How do you propose they charge their cars? On some nights you can fit 20 cars on each side. On others, 10 cars. Sometimes you can park right in front of your house, sometimes you have to park two streets away because there was no room on yours.
Do we just install a charging point ever ~10 meters? If yes, who is going to pay for the absolutely enormous cost of ripping out every single street in the UK to put the necessary cables down? Won't it be an eyesore? How about vandalism and damaged cables?
Same questions could have been asked about fiber optics, cable TV, electricity, telephones, water and sewers. Yet we have that infrastructure.
Also, some people believe by the time that future will come many people would opt out of buying cars, in favor of driverless taxis. These don’t need to stay parked in residential areas.
If we’ll start running out of places to charge EVs, the existing places will raise their per-KWh prices to maximize their profits. This in turn will create incentive to install more plugs, and upgrade electrical grid and generation to supply them. No need to bury millions in advance installing the infrastructure before there's a demand.
Yep. Most homeowners will just install their own charge point on their own front wall, which costs £150 after subsidy (£600 unsubsidised). If your street has chronic parking problems that mean you can't always park in front of your house (a definite minority outside of London), the council or a charge point provider will need to sort it out. The Office for Low Emission Vehicles already provides subsidies to any local authority that wants to install on-street charging infrastructure.
Given the cost savings of running an EV, the infrastructure will pay for itself quite quickly. Shared charge points use a contactless payment system, so it's easy to recoup the cost of installation and maintenance over time through a small premium on metered electricity rates.
http://www.rolecserv.com/ev-charging/product/OLEV-Grant-Fund... https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...
>How about vandalism and damaged cables?
Most EV charging cables automatically lock in place, which prevents the petty nuisance of someone unplugging your car for a laugh. If someone chooses to vandalise a cable carrying 7kW, they're likely to experience very swift karmic retribution. The charge point itself may be a target for vandalism, but it's no more attractive a target than any amount of other street furniture. Cars and bicycles are an easy target for vandalism when parked, but it's relatively rare in practice.
Which brings up another interesting point - if you do any work in UK and have to run an electrical cable across the pavement, you have to mark the area so that people won't trip over your cable or electrocute themselves.
In the picture I posted, if you had a charging point on the wall of the building, you would absolutely have to run it across the pavement to get to your car - so how can this be allowed? What about wheelchairs riding on the pavement? Or prams? Or people who trip over the cable?
Can someone else who parks in front of your house use your cable? If not, why not? The street parking is free for everyone, anybody can park there, electric car or not.
>> (a definite minority outside of London)
You mean outside literally any city in UK. Terraced houses are bread and butter of living in the UK and they all have the same problem - you usually don't park in front of your own door.
On-street chargers can be mounted to a bollard or lamp post at the kerbside, avoiding a cable run across the pavement. Alternatively, the cable can be routed through a sunken channel with a removable cover, similar to a standard drainage channel.
>Can someone else who parks in front of your house use your cable? If not, why not?
A private EV charger running from your own electricity supply has a lockable receptacle. A shared EV charger uses contactless cards for billing.
>You mean outside literally any city in UK. Terraced houses are bread and butter of living in the UK and they all have the same problem - you usually don't park in front of your own door.
70% of UK households have access to off-street parking. The other 30% do pose some significant challenges, but they're not insurmountable.
http://www.ecolane.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Ecolane-...
Parking meters is not a thing in Europe though. Usually there's a single ticketing machine, possibly behind a door. You either get a paper ticket and put it behind the windscreen or pay before leaving to get through the barrier.
Note the I've seen a lot of the Europe style meters in the US. Each city gets to choose, and the one machine for numerous parking spaces has some advantages, and other disadvantages.
At least in my city, there's literally no space on sidewalks for per-car meters. And there're no designated spots on many streets - all spaces are fluid. Nobody would be guaranteed to park in front of one. While somebody may be in front of two. Most public garages and big lots are bumper-to-bumper 90-degree parking with not much space either.
Of course, there's plenty of space in suburbs. But there's no parking meters at all over there.
Not yet. The technology is absolutely ready, it's just stuck at the chicken-and-egg stage in most places. Anywhere you can fit a parking meter, you can fit an EV charger. Rolec produce a street light with a built-in EV charger.
On-street EV charging is ready and waiting for the demand. I think it's almost inevitable that every parking space will eventually have an EV charger.
http://www.rolecserv.com/ev-charging/product/EV-Charging-Str...