City living presents many challenges for car owners, with parking among the most significant and painful.
Scarce parking spaces are a particular problem for electric-car drivers, who typically charge their cars where they park overnight.
Many electric-car drivers charge at home, but those owners who park on the street rather than in a private garage often don’t have that luxury.
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Now a handful of cities are making things a bit easier by starting to offer curbside electric-car charging.
The latest is Jersey City, New Jersey, which now hosts a network of curbside charging stations installed and operated by charging-infrastructure company Greenspot.
The company recently unveiled 10 charging sites in Jersey City, across the Hudson River from Manhattan.
All of the locations are in Jersey City’s downtown Powerhouse Arts District.
The 10 charging sites include a total of 19 arms for charging individual electric cars.
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The network includes one DC fast-charging station; the others are likely to be 240-volt Level 2 stations.
As well as charging infrastructure, Greenspot is also coordinating car sharing in Jersey City in a partnership with General Motors’ Maven brand.
Maven is a “mobility brand” launched by GM last year to offer car-sharing services in selected cities.
In Jersey City, Maven will offer Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrids to members, who can reserve the cars using a smartphone app.
Curbside charging and car sharing are a particularly good match, since the combination allows cars to be charged in the same locations where they are picked up and dropped off by drivers.
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Car-sharing services deploy their cars on city streets, so that users don’t have to go to a central location that may be out of their way, as with conventional rental services.
One model is the successful Autolib service in Paris, which has thousands of small three-door Bollore BlueCar electric hatchbacks parked in groups of half a dozen at curbside charging stations.
Those stations can also be used by drivers of other electric cars, and a mix of Autolib and privately owned electric cars is now a standard part of the landscape on many Parisian streets.
Volkswagen e-Golf recharging at curbside Autolib station, Paris, Sep 2016
Enlarge Photo
The Autolib service is testing its prospects in North America with a trial deployment in Indianapolis as the BlueIndy electric car-sharing service.
Its curbside charging stations follow the model in Paris, grouped in batches of six along main and side streets, as well as at the Indianapolis Airport, a popular destination among car-sharing users.
The availability of such curbside charging may encourage more Jersey City drivers to switch to plug-in electric cars—or at least try them out for a short period through the Maven car-sharing service.
A few other cities, including Palo Alto, California, have adopted legislation permitting curbside charging stations, but such sites remain a rarity today.
Perhaps Jersey City will become a model for such installations in the the older, denser cities of the Northeast.
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