International Parking & Mobility Institute

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A Different Perspective

Illustration of parked cars charging

A Different Perspective

A Different Perspective

Parking Should NOT be the Gas Stations of the Future!

I think there is substantial uniformity among parking consultants, owners, and operators that we should be preparing for the plug-in electric vehicle future by providing EV charging stations (EVCS) for near term needs and electric capacity and infrastructure for the future. However, there is a troubling trend of communities and others in the sustainability community having a premise that parking should replace the gas station function in the United States. At least one city, Boston, is requiring as much as 25% of the stalls in new parking structures be equipped with chargers, and that infrastructure should be provided for 100% of the stalls to be equipped in the future. Other cities are requiring infrastructure for 20 or 25% of stalls. 

I have two concerns: one is fast charging in parking stalls; and the other is the difference between putting in a few chargers today and planning new parking structures to essentially replace gas stations. 

I typically don’t recommend the installation of any direct current (DC) fast charging stations (DCFC, which is sometimes but incorrectly called Level 3 in the U.S.) in any parking facility. I also use the term DCFC because the “fast charging” used for passenger cars is defined as a type of Level 2 charging by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), just with DC current; it is much faster than with AC Level 2 charging. Per the SAE, Level 3 charging is over 400kW, which is not available today for cars, and is likely to be used only for buses and commercial trucks. 

As another important aspect of this discussion, the installed cost of AC Level 1 charging can be as little as $500 with just a circuit, a NEMA electrical outlet, and the recharging cord that came with the car—also known as BYOC (bring your own cord!). However, a full charging station with integrated cord and coupler, and the safety and other protocols that are included for AC Level 1, can cost up to $5,000 per stall, installed. AC Level 2 chargers can cost up to $15,000 installed per stall, and DCFC can cost from $25,000 for a 50kW unit up to $150,000 or more for a 350kW unit, which can charge 200 miles in under 15 minutes. Most of the DCFC units already installed today are 150kW which can charge 200 miles in about 25 minutes, but the higher power—and faster—ones are coming.

DCFC is intended to compete with fully refueling a gas-driven vehicle (internal combustion engine or ICE vehicle), not topping off which is all that is typically required at community destinations, including workplaces. Because most travel is local, most cars may never need to be charged at their destinations and may need to only be charged once a week at home. Most people don’t fill up ICE vehicles every day. We just don’t drive as much as many people think. The average car is driven 37 miles a day (13,500 miles a year). Most residents will need to fully recharge one night a week, or just an hour or two every day at AC Level 2. DCFC charging is mostly required on highways for long distance trips, and for fleet charging where a business owns EVs including taxis, Transportation Network Company (TNC) vehicles, and/or delivery vehicles. As an example, DCFC could/should be provided at the equivalent of a gas station at an airport, for recharging rental cars, and for EV owners to recharge for the drive home, rather than putting AC Level 2 or even AC Level 1 chargers in long term and economy parking. Even with Level 1, the charging time will be a fraction of the total time the car is parked in an economy lot. 

While there are differences in user needs, for this discussion there are two broad types of parking: Destination parking as a place that someone parks to visit or work, and residential parking. At least 75% of charging can and should be done at home. The other 25% of EV owners may not be able to install a charger at home for a variety of reasons. There may be some exceptions to overnight charging, such as if most of the power supply is solar; but in most places in the U.S. today, the grid and the power supply is best able to accommodate a switch to EVs with charging at home, and the electricity cost is lowest in that time frame. 

Thus, charging capability should be provided at parking facilities serving residential parking, with significant capabilities to easily add chargers as need grows. However, even in that case, there is no need to provide power adequate to charge every vehicle parked with full power simultaneously. Even if/when every resident of an apartment complex has an EV (which will likely be at least 30 years from now), the power need is no more than enough to charge 1 in 7 stalls (14%), simultaneously over night or perhaps 1 in 4 stalls (25%) if most vehicles are charged every day. The numbers are lower for the 25% of employees who can’t charge at home and always charge at work. Assuming no more than two hours charging per car each day, 1 in 4 stalls x 25% of parkers would mean infrastructure for 6.3% of stalls for those employees. Adding in some visitors, and being conservative, a maximum of 10% of all stalls charging simultaneously is likely to be all that is ever needed. 

And let’s not ignore curb charging. Some cities where street parking is vital for residential parking are working to add charging at the curb; New York City plans to increase from 86 chargers today to 1,000 public curbside chargers by 2025.

The only way to recover the cost of DCFC charging is high utilization and turnover. Asking drivers to stay with the car and move it when charging done is difficult to manage and enforce, and in fact is functionally much more like a gas station stall than a parking space. Tesla charges fees to those who remain in the charging stall more than a few minutes after the charging is complete. I would thus argue that DCFC charging is not in fact “parking” at all! It can be a service/amenity the property owner chooses to provide, but it is not and should not be defined, counted, and operated as parking. 

The Biden administration, while strongly supporting EV charging, doesn’t expect destination parking to serve the need for fast charging. Under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed in November 2021, the first $5 billion will be invested “over five years to help states create a network of EV charging stations along designated Alternative Fuel Corridors” which are defined by the Feds as basically the Interstate Highway System.2 Additional guidance issued in February3 states that only after that $5 billion network is built out, will unspent funds be available for “any public road or any publicly accessible locations.” However, that guidance further states that the remaining $2.5 billion for EV infrastructure in the act will be divided equally between grants for further development along the Alternative Fuel Corridors and community charging, where the priority will be “rural, disadvantaged and hard to reach communities”. It does not appear that any of the funds in that act will be available for community or residential charging, at least in properties where the owner can afford to provide parking structures. 

