I disagree with this. Retro installs maybe, yes. But new construction, which I consult heavily on, most of the developers I work with are motivated to install them. They’re revenue sources and attract the kind of tenants they want occupying their new building.

The answer to retro installs (which is always about money anyway) is to not force the hand of property owners, but make the install cost a no brainer with tax rebates and subsidies. Regulation in this regard would just cause negative effects I think, IF it ever passed a public vote (Cali maybe, but not much of the rest of the country).

My city is building tons of new apartments clearly meant for commuters to the nearby big cities and exactly zero of them have EV chargers despite being the most expensive apartments in town. I'm not holding my breath that new construction will do this all that soon, either.

I agree it's probably not so bad even for retrofits - 70% of housing in the US is SFH or a duplex (https://www.infoplease.com/us/census/housing-statistics). Getting a charging solution for those units seems achievable. I'm also willing to bet that multifamily housing is generally massively over represented in blue cities, which might be able to require/incentives retrofits. That's a huge marketable population to start buying electric vehicles and normalize them. I suspect that by the time there is significant used electric market there will also be enough market and political demand to figure out the multi-family situation.

Subsidies are the way to do this. The government should be highly motivated to spur transition to EVs for carbon emissions, and what is holding back almost everyone except Tesla is charging infrastructure.

Cities where concentrated apartments reside have the double whammy of pointless carbon emissions in traffic jams and smog.

Identifying lobbying groups with common interest in this would lead me to the mainline auto industry, especially GM and Ford. They need a charging infrastructure build pronto to compete with Tesla and its Supercharger network. This would probably be related, since city drivers are younger and more likely to buy an EV.

Such is American Politics that you have to lobby the lobbying groups to get anything done.

I was looking at a few new apartment in london that are just completing construction. The amount of charging points I personally was able to find is big fat zero.

“ They’re revenue sources and attract the kind of tenants they want occupying their new building.”

This a huge problem. They mainly want to install them to gouge people. To attract people it needs done at cost.

With the rare exception for when the expected marketing value of having those spots or tax subsidies make installing them appear to have a positive value.

The exception that definitely proves the rule. Until it's mandatory in new construction it won't even start to become normal.

I'm curious how street parking is supposed to work, that photo is hilarious but I imagine that on the streets of Boston where you'll get hit with a bat over trying to save a parking spot (or trying to use a saved parking spot, it's Boston in the winter).

I have the feeling you're going to see better adoption in suburbs and lower density urban areas first because the range doesn't need to be so high but it's also not impossible to have a consistent parking space (or garage or driveway) that you can invest in improving. I'd probably have to get a special variance from the city to install an outlet in the sidewalk...

Fortunately, the CalGreen code has some charging requirements:

https://up.codes/viewer/california/ca-green-code-2016/chapte...

I think the requirements should be higher, but this is a start.

A bit off topic, but your example of parking spots probably isn't the best. There's been some calls to lower the kinda ludicrous parking requirements mandated by local authorities

If the efforts to reduce parking requirements succeed, you can be sure that more units will be built with no parking lots at all (Profit$). We are seeing this in Portland where 20 unit apartment buildings are getting built with zero parking (or maybe 10 spaces available for additional rent). The end result, for now at least, is 30-40 more cars parked in the surrounding streets.

I lived in London where new buildings are required to be zero parking - the thinking is that the roads are already congested enough and so anything that encourages bringing more cars in is bad for the city. It's a pretty good approach IMO, though I guess you need to combine it with something like Tokyo's rule that you can't buy a car unless you can show you have a parking space to register it to.

Right, and this is typically in the form of a planning condition where residents waive their right to cheap on-street parking (ie: no resident’s parking permits). Smaller Central London buildings typically wouldn’t provide off-street parking anyway, there just isn’t space!

Large, luxury developments often do still provide parking facilities, even in Central London. Transport for London sometimes makes attempts to get these reduced in size or eliminated, but hasn’t always succeeded.

London transition should focus on running a good, reliable system at low cost. London isn't the worst in the world, but they seem to be trying to be the most expensive.

