Quote:
Originally Posted by Traum
In addition to the power (supply) issue that has already been mentioned, why would anyone think that a gas station is a good place to install EV chargers? Anyone with any common sense or rudimentary understanding of how EVs and charging works knows that charging takes time -- it makes me wonder whether the City Hall idiots charge their cell phones. Gas stations would be the least appropriate place to install chargers. Shopping malls / plazas and street parking spaces are far more appropriate locations for charger installations.
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Their ask is quite half-assed I would say. They only require gas stations to supply a minimum of 50kW and parking lots of 60+ stalls, a min of 26.6kW (lots less than 60 are exempt). With a fee of only 10k and an average estimate of 7-8 years to recoup their $100-136k investment into charging stations, I would think that a big chunk of business owners are just going to eat that $10k fine for the first few years until closer to 2030 when the legacy car manufacturers are more or less fully on EVs.
Logistically for the City, street parking would only make sense off the main streets as parking is already quite limited, but that would only benefit the local residents of those inside streets. And like you mentioned, they would have to hire more bylaw officers to work those streets since assholes are definitely going to park there all day when they're either full or not even charging - making it not as feasible. It's much easier to offload that responsibility onto the gas station or parkade management.
Considering places where people frequent by car, it makes sense to me that they are targeting these two categories. As there are going to be more EV's on the road, they're going to be having less gas customers - and even those small stations may free up more spots for EV charging instead. Not that there are many malls/mid-sized plazas in Vancouver proper (can only count PC/Oakridge/City Square/Kingsgate for malls and King Ed/Champlain/Renfrew for plazas), but these guys would probably pony up the money themselves since EV charging attracts consumers - so there's no reason to introduce any fees to them at this point.
The City has already imposed new bylaws for new residential/commercial builds - and with anything the City owns, it will hopefully be funded by the fees that they will be be collecting from this.