The prior federal tax incentives for EV charging installation lapsed last December 31, and there has been as yet no extension or replacement announced. A renewed federal incentive for EV charging in parking facilities will have to be done either via budgeting or additional law(s) passed by Congress which is not certain in the current political climate. One company, Brightswitch, that helps owners obtain EV charging rebates and incentives says that only 58% of the country has any available as of this writing.4 

Further supporting the argument is a study by the Edison Electric Institute and included in a briefing document available on the Department of Energy website. It noted that 78% of the chargers needed by 2030 will be for home charging and only 1% need to be DCFC. A total of 2,000,000 public and workplace ports are required. With an estimated 2 billion destination parking spaces in the US,5 that means at most 1% of destination parking spaces would be needed for charging….in 2030! 

Most U.S. gas stations are not installing EV charging, except on some highways, and clearly only with incentives, again because there is yet no return on the investment. However, BP reported in January that their Pulse network in England is “on the cusp” of being more profitable than gas pumps.6 The percent of plug-in EVs on the road in the UK as of 2020 was about 3.3% per the House of Commons7 and probably is closer to 5% today. We might get to that percentage on the road by 2026-28. The highest and best adaptive reuse of the typical rather small parcel of an existing gas station may be to transition towards DCFC charging, rather than yet another fast-food drive-through. Why then are we asking new parking owners to install significant infrastructure for EV charging that will not be needed until 2030 or beyond and may never be repeated?

Yes, there is the oft-repeated mantra that cars are parked 95% of the time, so the proponents say why not charge then? However, that ignores the costs especially for infrastructure for the future. The current trend is for localities to impose the perceived need for community charging on new parking spaces, not existing ones, with some cities requiring that infrastructure be installed to be able charge at 25% or more of the new parking spaces. Most of these requirements, including the State of California, don’t require any minimum number of chargers at opening day, just infrastructure. The California CAL GREEN code requires an equal number of EV -capable stalls at residential and destination (excluding hotels) parking with 10% minimum, but voluntary tiers at 15% and 20% with the only difference being that destination parking is exempt with less than 200 stalls. Local communities often use zoning process leverage to get property owners to meet the higher tiers. 

There are also two different levels of requirements for infrastructure. EV Capable generally means a larger electrical room and more distribution panels, a larger service (which is usually expensive) and empty raceways and conduits to at least the area of each future EV stall. For EV Ready, power and communication wiring are pulled to a junction box at each future stall, so each additional EV charging unit is basically just plugged in. This is particularly problematic in 2022 due to the high cost of wiring due to pandemic and other supply chain issues. It is also noted that DCFC units are much larger than AC Level 2 and are very difficult to deploy inside parking structures without loss of stalls. ADA requirements further complicate the layout of initial and future EV stalls. Consultants in California report that they must submit full layout drawings for the future parking layout at buildout of the required charging stalls, to support the planned conduit runs provided at opening day. 

The cost for EV Capable for a 1,000-stall parking structure at 25% will exceed $5 million. There is no return on most of this investment until and unless chargers are installed and even then, many owners will never recover the cost of charging and thus will have to charge all parkers more to be a viable operation. Meanwhile competitive, older parking facilities won’t have this burden. 

As previously noted, the City of Boston recently adopted requirements that some new parking structures must have chargers installed at 25% of the parking stalls. To compensate for the clear loss of functional parking, the city requires that anyone, including ICE vehicles, can park at the charging stalls. So, it is even more probable that when a car needing charging arrives, there still won’t be any chargers available. Cities/states that impose excessive requirements for EVCS installation today need to pass legislation to allow ticketing by the police for violation, like laws that allow police to ticket ADA parking violations on private property. 

The final point is that we simply don’t know how charging will be delivered in 10 years, much less 20 or 30 years. Batteries may improve in range, or charging may occur more efficiently. The need for EV charging at destination parking may change radically if other options such as DCFC at corner gas stations or in-pavement charging at stoplights occurs for every day charging needs; it seems entirely possible that there could be far less need for charging in destination parking in the future than is contemplated today. There is potentially a tremendous and literally unsustainable waste of capital and resources to provide 25% EV Capable today, much less 25% EVCS installed. 

In sum, the attitude among policy makers that parking can be the gas station of the future is imposing an unfair burden on the construction of new parking facilities in the U.S. I fully support and recommend installing some chargers today, say two times the local share of EVs on the road at opening day, and EV Capable infrastructure to grow that to up to a maximum of 10% of the parking capacity for destinations, with infrastructure for a maximum of 25% of residential parking. Providing multiple times that infrastructure for parking is an extreme burden. Even at residential, full charging draw is not needed all night, every night!

Our industry needs to bring a voice to the table for reasonable and rational plans for EV charging, and advocate that parking will not be, indeed does not need to be, the gas station of the future.

istock / Magnilionl, Antonio Carlos Soria Hernandez, stock.adobe.com / dlyastokiv, koya 979, PetraRichli, green 2

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