New York Ponders Its Place in an Electric-Car Future – Attempts to understand the dynamics of New Yorkers and electric cars
(Source: The City Room – New York Times)
Will New York City be left behind in the era of the electric car? Or will it perhaps become the first to embrace it?
Image: Reuters - Would New York City install charging stations like the one above, in London? The Bloomberg administration has commissioned a study on electric cars in the city.
With all the hubbub over electric cars of late (covered very well by our compatriots on the Green Inc. blog), the Bloomberg administration found that the strategies that electric car manufacturers were presenting to them did not apply well to New York City. “None of them felt like they were really tailored to New York City,” said Rohit T. Aggarwala, Mayor Bloomberg’s adviser on green issues. “The fact is that most drivers live in circumstances and use their cars very differently from New York drivers.”
As a result, the Bloomberg administration plans to commission a survey to understand the dynamics of New Yorkers and electric cars, as The New York Post reported Wednesday.
One of the key differences is that many American families live in a house with a garage, which gives them a place and opportunity to charge cars when they are parked at night.
“That works most places, but at least for a large portion of New York, they don’t store it in a garage,” Mr. Aggarwala said. Many New Yorkers park on the street (and contend with alternate-side-of-the street parking rules) or in shared garages.
In addition, average Americans may use their cars almost daily, but a large number of New Yorkers own cars but do not use them every day. “Our conjecture is that for local travel, many New York auto owners use public transit,” Mr. Aggarwala said.
Mr. Aggarwala also noted that perhaps the survey could find that the regions of the city that do have homes with individual garages may prove the most fertile for electric cars, as in the rest of the country. “That would mean you wouldn’t target it in Manhattan,” he said.
At the same time, if New Yorkers largely drive within the city and use their cars for errands, they may not mind the limited range and power of the current generation of electric cars.
Different circumstances are prompting communities to embrace electric cars at different rates. China, for example, also has very different driving dynamics — short distances, lots of traffic — and the government there has gambled that those factors create a fertile environment for introducing electric cars.
Even other urban areas are very distinct from New York. San Francisco, which has begun installing electric charging stations, is still much more dependent on cars. Portland, Ore., which is also building an electric car infrastructure, has a lot of municipal garages; New York has tried to reduce their numbers. “That is not necessarily a replicable strategy for us,” Mr. Aggarwala said.
There are a host of questions, which is why the city is announcing a survey, he noted: “None of us fully understand how that plays into what it would take to get New Yorkers to use electric cars.”
