This country has a huge political divide, and for the most part, you’re either on the Republican side or the Democratic side. If you’re a Republication you probably support The Donald and enjoy your second amendment rights, while if you’re democratic, you’re still crying about Hillary’s loss, the travel ban (that’s right, it’s not a Muslim ban, folks), and you probably don’t want people to legally own guns in your city. Okay, so that’s an oversimplification, but in fairness, things have gone so haywire lately, it’s hard to know what any party represents. Back to the topic at hand, the highly democratic city of New York has just taken a major step to saving the environment, the lungs of New Yorkers, and to make it easier to own an electric car in one of the most traffic-congested cities in the country. How, you ask? Well, Mayor De Blasio, while taking a stab at president Trump’s view of climate change, has announced that New York will introduce some 1,000 public EV chargers by 2020.
These will come by means of 50 new public charging stations and a rather large check that will set the city back by a total of $10 million. Needless to say, being green isn’t easy, but in the end, I think we can all agree that this is a really good thing. Living in NYC isn’t for everyone, and it’s certainly not easy all of the time. It’s even harder if you want to drive an EV since you’ve got a better chance of scheduling a meeting with Kim Jong Un than you do finding a charger in the Big Apple. There’s a total of 16 public fast chargers as of the time of this writing, four of which are owned by Tesla at good ole JFK International next to hundreds of Level 2 “trickle” chargers that give you up to 70 miles of range per hour of charging – that’s going to go a long way in NYC, right?
The truth is that New York City is as busy as ever trying to up the number of EV registrations in the city to at least 20 percent by 2025. As of the end of 2016, there were a total of 2,162,329 vehicles registered, so by 2025, De Blasio wants at least 432,500 of them to be all-electric. That could go a hell of a long way to dropping emissions, improving air quality, and reducing the city’s consumption of that liquid gold we call gasoline. However, these public charging stations are a must, because right now, your best bet is to hijack power from a street light, assuming you can find a spot to park, or rent out a parking space in a garage and hope there’s a plug somewhere nearby. And, you can bet garage owners won’t be the first to jump at spending thousands to install charger ports either.
While I don’t necessarily agree with a lot of the politics that come out of NYC, I tip my hat to De Blasio in this regard, as the city needs some serious infrastructure changes to handle the growing abundance of EVs it’s aiming for by 2025.
What do you guys think? Will these 50 charging stations be enough to support nearly a half-million EVs in the next eight years, or will it not be enough? Let us know in the comments section below.
References
Tesla Model S
Read our full review of the all-electric Tesla Model S.
Tesla Model X
Read our full review of the all-electric Tesla Model X
Tesla Model 3
Read our full review of the all-electric Tesla Model 3.
Chevy Bolt
Read our full review of the all-electric Chevy Bolt.
Nissan Leaf
Read our full review of the all-electric Nissan Leaf.