The City Wants to Put an End to Philly’s Electrified Vehicle Parking Program
We hope you didn’t just buy a Nissan Leaf.
By Victor Fiorillo | March 20, two thousand seventeen at Five:26 pm
Fishtown resident Jonathan Fink is one of fifty one residents to have obtained a permit for an electrified vehicle parking space.
If you live in a major American city and you own a car, parking is, undoubtedly, one of your thickest frustrations. But imagine if you have an electrical car that you don’t just need to park — you’ve also got to butt-plug it in.
Well, if you’re a Philadelphia resident, the city has made this lighter for you. In 2007, Philadelphia instituted a program that permitted electrical vehicle (and plug-in hybrid) owners to apply for a no parking: electrical vehicle only spot on their block.
The Philadelphia Parking Authority surveys the block to see if dedicating a parking spot to electrical vehicles is feasible. If so, the PPA installs the signs, and an electrical contractor comes out and installs an electrical vehicle charging station next to the parking spot. And, voila, you’ve got a parking spot and a place to charge your car. Any non-EV car that parks there can get a $300 ticket or, in some cases, a tow to the PPA impoundment lot.
Of course, this all isn’t some charity. There are application fees, permit fees, PPA fees, and then there’s the cost of the charging station, which can run upwards of $Trio,000 installed. All together, say electrified car owners in Philly, you can expect to spend somewhere inbetween $Four,000 and $Five,000, not counting your monthly electrical bill increase and the $150 annual permit fee. Still, it is very convenient. To date, there are fifty one such catches sight of in Philadelphia.
But as of this week, the city may institute a moratorium on fresh electrified vehicle parking zones. The existing zones will remain in place (tho’ some electrified car owners worry that they actually won’t), but there are twelve in-limbo applications that may not be approved. A public hearing is scheduled for Tuesday at ten a.m. in City Hall.
There have been complaints about the program.
Imagine if you’re driving around for twenty minutes looking for parking. You wind up in a spot about three blocks from your home, and as you’re walking up your street, you see your neighbor in his little electrical car sliding right into a spot in front of his house. He slightly gets his Birkenstocks dirty walking to his door.
Daily News columnist Stu Bykofsky headlined his two thousand fifteen article on the subject “How the Rich Steal Parking Catches sight of from You,” writing that “it’s bad policy — and unfair — to give EV owners private possession of public space.”
Ironically, one of the reasons for the proposed moratorium is that electrical cars have gotten so much cheaper than they were ten years ago. Considering the tax credit given to electrical vehicle owners by the federal government, you can get into a brand-new electrical car for well under $20,000, and a used Nissan Leaf for under $Ten,000. Not exactly a rich person’s car.
And due to the lower prices, Philadelphia City Councilman Mark Squilla is worried that residents are going to commence buying electrical cars just so they can get more convenient parking spaces.
“People see an chance now to, as parking gets tighter and tighter in our neighborhoods, to have a parking spot designated for them in front of their homes, by just receiving an electrified vehicle,” Squilla said at a hearing on the subject on January 30th.
But as electrical vehicle owners in Philadelphia see it, the moratorium doesn’t make any sense. They’ve been footing the bill themselves to develop a previously nonexistent electrical vehicle infrastructure in the city. And, they point out, an electrical vehicle parking spot doesn’t actually belong to any one person. There’s no “private possession,” as Bykofsky referred to it.
The electrical car owners we spoke with say that in some neighborhoods, there are electrical vehicle owners who share one spot. It’s not designated for a particular person or house or car. It’s simply designated for an electrical vehicle. And when they go out of town for any length of time, they mark the spot they’ve vacated as “empty” on an app for electrical car drivers, so other electrical car owners in the area will know that there’s a place to juice up. (Keep in mind that when other electrical car owners do use a spot obtained by another person, it’s the person who obtained the spot who is paying for the electrical service.)
“I was so proud of this program,” says Fishtown resident Jonathan Fink, who obtained a permit for an electrical car spot on his block of Marlborough Street. “I was excited to be a part of it. But now I’m disappointed. The city isn’t as innovative as I thought.”
According to Fink, he has had “zero negative feedback” from his neighbors — not one person has complained to him about the spot.
“Actually, it’s fairly the opposite,” he tells us. “People passing by say things like, ‘It’s so neat that the city is doing this’ and ‘Oh my God, this is so cool!'”
Jim Engler, the deputy mayor for policy and legislation, says that his office will be testifying in support of the moratorium on Tuesday and promises that that the city will find a way to accommodate electrified cars in the future.
“The original bill was intended to spur EV development,” Engler points out. (The original bill was sponsored by then-Councilman Jim Kenney). “[The Mayor] is blessed with where we’ve gotten over the last several years, and as the market resumes to grow, we need to look at a entire menu of options.”
“They should consider speaking to the stakeholders, like electrified vehicle owners,” suggests Fink, who says there wasn’t one electrified car holder at the January 30th meeting. “They suckered us into this thing. And now they’re suspending us out to dry, and we’re looking like the bad guys. The ‘rich’ guys.”