MAYBE PLACE A FEW BETS ON EMERGENCE?

That calls for too much self-discipline.  Transportation for America's Chris Rall sees all sorts of opportunities to order his fellow travelers around.  "With the electric vehicle transition, access to transportation options like transit, walking and biking needs to come first. But—for smart growth and equity—equitable access to charging for apartment dwelling car-owners is an essential part of the picture."

Keep reading, dear reader, it gets better.  You can't have Dementia Joe's beautiful transition in isolation.  There are too many boxes to check first.

Much of the group-think around the transition to electric vehicles comes from the picture in many people’s heads of the suburban built form, where every house is a detached single family home with its own garage where the electric vehicle (EV) sits charging.

Guess what? Not everyone lives in a single family home. If we’re going to integrate the EV transition with smart growth, and make it more equitable, we have to make sure people living in apartments have access to great mobility options. Apartments are good for smart growth, and low income and Black and Brown communities disproportionately rely on them for housing. So, if we want to advance smart growth and equity, there shouldn’t be a mobility penalty for living in apartments. Let’s talk about how to approach this issue.

I'll give him partial credit for seeing the limits of issuing ukases.

For some EV enthusiasts, it’s tempting to focus on EVs first and start with the idea that apartment buildings should be required to have plenty of parking with access to an EV charger in every spot. Not so fast! Parking requirements significantly increase the cost of housing, make it difficult to create walkable environments, and incentivize car ownership and driving which increases emissions.

There is not enough space here to lay out all the problems with off-street parking requirements. Go here, here and here to learn how these outdated and misguided regulations increase housing costs, hamper efforts to create more walkable neighborhoods, generate traffic and more. Suffice to say that the best practice is to eliminate off-street parking requirements, allow the market to determine the number of parking spaces, and focus public standards and investment on biking and walking infrastructure and transit service.

Eliminating off-street parking requirements won’t change the world overnight. In most communities and particularly car-centric ones, developers will build apartments with parking even if they aren’t required to, and many residents will still own cars. Recognizing that it takes some time for communities to become less car-reliant, we need to address charging, the biggest impediment to the EV transition.

How do you reconcile the reality that those batteries require recharging, that dedicated recharging stations make more sense in houses with garages and apartments with off-street parking, and that Our Political Masters, particularly in states run by Democrats, seem bent on forcing as many people as they can to buy those limited-range latter-day Baker Electrics. Which they aren't! "Far too much of [the transition] is built on hope rather than reality."

So, too, with equitable charging.

When a municipality eliminates minimum off-street parking requirements, builders still put parking in many of their projects. These buildings will be around for 50 years or more, and we need to be at zero emissions by 2050. With EV adoption doubling every two years, we’re risking a drastic shortfall of charging options for apartment dwellers much sooner, one that could see apartment dwellers relegated to gas-powered cars.

One of the benefits of EVs (if you can charge at home) is that you never have to go somewhere to fuel up unless you are driving more than your car’s range in a single day. Since American drivers cover an average of 37 miles each day, and less than one percent of trips exceed 100 miles, EVs are much more convenient and much more affordable to fuel than ICE vehicles, if you have at-home charging.

For EV-owners who can’t charge at home, convenient, affordable, publicly accessible neighborhood charging is really important. We’ll talk in greater detail about getting public charging right in the next blog in this series. However, it’s worth noting that of the $7.5 billion in the infrastructure law dedicated to public charging, 83 percent is dedicated to fast chargers out by the highway, leaving comparably few resources for public charging that serves those who can’t charge at home. This is very inequitable.

It’s pretty clear that all new residential parking spaces constructed from now on should have charging options. The cost of running electricity to parking as a retrofit is orders of magnitude more expensive, so we need to make sure any parking serving residential built today is EV-ready. In short, don’t require parking, but require parking to be EV-ready.

So much for relying on markets to determine the mix of on-street and on-lot parking, whether it's houses with attached garages or apartment complexes with or without frontage roads.  Once you've issued a ukase dictating that commuters buy electric cars, you have to issue ukases dictating that commuters have means to recharge at home for those commuting trips.  Put another way, you've made the parking mandates more stringent, haven't you?  And the mandates will keep on coming.

Congress and the administration can do a lot to support this approach. The Joint Office on Energy and Transportation (JOET) could develop guidance and sample building codes. The Department of Housing and Urban Development could include EV readiness as a criterion when prioritizing affordable housing investments. Besides fundamentally re-orienting the transportation program from highway expansion to better support transit, walking, and biking infrastructure, Congress could support JOET’s work on guidance and provide support for low-income multifamily housing projects to incorporate clean mobility options like EV carshare and affordable EV charging.

Sic semper tyrannis.

Any attempt at changing peoples' behavior by changing policy ought have an answer to Deirdre McCloskey's takedown of the Social Engineering Vice: "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" Because any allocative inefficiency leaves unexploited gains from trade, advocates of any attempt at a policy change -- whether to expand the power of government or to take functions away from it -- owes voters an explanation of whether the proposed change will in fact be cheaper to implement than the social benefits it attempts to harvest.

Haven't we had enough of Governance by Wise Experts?  Perhaps the best thing governments at all levels could do is go away.