SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Electric vehicle owners who live in cities often don't have garages or driveways, so they can't easily charge their cars at home, and public chargers are in short supply in a lot of urban neighborhoods. As Meir Rinde of member station WHYY reports, that has left many EV owners on a constant hunt for a place to charge up.
MEIR RINDE, BYLINE: Every couple of weeks, Nate Golubiewski finds himself in the loud, buzzing underground parking garage at MOM's Organic Market in Center City, Philadelphia. It's one of the few convenient places in town where he can plug in his Tesla.
NATE GOLUBIEWSKI: It is because I come here probably on a biweekly basis to go grocery shopping. And I come here specifically because there are chargers where I can come. I can plug in. By the time I'm done charging, I have a full charge, and that lets me go another two to three weeks without charging.
RINDE: It doesn't always work out, though. On a recent visit to the garage, he had to stop by three different chargers before he found one that he was able to connect to.
SIMON: It is a big challenge if you come to a grocery store with the intent to plug in because you can't charge at home, and you can't charge at the grocery store either. It really throws your day off and your routine off when that happens.
RINDE: It happens often. Philadelphia has nearly 10,000 registered electric vehicles but only 145 publicly accessible charging stations, according to data from the U.S. Department of Energy. The federal bipartisan infrastructure law allocates $7.5 billion to subsidize new chargers. But so far, that money has gone mostly toward installing them along highways rather than in densely populated urban neighborhoods. Elaine Buckberg and her husband both rely on public chargers for their EVs in the Boston area. She's also an economist who studies charging at Harvard University.
ELAINE BUCKBERG: Like, OK, well, we'll go out to dinner, and then we'll leave the EV and walk home and early in the morning go pick it up.
RINDE: Buckberg and other experts say widespread electric vehicle adoption is critical to reducing use of fossil fuels and combating climate change. But the lack of public chargers is keeping many urban drivers from switching to EVs. She says some cities are further along, like Los Angeles, which has been installing EV chargers on streetlight poles since 2016. Boston and Portland, Ore., have invited private firms to install curbside chargers at no cost to taxpayers, and Austin, Texas, leases space to charging companies.
BUCKBERG: But cities that might not be as ambitious in terms of those climate goals might be slower to start thinking about EV charging. There are also cities where a lot more people might have driveways - right? - lower-density cities.
RINDE: Philadelphia is a dense city where officials are concerned about climate change, but they still haven't taken steps to support large-scale installation of public chargers. Anna Kelly, the city's senior policy adviser for electric vehicles and parking, says that's because planners are focused on making a system that's affordable and accessible for everyone, especially people who aren't driving. She says EVs are preferable to gas-powered cars but not to other more equitable and more climate-friendly ways of getting around town.
ANNA KELLY: That emphasis first is on making sure that pedestrians, bikers, people using transit have what they need and are being served. And I think EVs play a role.
RINDE: Which means that Philadelphia EV drivers like Nate Golubiewski can expect to keep visiting supermarket parking garages for at least a few more years.
For NPR News, I'm Meir Rinde in Philadelphia. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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