The planning goal seems to be focused on a future where remote vehicles are summoned to convey the inhabitant 'on demand' from what I've heard. Permissions based travel with costs associated for emissions etc...

> If the efforts to reduce parking requirements succeed, you can be sure that more units will be built with no parking lots at all

I'm having trouble seeing the problem here. :)

Y'know what's even better for the environment than electric cars? No cars! I realize that living in California without a car is going to be difficult, but if you can manage it, you shouldn't have to pay for other people's parking spaces.

That would be great if that was the result, but the more likely outcome is that the tenants own cars that are parked in neighboring blocks.

That's why we shouldn't have any free parking in the first place. Parking spots should always be paid; they are not a public good.

https://www.vox.com/2014/6/27/5849280/why-free-parking-is-ba...

What if those neighboring blocks were built using the same laws and hence didn't have any parking either?

The thing is not everyone is able to manage it. By not providing for those people you ensure the parking problem becomes someone else's problem.

> providing for those people

Which doesn't require that every single unit has parking.

> you ensure the parking problem becomes someone else's problem

It just becomes an attribute on the listing. This house has 3 bedrooms and parking. This house has 2 bedrooms and no parking.

Can confirm, I lived in one of those apartments, now I'm very happy in a suburb. It's nice to be able to haul groceries to your place without walking 4 blocks from the car for each load.

Typically in such neighborhoods in Europe the grocery store is no further than 4 blocks away, so you just walk and don't use a car. It works since the store doesn't have parking minimums either so don't take a lot of space, even if it is a fairly large one.

Carrying 35kg of groceries sucks. Especially when it rains. Personally, I drive 2km to a larger store with underground parking instead of visiting the store two blocks away.

That's a very narrow minded approach :-)

People don't carry around 35kg of groceries each time they go to the local supermarket. They buy a tiny bit of what they need each day, walking back from home/school, since it takes so little time and often it's on the way, anyway.

Carrying 2-5-6-7-8-10kg is quite easy.

I've had a frustrating form of this conversation with so many Americans. The concept of buying less than 40L of soda at a time, because presumably they drink many liters per day, is hard to overcome for some.

They literally will not believe that it is possible to but a days worth of groceries every day, and get fresh, quality food.

But the more people saying that it can be done, and is a superior way to shop, the more likely we will convince them finally.

You're really comparing apples to oranges because the majority of Americans don't live within reasonable walking distance to a grocery store to begin with. Depending on where you live, it's not uncommon to take 15-20+ minutes to drive to the closest store.

With the return trip time + parking, you can see how it's much more sensible to plan your shopping ahead of time to optimize for the fewest amount of trips possible.

Even if you currently live in a borderline walkable area, there's a solid chance you grew up in an area where driving to the store was a norm and thus contributes to the decision to walk vs drive.

Agreed on the design of most grocery store in the US. Most people can't stop in quick on a normal daily walk, because the inherent space-inefficiency of cars means a long detour to hit multiple stops, whereas with walking it's an easy in-and-out grab.

However, even when patiently explaining this difference, it is a mental leap too far to consider any change. Not only is it the physical design of the stores and car-only infrastructure, a lot of it has to do with package sizing and pricing structure, as another poster pointed out; smaller quantities get massive markups in US stores, for no good reason other than once they've got you in a store, you're fairly captive and they want to extract the maximum amount of money from you so that you don't end up elsewhere.

Until people experience it, and realize that having a five person family is no challenge at all for this style of life, it's hard to give them the picture.

In most American cities, going to the grocery store is kind of a pain. You have to drive somewhere, usually at least a mile or two. You have to find some place to park and walk across a huge parking lot. The store itself will be huge, if you're just getting three things you have to trek all the way across the store to retrieve them. And the lines at the checkout can be bad.

As I mentioned in another comment, I had the opportunity to live for a year in a very walkable neighborhood, with an excellent grocery store. It was convenient, it was small, the food was high quality, checkout was lightning fast. I found myself going there nearly every day and it was wonderful.

But once I needed to move back to a more car-centered city, the idea of doing this became once again unthinkable. Far too big of a chore to do daily.

