conditionally awarded NEVI site off of exit 119 off I-81 in Pennsylvania, yet to be photographed, in an area where travelers can access few services while their vehicle is charging. Google maps

Distance from an interstate highway exit is not the only obstacle to the development of federally supported charger-oriented developments. In Ohio DOT’s NEVI plans, charger sites were identified by their proximity to amenities – but those amenities were defined as truck stops, gas stations, and big box stores. Sites near a greater number of local businesses that provide more options for travelers, such as the walkable downtown of Logan, Ohio, will be skipped over in favor of truck stops out by the highway.

Aerial photo of a five lane road and historic buildings in Logan, Ogio — Aerial photo of Main Street in Logan, Ohio, a vibrant, walkable area with small locally owned businesses. Ohio DOT’s NEVI deployment plans would consider this area as undesirable compared to a separate highway exit with a gas station and big box store. Image: *Logan Town Center*

Google map satellite image of a large parking lot with a wallmart, fast food, and other businesses — *Satellite image of a NEVI Round 2 Candidate site off US-33, with several ‘favorable amenities,’ as identified by ODOT, few of which are locally owned. Image:* *Google Maps*

The two examples above reflect a pattern. Based on Ohio DOT’s selected sites so far, the state is not capitalizing on the unique benefits that electric vehicle chargers could confer to both drivers and local communities. On average, Ohio DOT’s Round 1 sites have a Walkscore of just 27, signaling how isolated users will be. Choices to locate these chargers in areas so dependent on cars neglect the fact that everyone is a pedestrian once they exit their vehicle. With its intense focus on alleviating range anxiety, the NEVI program is recreating a transportation system that leaves the economic benefits that these federal investments could bring to disadvantaged and rural communities off the table.

You can explore our map of states’ initial NEVI sites, along with the Walkscore, Bikescore, and Transitscore of each location below. Pennsylvania DOT, Ohio DOT, and Colorado DOT have announced a total of $64 million in funding for these sites. $47.5 million has been awarded to sites with a gas station or truck stop at the same address, reflecting a continued preference for the status quo.

Announced NEVI Sites

We color-coded each announced NEVI site according to each site’s Walkscore. Red means a Walkscore of 0-50, Yellow means 50-69, and scores of 70 and above are Green.

The Biden administration often states that the goal of the NEVI and CFI programs is to electrify the great American road trip, but the current implementation seems to forget that road trips are also about the journey, not just the destination. Providing greater flexibility in the NEVI program to promote Charger Oriented Development would be a powerful way for the administration to meet its equity goals, promote a superior travel experience, and support local economic development while building out a national charging network.

Recommendations

An image showing do not walk signs with a gas station complex in the background — *The state of the sidewalk near a conditionally awarded NEVI site in Washington, Pennsylvania. Google Maps*

Congress can better account for the difference between charging an EV and fueling an internal combustion engine vehicle by directing the Federal Highway Administration and US Department of Transportation to loosen the one-mile requirement in the NEVI and CFI programs. This is an important opportunity for members of Congress with rural communities in their districts to make sure the EV revolution benefits their constituents. Meanwhile, the Joint Office on Energy and Transportation (JOET) should develop rules and guidance that encourage state DOTs to practice Charger Oriented Development by siting charging stations in places where travelers can access more opportunities while the car is charging.

Leave the gas station behind: How charger-oriented development can lead to a greener future

Two men stand, chatting, beside a car while it's getting plugged in to charge.

Charging an EV is fundamentally different from fueling a gas-powered car. It’s time to co-locate charging infrastructure with existing communities in an approach we call charger-oriented development.

One man charging his white EV while speaking to another man wearing glasses

With the implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act and 2021 infrastructure law in full swing, transportation electrification is taking off faster than ever. Congress is pouring billions of federal dollars into states’ National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) programs to electrify American cars, but those dollars are falling into a familiar pattern.

While electric vehicle charging infrastructure has distinct advantages over traditional gas stations, certain restrictions in NEVI standards and plans fail to imagine ways to invest in communities beyond the suburban gas station and sprawl-inducing big box store. The advantages (and even supposed disadvantages) of EV charging offer up opportunities to create vibrant, thriving places, but to unlock these benefits, policymakers need to rethink the pitstop.

