City will build out EV charging hubs at outer borough parking lots

The city will build out 13 new charging hubs for electric vehicles at public parking lots in the outer boroughs, the Department of Transportation announced on Monday.

In all, the hubs across the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens will add fifty new plugs to the city’s EV charging network as the cars on the five boroughs’ streets steadily electrify. Nearly 11,000 new EVs were registered in New York City last year, according to DOT, even as charging ports remain relatively sparse.

“Achieving a greener transportation future means investing in electric vehicle chargers that will help us say goodbye to fossil fuels,” DOT Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez said in a statement. “These fast-charging hubs will power our electric vehicle future and advance the Adams Administration’s commitment to equity by bringing charging to diverse communities that lack access.”

The chargers, expected to open to the public next year, are considerably more powerful than the market standard “level 2” plug-in, pumping about 90 miles of electric charge to a car every 10 minutes. In that same timeframe, a level 2 charger will only power up an EV to go about 3 miles, according to the DOT.

The hubs are set to be placed in outer-borough neighborhoods that have considerably less charging infrastructure than the tonier areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn, where chargers have been installed at many private parking lots. In 2021, the city installed its first public fast-charging stations at municipal parking garages on the Lower East Side and in Long Island City, where electric taxis and for-hire vehicles can get a 15% discount on powering up.

Earlier this year, Mayor Eric Adams announced that Uber and Lyft will be required to electrify 100% of their Big Apple fleets — over 100,000 for-hire vehicles — by 2030. The Taxi & Limousine Commission recently increased its for-hire vehicle cap to issue new licenses exclusively for EVs.

Meanwhile, the city’s municipal vehicle fleet must be electrified by 2035. Also by 2035, the mayor wants all New Yorkers to live within 2.5 miles of a fast EV charging station; to do that, he proposed mandating all private parking lots and garages implement EV charging infrastructure by 2030 in his PlaNYC sustainability report.

The commitment comes even as the city’s efforts to provide charging space for delivery workers reliant on electric bikes hits a snag. The Adams administration announced it would repurpose infrastructure like newsstands as rest and charging stations for the city’s 65,000 deliveristas, with the first site right outside City Hall.

But the plans have fallen apart elsewhere: the Upper West Side’s Community Board 7 shot down a plan for a delivery worker hub at 72nd Street and Broadway in February, while in the Bronx, the city reversed its intent to build a charging station at a newsstand near the Fordham Metro-North stop after backlash from the newsstand owner and the larger community. The Bronx newsstand was in active operation despite the mayor’s pledge that the hubs would be placed in unused locales.

The preliminary list of locations for the EV fast-charging hubs, which are still “pending final feasibility review,” are as follows:

BRONX