Yeah, you need the right environment. Going against the grain will only cause pain and suffering...

You can get a 2L bottle of soda for $3, or $1.29 each if you buy a multiple of 6 of them...

Indeed, for a year I had the chance to live five minutes' walk from an excellent grocery store. It was right across the street from the yoga studio where I practiced, and on my way between home and work. There were lots of automated checkouts and the store was very efficiently run.

Previously, the idea of going to the grocery store every day had sounded like terrible tedium -- but I found myself doing it and it was wonderful.

There’s usually also the option of having stuff delivered. The heaviest items are drinks and getting those delivered has the additional benefit of getting them brought to the doorstep. Costs a bit more, but not owning a car offsets that easily. Friends just call a cab for their monthly large shopping.

Some people have a couple of kids, and need more groceries that can be done that way. Some times there is this thing called "inclement weather" which means it rains 2-3 days in a row and makes doing this miserable. Or you work a double shift and are too tired to get groceries, or you work 2nd shift and everything is closed on the way back except convenience stores. Or you get sick and can't actually go out to get food for a few days.

There's so much of a bubble here sometimes. Narrow minded...dude, not everyone is a single, childless, wealthy knowledge worker that can waste their time to do this.

I have kids and deal with inclement weather - it’s been a mix of rain and snow for most of the last couple of days. Granted, I’m a knowledge worker, but shops are open until midnight in the neighborhood and worst case, both of the large supermarket chains here deliver until late with prearranged slots.

For the majority of (urban) people it’s definitely manageable. More than 50% of all households in central Berlin own no car, numbers rising.

I used to own a car, and the tipping point from “I can’t do that” to “no problem to do that” was selling the car. It’s an acquired habit for most of us. I now own an umbrella and a good waterproof jacket instead.

I have kids. I know a lot of people that have kids. Again, narrow mindedness.

You don't just go to buy STRICTLY what you need today. You buy something like 10% over each time. Within several weeks of shopping you'll have a full fridge, heck, even a full pantry.

Then you only need to top up when you go each day. And I'm being generous, you can go every 2-3 days, even.

There are comfortable solution, you need two things:

1. An environment that helps (most European cities).

2. A bit of planning/flexibility/smarts.

If you don't have 1. you're dead in the water, from the start. If you don't have 2., well... get them :-)

And the point of most of the US-centric replies to this subthread is that ...drumroll... we usually don't have 1.

> Typically in such neighborhoods in *Europe*

Thankfully, I intervened when great grand parent comment said the above.

Ba-dum-tss?

In Tokyo you need to have proof that you have a private parking space before you can register a car.

It's going to be very hard to apply that mandate to existing construction. I feel like the best way to move forward is for charging companies like EVgo or Chargepoint (or a new HN company!) to approach building owners, install pay per use chargers for free, and offer the building owners a 10% cut of the charging revenue.

> A staggering amount of buildings are built to code

A staggering amount of buildings are also NOT built to code. My smoke detector failed and isn't getting replaced for a whole week. My heater makes scraping noises every time it starts and maintainence thinks it's normal. Smack in the middle of Silicon Valley.

But this is the best of what I could afford. It's decent. It's clean. Everything else I saw at my budget was worse. One apartment I saw was $2400 for a 1-bedroom and had the toilet paper holder was bolted to the wall right above a red hot heating element recessed in the wall with a grill. Needless to say I didn't rent there.

Want an apartment that is built to code? It'll cost you $3000 or more.

The valley is well known for not building enough, thus allowing this to happen. You can find apartments like that in any city, but it will be the bad part of town and rent will be in the 500 range.

housing in the US is just not that great for the thing right in the center of the national psyche: cookie cutter designs with no attention to the environment, low-quality constructions, apartments with zero soundproofing (no wonder everyone wants a house) and then the laws that force people to keep antiquated structures around for way longer than reasonable.

Why are people so numbskulled to downvote this - A guy sharing his firsthand experience? Let me guess, everyone on HN in SV lives in a fancy multistorey condo overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge? /s

There is significant potential for installing solar on rooftops and small storage to reduce grid loads for EV charging