In his 12th and final State of the City address last week, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced plans to expand the city’s EV fleet and encourage a massive rollout of public chargers.
In his 12th and final State of the City address last week, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that New York City would become “a national leader” in the new technology of electric vehicles, announcing plans to expand the city’s EV fleet and encourage a massive rollout of public chargers.
“We’ll add 50 more electric vehicles to the city’s fleet of cars, and we’ll put the first six fully electric taxis on the road – with the goal of making one-third of our taxi fleet electric by 2020,” said the mayor. He didn’t say how this squares with the city’s current plan to require the existing 6,000 or so hybrid cabs now in service to be phased out and replaced with (plain old ICE) Nissan NV200 vans (the plan is being disputed in court, and it’s not yet certain when or if it will become law).
The next part of the mayor’s proposal could be a real game-changer: “We’ll work with the City Council to amend the Building Code so that up to 20 percent of all new public parking spaces in private developments will be wired and ready for electric vehicles, creating up to 10,000 parking spots for electric vehicles over the next seven years.”
New York zoning laws require the construction of new parking spaces along with new building construction, and the mayor’s office says that about 10,000 new parking spaces are added each year.
According to Transportation Nation, the Big Apple currently has 100 public charging stations and 120 for the city’s own fleet of 458 plug-in vehicles, the third-largest in the country. The city will add 30 more government stations under Bloomberg’s proposal, and begin a pilot of two DC fast chargers.
Image: ChargePoint
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