Comment by blahedo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blahedo | Hacker News Reader

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Thanks for raising this issue—as you point out, it's often ignored—but I'd posit it's even worse than you (and others on this thread) indicate.

When the issue is framed at all, it's usually boiled down to "landlords won't want to install chargers in the apartment garages" with the possible counterpoint of "demand will force them to" or there will be subsidies or etc etc.

But there are vast, vast numbers of people whose permanent parking situation is literally "on the street in front of my building"... or down the block... or around the corner... or wherever there's a spot free. This poses two tremendous difficulties for EV adoption. First, now we're talking not just about upgrading an electrical supply and mounting a new outlet; to bring overnight charging to street parking we'd need to dig up and re-lay concrete and asphalt. Second, people already grumble about "someone took my spot" and get a lot louder about it when there's something dedicated about the spot (google "Chicago dibs" for some serious rage on this topic) and if some-but-not-all of the street spots have charging stations, you better believe the fights over them will be epic, neighbourhood-destroying affairs.

Street parking is a central problem for anyone pushing widespread EV adoption. It can't be driven purely from consumer demand.

ETA: Can someone who spends a lot of time in California tell me if there's a lot of overnight street parking there? Because I've suspected that there isn't and that that's why this gets overlooked, but there might be some other reason.

I feel like most of these issues are solved in Norway now. There's plenty of people with just street side parking in Oslo. The municipality set up public charging poles on a lot of them. They were free to begin with but now you have to pay. There's always a shortage since scaling up fast enough is hard during this transition, but in the long term I don't think it'll be a problem.

At the same time, there fast chargers eeeeeverywhere now. Supermarket, gyms, shopping mall, hardware store, etc. I would be fine just charging whenever I shop for food. Most of them were built in like the last 5-7 years.

There's legislation that encourages or forces apartment buildings with garages to install charging points.

There's really no significant technical barrier that hasn't been already solved in Norway. So it's down to cost and political will. I'm optimistic that even in the US this will solve itself in the coming years.

In my country, they solved that overnight street parking pretty easily. If there's not a charger close by, you can request the city council to place a charger in your street. They do indeed dig it up, wire it to some electrical lines there and there's your charger. And the cost? Commercial companies actually do all of this and you just pay for the electricity when you charge, the city council takes care of the permits. Win/win/win situation I'd say.

There's lots of overnight street parking in the bay area, but there are lots of other opportunities to charge. The actual hard case is someone that drives a significant amount during the day, doesn't have charging at work, and can't have charging overnight. Here really the only option is DC fast charging.

However, this is a reasonable rare circumstance, and it's only getting easier to charge.

One potential source of traffic in LA that will be tough to meet with an EV solution as currently offered is the 'handyman' persona. Either legitimate businessmen such as plumbers or landscapers and what not, or those people who extend their truck beds with plywood to stack the scrap as high as the freeway bridges will let them, either way all of these groups of people are driving all day, at all hours, to oddball places all over the place, and are in need of cargo space. The job site of the day might not have reliable drinking water let alone a supercharger for you to tap into.

The streets in my neighbourhood have plenty of parked vehicles with extension cords running out to them. The cords are there to power block heaters, not to charge EVs. Nevertheless, that would at least be one option for slow charging.

Maybe finally THIS will force regulation of parking so people will simply have no way of leaving their car in a random place like that. Japanese way of doing it - "if you don't have a permanent, legally fixed place to park your car, you can't buy a car" - is just right.

We have too many cars filling in sidewalks, narrow city roads reducing them to single-lane, and so on. That's a problem in itself, and while it was only about people's convenience, harsh measures were hard to justify - but now we can frame it as "it's either that or Putin is coming for you" - and it becomes easier.

Why would a landlord pay good money to build something that they can charge people to use for short periods of time and recoup their investment and start to profit in their sleep over a medium term timescale?

And cities, creating places for cars to park and forcing them to pay for that, either charging the car owner directly at the time or through taxes? I just can't imagine that.

We have street-side car charging in my neighbourhood in London now, and it didn't seem to be too difficult to install. There's a mix of outlets retrofitted into lampposts, and ports sunk into the pavement. I don't think they had to dig up the whole street. Just locally where they were actually installing the charging port.

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