Charging an electric vehicle differs significantly from the traditional fueling experience. In an internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle, drivers start the day with the same amount of gas that they had the day before. EVs may take more time to charge, but people with home charging options can start with a full battery and charge at destinations. However, on the rare occasions you do need to stop and charge, it’s going to take 20 minutes or more—not the three-to-five minutes it takes to tank up an ICE vehicle. This has big implications for where we put charging stations and what should be around them.

Charger-oriented development (COD) is the strategy of locating charging infrastructure in vibrant places that have an abundance of diverse opportunities easily accessible within walking distance. This could be on a rural town’s Main Street, town square, or a vibrant, walkable, mixed-use urban neighborhood. In these places, the driver can do something worthwhile with their valuable time, and local businesses benefit from new patrons bolstering the local economy.

Flipping the script

Many people are familiar with the concept of transit-oriented development (TOD): build up and densify around stops and corridors as much as possible and reap the benefits of walkability around transit. To implement that same smart growth approach with EV charging, you need to flip the script. Chargers should be oriented in walkable areas, in ways that contribute to local economies.

As we’ve said, most EV owners will charge at home overnight, or at other destinations, so they will only need access to a DC fast charger (DCFC, also called a level 3 charger) on longer trips. Once they plug in, what do they do? Do they sit in their car at the truck stop out by the highway, or are there multiple businesses they can patronize like cafes, restaurants, and stores? Perhaps there is a nearby park where the kids can let off steam. Ideally, the charger is in a place they were going anyway—the museum or the arena, for example.

Charging up local economies

Charger location also has implications for the local economy, particularly in rural communities. Businesses on Main Street are much more likely to be locally owned than the truckstop or the big box store. Public investment that directs travelers’ dollars into local pockets builds local wealth and resilience.

You can see examples of this from Meeker, Colorado and Canton, New York in our Sparking Progress report, where local businesses have benefited directly from travelers stopping to charge up. Strong local businesses on a Main Street tend to support each other by creating a vibrant place that becomes attractive for more people to visit.

Invest in existing infrastructure

Everyone involved in discussions around charger infrastructure quickly learns the importance of utilities. You can’t build chargers without electric power, and level 3 chargers draw a lot of it. Fast charging, especially, takes a lot of juice. In fact, a federally compliant fast charging station with four ports can draw as much electricity as a small town. Bringing that kind of power to an area is expensive, which is why we need to think of ways to use the capacity we already have in the grid more effectively. This is a corollary to the principle we already follow with smart growth: invest in existing communities.

There are a number of strategies we can use to take advantage of existing utilities. For example, Los Angeles installs level 2 chargers where there are already streetlights. The private company ITSElectric has developed a strategy for delivering level 2 charging at the curb using excess capacity in buildings fronting the street. Power hungry level 3 chargers are more likely to require significant utility upgrades, but those upgrades could be easier to deliver in existing communities than in a remote location by the highway. In addition, electric utility upgrades today would be a valuable investment in rural communities’ electrified future.

Utilities aren’t the only essential infrastructure near EV chargers. Just as everyone is a pedestrian when they park their car, the same goes for someone charging their car. Pedestrian infrastructure is essential, and a Main Street or neighborhood is more likely to have sidewalks than the truck stop or big box store. In some cases, it might even be feasible to integrate bikeshare with a charger location, giving the traveler who has stopped to charge up a much wider range of opportunities while they wait.

Reorienting federal investment

Unfortunately, the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program, Congress’s first stab at building a charging network, is not grounded in charger-oriented development principles. NEVI charging locations, as well as the corridor grants for the Community Fueling Infrastructure (CFI) program, are required to be within one mile of the highway they serve. This pulls opportunity away from countless rural towns a little over a mile or two off the highway. State DOTs are implementing NEVI plans for the first time and there is no guidance or incentive for them to do anything other than place chargers out at the truck stop. The next blog post in this series showcases opportunities for charger-oriented development we are already missing in Pennsylvania and Ohio.

