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Comment by vinay427 | Hacker News Reader

Hmm, how does this work? I imagine the government isn't in the business of operating charging stations, so it is some combination of subsidies and regulatory easing, or something more? Do they benefit Tesla Superchargers or have other EV charging standards capitalized on it as well?

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It's a combination of tax incentives, permits, active relations between planning bodies and the industry, and some subsidies.

The Netherlands is one of the most densely populated countries in the world so any kind of construction work generally involves permits and negotiations with governments about how and what. Permits come with strings attached and this is how governments can nudge the private sector the way it wants to go. EVs and clean energy are popular topics for planning bodies. It makes everybody look good.

When something new gets planned, questions need to be answered about this (and a lot of other topics) and having solutions in your plan generally helps getting those plans approved and probably also unlocks some nice subsidies. So, a real estate developer planning some new housing, roadwork, industrial estate, or whatever is going to have a big incentive to have some charging infrastructure built into the plans from day one.

For the same reasons the Netherlands is one of the safest places to ride a bike because any roadworks in the last 50 years had some explicit planning for improving bike safety. There's not a single road that gets built without that being a topic of attention and scrutiny.

Someone else posted a picture already, but The Netherlands has a nationwide network of municipal-run charging stations. In Amsterdam they're placed in the middle of two parking spaces and have two sockets that service those two spaces, which are reserved for EV charging.

If you buy an EV you can ask the municipality to install more of these parking spots, and depending on existing saturation they will.

You get an RFID card that you hold up to the charging station to activate it, and you're then charged for its use.

Here's more details: https://www.amsterdam.nl/en/parking/electric-charging/

The country works together with private business to promote the charging stations. The country office provides an overview of where they are, but the ownership of the stations is private.

Details (in dutch) https://www.eindhoven.nl/stad-en-wonen/stad/parkeren/oplaadp...

An overview, together with if they're currently occupied: https://oplaadpalen.nl/

Since we are on Hacker News, let me promote the startup that built this and provides the realtime chargepoint data: Eco-Movement[1]. They have expanded out of the Netherlands and now provide this data europe-wide[2].

I think this is a good illustration how forward thinking government policies (incentivise electric car use) can drive new business in a country or state.

[1] https://www.eco-movement.com

[2] https://chargepointsmap.eu

> I imagine the government isn't in the business of operating charging stations

Why not? Governments take care of a lot of public infrastructure, either directly through public workers or by paying private companies to do the work for them

I understand that a government can do this. I'm saying that I assumed this isn't the case here based on what I know about the Netherlands, fossil fuel stations, etc. Do you have information claiming otherwise?

You can find every this everywhere

https://imgur.com/a/yH2qnnR

It's not my car... I had humble bikes :)

Unfortunately the actual image doesn't seem to load for me.

EDIT: It now works. Not sure what was up before. Thanks, this makes sense and looks really seamless!

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