New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg Endorses Electric Car Charging Parking Space Plan

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in his final State Of The City address in late-February, said, "We'll work with the City Council to amend the Building Code so that up to twenty 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."

A 2012 study of 2,300 adult drivers over the age of 21 in large American cities, sponsored by the Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs, revealed that the majority of drivers are only marginally aware of electric vehicles at all.

"Based on sales data of electric vehicles, and subsequent surveys, we would be very surprised if the result would be much different today than in August 2011," said Dr. John Graham, who originated the study. Graham is Dean of the university’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs. "We found substantial factual misunderstandings of electric cars in our sample of 2,000," Graham said. "In some cases, the misunderstandings would cause one to be more pessimistic about the vehicle than they should be. And in other cases, it would cause people to be more optimistic than they should be."

There is currently no official place to charge an electric car in the five boroughs, but the city is planning to install two 480-volt fast chargers, one for the public on the lower East Side, and another for six new Nissan Leaf battery-operated cars the city will add to its fleet of cabs this year.

"We'll add 50 more electric vehicles to the city's fleet of cars," Bloomberg also said. "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."

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