City Councilman Drew Nielsen wants the city to start preparing now for a future where we all might be driving around town in electric cars.
The city sent him to a conference at Stanford on climate policy and transportation and he told me some of the of the information he learned “had my jaw dropping.” Here’s the problem with electric cars: you need some place to plug them in. Like that old chicken-and-egg riddle, most people don’t want to buy an electric car if it’s a pain to use and the infrastructure won’t get installed if not enough people want to drive one.
He’s asked city staff to look into options that might make owning and driving an electric car in Everett easier, such as taking away a parking space downtown and adding a charging station.
Another suggestion is requiring circuitry for a charging station to be installed in new homes. That’s something that’s relatively inexpensive to do while the house is being built and much more expensive later.
It turns out the city is already in the process of allowing charging stations in commercial and industrial zones because the state legislature mandated it. It will be interesting to see if Nielsen can get more aggressive measures pushed forward in Everett.
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