Everyone is, or everyone should be, worried about climate change. All hail the electric car drivers! However, not all of us can avail ourselves of these wondrous vehicles, and much must change before we can.
I am not writing this to bleat on about how living on a main road in London, without off-street parking, makes it less feasible to go all-electric, but rather to shine a light on a sad fact of life; not everyone who cares about the environment is a nice person…
I was recently in an all-electric Uber, the driver of which lives in Hackney. We got talking about the practicalities and apparently, unlike where I live, there is an abundance of charging points in Hackney. However, apparently, EV drivers think nothing of leaving their vehicles parked at a charging point, sometimes for days on end. How selfish is that?
The report “Clearing the Air” by Shaun Bailey suggests that Road Rage is potentially being replaced by Charge Rage. A statistic published by the DoT a few years ago suggested EV sales are increasing by 172% every 5 years (though still only account for around 3% of all cars - March 2023). The report goes on to recommend installing an additional 1.6k rapid charging points for London ASAP, but that won’t even touch the sides if self-interested EV owners hog them.
As far as I can tell, from my admittedly scant research, you stop paying for the electricity as soon as your car’s battery is full: so where is the incentive for the solipsistic among us to move their cars once charged? I can’t believe I am suggesting this, since I have more than a reasonable proportion of anarchist in me, but why not keep the meter running? Would that not go some way toward meeting the £30+ million we Londoners are going to have to find to fund the free parking for the selfish?