An Annoyance of Electric Vehicles

I don't just use an e-bike to get around; we have two electric cars as well, and I recently had an opportunity to take one up from the Quad Cities to Milwaukee, a drive of about three and a half hours which, given current weather conditions (i.e. cold and wind) required one charging stop along the way. 

I want to talk here very briefly about how we aren't yet at the point of making these a real part of our transportation infrastructure--and how while I love my EVs, they aren't enough alone to solve the problems they're sometimes suggested as a solution for.

1. Infrastructure -- Soft and Hard

The biggest current hurdle is infrastructure for EVs--both hard infrastructure (actual charging stations) and what I want to call soft infrastructure: how we make that hard infrastructure visible and digestible for those using it.

Some Shell stations have EV chargers. There's even an app for that. Does this one?

No, it doesn't. But you don't know that from the sign: Shell stations with EV chargers also don't put the presence of EV chargers or the price of EV charging on the sign.

We need to have more EV chargers, as a start (and it's really a shame we have so many types of plugs not all of which are interoperable). But we also need to make it so that you can actually use an EV charger like you can use a gas charger: by a) knowing when there's one available without an app (since you are probably driving a car, and thus shouldn't be looking at a phone), b) knowing the price of the charger so that you can choose which one to use (just like that sign up there shows the price of gas), and c) making actually charging an EV simpler, primarily by allowing people to just use a credit card (as they can, again, with gas) or even cash, rather than a proprietary app that may not even work.

So we have a long way to go to make EV charging actually practical on the same level as gas chargers--and that's not even including the delay in charging times versus gas filling times.

2. What EVs Don't Fix

Of course, driving to Milwaukee wouldn't have been my preference in the first place if the US had actual train infrastructure. EVs are still cars; they take up the same space on the road, and they are just as individualized as a car in terms of where they run and how many people-miles they cover.

This guy is just as much of a car as anything that runs on gas.

That means that while EVs may help with some marginal elements of climate change (by reducing car emissions) they don't help with traffic (obviously) and they still require separate fuel and power for each individual, rather than allowing us to collectively group our outputs for greater efficiency.

A bus or a train still does better, in other words.

This is also a blue electric vehicle, but it moves a lot more people, a lot more efficiently.

3. Delays

Another consideration that I think gets sometimes missed along the way when comparing cars and other forms of transportation is that we attribute the issues we might run into in a car to the environment, but the delays of a train or a bus to the mode of transportation. 

I got stuck in Rockford for three hours because of faulty charging infrastructure. Admittedly, this could be seen as an EV-vs.-gas issue, but I've had bad gas pumps too, and bad traffic, and lots of delays in cars. But those tend to get treated as an issue for that trip.

If I had a train get in three hours late, the typical reaction is to treat it as a flaw in trains.

Oh no, NS is so unreliable. 

These buses are delayed. These cars? Just a bad trip; cars are so much faster than transit.

Until we can switch up our thinking on these issues, we won't really get to true efficient transit.