“The transition to electric vehicles is not just an environmental imperative. It’s about security, public health and environmental justice,” said Angelo Santabarbara, a member of the New York State Assembly, representing Schenectady, during a Sept. 27 press event organized by Elected Officials to Protect America (EOPA).
“We can no longer deny climate change,” echoed Rep. Debbie Sariñana, a member of the New Mexico Legislature and co-chair of the EOPA National Leadership Council. “Making a transition to clean cars is a huge step in the right direction.”
Members of the EOPA were making a full-throated defense for public policy to move the adoption of electric vehicles forward, and support for the local, state and federal incentives to speed up the build-out of charging infrastructure.
In New Mexico, the state has adopted new rules to advance the sale of EVs. By 2026, 43 percent of new light-duty cars and trucks will need to be zero-emission models, and 82 percent by 2032.
“Which is ambitious, but we’re going to try,” said Sariñana.
The state has 500 public chargers, and is investing $38 million from the federal infrastructure legislation to add more.
In the small Bay Area city of Hercules, Calif., the city is installing 16 new EV charging ports, bringing the total number to 25.
“While we continue to work toward these amazing goals, we have to keep equity and working-class folks in mind and establish more tax credits to make sure that these electric vehicles are present and available so that way when we make this transition in 2035 we’re not leaving out the Black and brown communities that always have historically been impacted by some of these decisions,” said Hercules Mayor Alex Walker-Griffin.
Technology companies are stepping in with new products to aid public-sector agencies in the locating of EV charging, allowing cities and other organizations to rank potential sites against a list of criteria or priorities.
“I have one client who is really interested in making sure that the public sites that they support will serve residents of lower-income communities, folks who live in multifamily housing, folks who rent, who might have less access to charging at home,” said Jenna McDavid, practice director of zero-emission vehicle strategy at Kimley-Horn Consulting, which advises cities on where to locate charging.
The firm has developed its TREDLite EV tool to aid in EV charger site selection. The technology was born out of a need by a client with thousands of EV charging sites nationwide who was planning to pilot 50 fast-charging EV sites “but didn’t really have a clear rationale or approach to selecting their pilot sites,” said McDavid in a late September interview with Government Technology.
“They knew they wanted to get into the EV charging game, and they had some sites that they thought might be good sites, but they didn’t really have a clear approach to identifying which sites might be the best candidates to host charging infrastructure,” she explained.
The TREDLite tool can evaluate sites based on a number of metrics. Those metrics can be prioritized according to a city’s goals. There are about five sets of criteria built into the tool, “but each of those has values that you can change,” said McDavid.
A number of those values are based on trip density and examine the concentration of trips which tend to terminate within proximity to the site under review. This could be an indication of drivers returning home, or arriving at work.
Other “theme maps” built into the tool start to show where incentives may be available. TREDLite also points out existing charging infrastructure in an area.
“If you’ve got two sites and they both score really high, and one of those has, across the street, a SuperCharger site where there’s 30 chargers, maybe that one is sort of scaled back a little bit, in terms of your priorities,” said McDavid.
These are the kinds of new technologies cities and planning agencies will be turning to as they move more aggressively toward transportation planning with electrification in mind, much of it driven by the urgency of climate change.
“We can’t turn back the clock,” said Sariñana, the representative from New Mexico. “But what we can do is utilize our collective knowledge, tools and resources to slow down, adapt and mitigate the impact of climate change. Speeding up the transition to clean cars is a huge piece of that puzzle by reducing harmful emissions and improving air quality across the nation.”
