Urban Technology at University of Michigan week 131
Notes on Electric Vehicle Charging in the Snow
Snow is on the ground here in Michigan despite the fact this is one of the warmest winters on record. This week we take a close look at the human experience of electrical vehicle charging by interrogating one of the world’s most peculiar public vehicle chargers. It just happens to be located at the base of GM’s global headquarters, blocks from where I’m writing. What does it tell us about boundary objects, path dependency, and urban prototyping? Read on, friends.
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⚡️ An Electric Vehicle Charging Detour
The image above shows a public electric car charging station. There’s an inch and a half of snow accumulated on top of the charging connector which sits inside a holster of sorts, also covered in snow. Even the thick rubber-coated cable, looping in eccentric shapes, is dusted.
When I arrived to this scene last week it was so beautiful in its own mundane way that for a brief minute I did not want to disturb the snow. The moment passed, I connected the charger to my vehicle, tapped a payment card, did a chilly dance while waiting for the car and charger to establish a connection, then quickly hurried inside the adjacent skyscraper to wait an hour for the charge to complete. Sitting under the yawning atrium of the John Portman-designed Renaissance Center, currently General Motor’s global headquarters, I couldn’t help but think about how silly the prior few minutes had been.
Of course it snows and rains in Detroit, so why aren’t chargers designed to be more protected? Maybe it’s because this device is from EVgo, a company from un-snowy Los Angeles. Or perhaps this was an act of bureaucratic convenience because installing the charger requires an electrical permit, but installing a canopy would trigger a building permit as well? To me, as a consumer looking for some kilowatts, the un-covered charger looked like an annoyance. To GM and EVgo, on the other hand, this installation was likely an act expedient navigation of internal and municipal bureaucracies.
Electrical vehicle chargers are a great urban technology “boundary object,” asking questions across experience, operations, and urban systems of a variety of different constituencies who look after these topics. A close reading of something like this charger lets us parse the multiple overlapping interests, as well as multiple incentives and constraints.
A charger’s various stakeholders are sensitive to different forces at play, with the most durable and attractive version of the charger installation being one that threads all of these various needles equally well. In reality, that is not often the case.
To the consumer it represents questions of experience: ease of use (can I figure out how to use this thing?), accessibility (can I afford it?), convenience (is it available when I need it?), and reliability (does it work even while snowing?).
To the owner of the infrastructure it begs questions of operations: access (do we have enough power here?), operational adjustments (what do people do while charging?), and probably optics (will it make us look good if we have a public charger?).
To stakeholders that have a more systemic role to play, like the municipality and utility companies, it raises questions of infrastructure: process (which approvals are needed?), precedent (if this happens in one place, is it OK to happen everywhere?), and equity (how do we encourage the market to provide charging outside the glitzy downtown?).
The best way to design charging infrastructure would address all of these questions with equal sophistication. Newsflash: that’s not always the case.
Ponder the public charger above, photographed in Paris in 2017. At that time it was forward-thinking for a city to have sidewalk charging. While the citizen/consumer optics and convenience are great, the systemic precedent is less so. If sidewalk charging becomes the norm across Paris, now also imagine Rue Vieille du Temple dotted with blinking lights of a charge point every couple meters. Imagine the soundtrack of Place des Vosges with a mix of cooing pigeons and a steady rhythm of pings from street-side charging transactions being processed. What works as a delightful exception to the norm—an occasional electric vehicle charger in a gas-guzzling world—is not necessarily so pleasant as the new normal.
There’s a shadow stakeholder of sorts lurking in the image above, and that is something called “path dependency,” or more simply put, the weight of history. When cars became the primary constituent of the space between buildings in the 20th century, sidewalks became de-facto owned by vehicles as well. Now that cities like Paris are making decisions about widespread electrification, it feels natural that the curb is where charging infrastructure lands—kinda like when I eat one cookie, it feels natural that I have two more. But three cookies, just because they’re right in front of me and delicious, isn’t always the best choice!
Cities have an opportunity at this very moment to think beyond the automobile-carved paradigm they have (almost all) been following for decades. Just because it’s easy for a municipality to put charging infrastructure on the sidewalk, is it really a good idea to lock the sidewalk in to an auto-centric use for another generation? Even if the answer is “yes” right now, will that still feel like a good idea in 30 years?
The process of building almost anything in an urban context is demanding, even grueling, because of the various individual, business, and systemic stakeholders whose needs do not always align, or whose timelines may be mismatched. In the urban realm, path dependency is extra powerful: “there’s power under the sidewalk and parking already happens on the curb,” you can almost hear someone in Paris saying out loud, “so how about we put charging there?” In such instances it can be tricky to parse complacency from contemplation, which is one of the things that makes urban technology so hard. There may not ever be a “right answer,” and there’s no single “decider,” so is progress and imagination even possible?
Yes, via serious prototyping.
From high-profile pedestrianizations like Oslo’s downtown or Broadway in Manhattan, COVID-inspired open streets, to PARK(ing) day and other tactical urbanism experiments, there is a swell of efforts to reclaim streets for people. One of my favorites is from Vinnova in Sweden, led by their former Director of Strategic Design, Dan Hill, that involved prototyping new wood-based structures to turn streets into playgrounds, cycling infrastructure, and outdoor living rooms. The video below explains it in more detail, but the basic idea was to build high-quality prototypes of large-scale street furniture, deploy them in real streets around the country, and then use the findings from those prototypes to shape road policy. Thoughtful and highly public prototyping as in this example from Sweden is a critical tool for collectively figuring out what feels right in response to technological change.
The new question of where vehicles will be charged creates an opportunity to look at basic urban elements like streets, curbs, and plazas from a fresh perspective. If we’re going to consider asking these spaces to do the work of vehicle charging, maybe they can do other things too? And maybe those other uses might be even better suited to the lives of the people who live and work nearby?
It’s easy to disregard a snow-covered car charger in a place that expects snow every single year as the result of a lazy or uncaring thought process, but I prefer to see it as a prototype. The experience of this charging installation tells us that there has to be a better way to get kilowatts into cars. There must be a better norm for charging vehicles in the central business district—one that does not involve the absurd performance of parking no more than four cars in dinky parking spots immediately outside the front door of a 727-foot skyscraper.
The thing about prototypes is that we don’t expect them to work out perfectly; we expect them to teach us something. In this case, what the snowy charger tells us is that bolting new types of infrastructure onto old streets is unlikely to produce a satisfying solution; that what works in California might not work as well in Michigan; that the transition to electrification is as much experiential as it is infrastructural; and that the work of urban technology is by no means easy.
These weeks: Career services. Studio review formats. Protogrant. Admissions. 🏃