The emphasis on the NEVI program itself, with the vast majority of federal charging infrastructure funding going to level 3 chargers placed to serve long-distance travel, comes from a gas-station mindset. American drivers typically drive only 37 miles per day on average, and less than one percent of trips are more than 100 miles. Those distances are easily covered by overnight charging. In many cases those longer trips could also be better served by passenger and high-speed rail as they are in other developed nations.

The bottom line

As we build out America’s charging infrastructure ecosystem, there’s no need to emulate the gas station. Chargers are going to be a major infrastructure investment, but in the end, it really is just an electric cord with a plug and a parking spot. Charging can be delivered in a more diffuse fashion and fit in more dense vibrant neighborhoods. If approached the right way, our charging infrastructure won’t keep people tethered to power outlets on the side of the road, but free them up to accomplish more as they leave their cars to charge.

Share the spark with EV carshares

Electric vehicle (EV) carshare is an effective strategy in speeding the transition to zero emissions transportation, providing more affordable transportation options and syncing up with other smart growth solutions. This strategy is worthy of public investment.

Photo by Michael Fousert on Unsplash.

Carshare is a model of car rental where people rent cars for short periods of time, such as by the hour or minute. Sometimes the car has a home base that the user brings it back to, and some carshare systems are “free-floating” so that the user can drive a car on a one-way trip, usually within a limited area such as a city, and leave it at the destination for the next user. Electric carshare simply means providing this kind of service with electric cars instead of gas-powered cars.

Our partners at Forth, which is a member of the Coalition Helping America Rebuild and Go Electric (CHARGE), recently released Community Impacts: Accessible Electric Vehicle Carshare Programs which outlines the benefits of electric carshare and the key strategies to develop an effective program.

Why is EV carshare such a powerful strategy, and how does it help on both fronts of the battle to reduce emissions?

Supporting the transition to zero emissions

First, EV carshare moves more travel from gas-powered cars to EVs. Better than one person buying one EV, multiple people get to share the use of one EV car. Since most privately owned vehicles sit idle 95 percent of the time, a carshare vehicle delivers more bang for the buck if it is well-utilized.

In addition, giving more than one household access to each EV means more people getting real-world experience using these kinds of cars. People who are more familiar with EVs are more likely to buy one if and when they make a new car purchase.

One more benefit EV carshare can deliver to the EV transition is charging infrastructure. EV carshare programs are typically designed to provide charging infrastructure for the vehicles serving the program. Depending on how the program is designed, it can also provide charging options for nearby EV owners. For example, Evie Carshare in the Twin Cities (which has seen impressive growth in usage since we last wrote about it) has four-port charging locations where two spots are dedicated to the carshare program, and the other two are available to the public.

A transportation option that supports other travel modes

Besides being an effective strategy to support fleet transition, EV carshare is paradoxically a way to invest in cars to encourage less driving instead of more. For folks who rely primarily on walking, biking, and public transit day-to-day, every once in a while a car is useful for a particular trip. If you have access to a carshare when you need it, there is no need to waste money on purchasing, insuring, and storing a car you use infrequently.

A carshare car can replace anywhere from 5 to 15 cars that the users of the service would otherwise own. Since they pay per trip, carshare users are less likely to choose driving for a trip than car owners, resulting in less traffic. Carshare can save Americans thousands of dollars annually that they might otherwise spend on car ownership costs.

Advancing equity

Transitioning America’s car fleet to electric means encouraging the purchase of new EVs. Most new car owners are wealthier and whiter. It’s hard to get around the issue that programs that subsidize the purchase of a new car for individuals, even if it is an electric car, and focus government subsidy on an already privileged group of people.

EV carshare can flip this script, delivering benefits and electric mobility to people less likely to be able to afford a car, generally lower-income and often communities of color. For example, an EV carshare program in rural California supports farmworkers and raiteros, the drivers who help get them to their jobs and essential services.

Worthy of public investment

While carshare operates in a few well-off and densely populated areas with little-to-no public subsidy, it has become clear that the infrastructure and service just doesn’t pencil as a purely private enterprise in most of the U.S. – just like every other transportation option from driving to flying. This begs the question of whether and how we should invest in carshare as a transportation option. With the IRA and IIJA investing billions in EV charging infrastructure and subsidies for EV purchase, carshare’s multiple benefits make it look like a very attractive national investment.

