If you do a search for the number of electric vehicle charging stations in the US, you'll likely get a number somewhere around 160,000. But to better understand what this means, you'll probably want to ask a few follow-up questions:
Are these individual charging ports (for a single vehicle) or are these stations (locations with multiple charging ports)?
How many of these chargers are private versus publicly-accessible?
And how many of these are DC fast, versus just level 2? Level 2 is what most people have at home (I think), whereas DC charging is what you need if you're stopping on the side of the road and need to supercharge your car in 20-30 minutes.
Usually the biggest fear with EVs is range anxiety. We have come to expect that we'll be able to find a gas station when we need it, but, for the most part, we don't yet feel that way about EV charging stations.
So for this concern, the more precise question would be: How many publicly-accessible DC-fast charging stations are there in the US? This is the filter that gives you stations that would be most comparable to how gas stations function today.
The answer, according to the US Department of Energy, is about 10,597 stations and 44,160 charging ports. And according to Bloomberg Green, this puts the US on track to have public fast-charging sites outnumber gas stations in about 8 years.
Of course, it's probably safe to assume that the pace of EV adoption will only increase. And that means that this flip could happen well before 8 years. In my mind, that's soon.
On-street electric vehicle charging points are starting to roll out across Toronto. Here is one that I came across this morning in the Junction on Annette Street. The stations are from Flo.
At its core, this is, of course, a great thing. Ubiquitous charging points are a critical component of overall EV adoption. But at the same time, it was a good reminder that (1) above-grade electrical wires are ugly (this is the typical Toronto approach) and that (2) on-street EV charging is a design challenge that is going to need to be solved.
In the above example, the charging stations were mounted to an existing electrical pole and two bright yellow bollards were installed on either side to make sure nobody smashes into said charging stations while they're parking and/or trying to watch TikTok videos on their phone.
But what happens when nearly everyone has an EV? There are only so many electrical poles, so we will need to move on to standalone stations at some point, and that is obviously already being done. But if we're going to have charging points practically everywhere, how should they work and what should they look like?
I am sure that lots of very smart people are already thinking about this. But as someone who is not directly involved in this space, it feels like we need to think about these in a similar way to street lights. Because they are going to be just as ubiquitous, if not more so. That means there is a strong cause for making them both functional and beautiful.
In fact, this feels like a real city branding opportunity.