The next transportation reauthorization is sure to include another tranche of funding and programs supporting the EV transition. For all the reasons outlined above, Congress should make sure EV carshare is a significant piece of the pie.

For more information on how to implement effective EV carshare programs (including insurance, procurement, pricing, tech barriers, payments & privacy, fleet management, host sites, timelines and utilization) check out Forth’s resources on the topic.

We can advance EVs and smart growth at the same time

A black EV charges on the side of a tree-lined street. In the background, a construction crew in orange vests mingles on a wide sidewalk with bike parking.

Many climate advocates and pro-climate decision-makers are focused on electrification as the primary, or even only, emissions reduction solution in the transportation sector. As smart growth advocates, we know that electrification is essential but insufficient to achieve our greenhouse gas reduction goals. How do we push transportation electrification forward in a way that supports essential smart growth goals?

Electric vehicles aren’t the only way to travel in the above photo, where a vehicle charges next to a wide sidewalk with bike parking. Photo by Andrew Roberts on Unsplash.

Transportation is the largest energy-related source (38 percent) of greenhouse gas emissions. Emissions reduction models consistently show that electrification is essential to eventually get us to zero emissions on transportation. These models also show that EVs don’t get us there fast enough. Cars last on average for 15-20 years, and that means it will take time for the fleet to turn over from internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles to electric.

To draw emissions down quickly enough to meet targets, we need to remake our transportation and land use system to be less car-dominated at the same time that we electrify. Transportation for America stepped up to get involved in this intersection between the two big strategies for transportation emissions reduction—electrification and VMT reduction. Alongside the Clean Vehicles Campaign, we co-lead CHARGE, a broad-based coalition seeking to advance transportation in a way that achieves multiple goals, including advancing smart growth.

A graph showing percentage point years of emission reductions from 2020-2050 for fleet electrification and vehicle travel reductions. Working together, these two factors contribute to an emissions reduction of 100%, or 831 percentage point years. Alone, vehicle electrification contributes 364 percentage point years to emission reductions, whereas vehicle travel reductions contribute 467 percentage point years. More analysis in the caption directly following the figure.

Considering embodied emissions and rebound effects, electrification typically reduces emissions by about 70 percent compared with comparable fossil fuel vehicles and takes decades to achieve significant results. Many vehicle travel reductions can be implemented quickly and provide large co-benefits by reducing vehicle traffic and sprawl. As a result, travel reductions generally achieve more percentage point years (PPYs) of emission reductions and more total benefits than electrification. Chart and analysis by Victoria Transport Policy Institute.

Cross-pollination

EVs are essential but insufficient to reach climate goals, and multimodal smart growth strategies reduce emissions while delivering other benefits like equitable access to opportunity, reduced urban footprint, and less need for battery minerals, which can relieve supply chain and global security pressures.

As smart growthers in the EV-charging space, we get the opportunity to take EV enthusiasts by the hand and keep educating and reminding them about the importance of the VMT side of the equation, the co-benefits, and the strategies to accomplish it. Here are a few of our top takeaways.

1. We need to be clear that it’s not either-or. It’s both-and!

Often, rationales for reducing car dependency are misconstrued by the media as a reason to oppose the EV transition, but this is not helpful. EVs are a valuable tool for reducing emissions—they simply can’t be the only tool.

2. Learning more about how each side is approaching their issues is critical.

At first blush, electrification looks simple—just get people into EVs—while VMT reduction seems more complicated, involving land use, parking policy, street design, and transit investment. The real truth is that electrification has its complexities too. Since getting more involved in these issues, we’ve learned a lot about electric utilities, interoperability standards, tax incentives, and more.

3. Smart growth solutions can help us reach our electrification goals.

The interactions between smart growth and transportation electrification get pretty interesting. There are a few areas where we need to protect smart growth goals from misguided electrification proposals. For example, we shouldn’t require transit agencies to transition to zero-emissions in a way that undercuts transit service, and we need to be careful about subsidies for EVs that encourage car ownership or primarily benefit wealthy new car purchasers. However, education across the EV-smart growth divide has helped us to surface many powerful synergistic solutions together.