EV only Parking. Is it the future?

[Jason71]

I visited a large workplace recently with with well over 1000 employee parking spaces but many many more employees than that and as a result the car park is always full from very early in the morning.
I asked if they had charging points. They had 2 ( it's a start) but they were full one leaf was plugged in but not even charging. just pretending to. You could tell by the lights on the charger that it was not even activated.
I spoke to the security people and they said it was a bit of a problem particularly that even if you genuinely needed to charge at the start of the day if you went out later to move your car when full there was nowhere to move it and you could not really leave your work to spend ages driving around the local area looking for somewhere to park, I parked in the visitors CP in the end not a big deal on this occasion but it started me thinking.
Lots more charging bays would be nice but that takes time and costs a lot. A short term answer would be dedicated EV Parking.
It goes like this. You find out how many employees have EV's and convert slightly more spaces than that to EV only parking. That way people won't park in the charging spots if they don't need to and will be happier to move when charged. Also by providing a few extra spaces which are always empty it acts as an incentive for other employees to think about switching. Not all incentives have to be financial. Time and convenience is a big motivator as well.
Obviously this has to be enforced but in a secure work CP where everyone has a pass you just issue the qualifying vehicles with a green pass. Anyone without a green pass in the EV parking gets a black mark. The security guys I met looked like enforcing that is something they might enjoy )
Personally I would make it BEV/ZEV only (screw the outlanders) but that's just me it still works either way I just don't want to encourage more PHEV sales for spurious reasons.
It would be very cheap. All you need is a spray can and a template to mark the bays. As EV adoption increases you keep adding more and more bays to keep ahead of the curve. The only issue I can see is what is in it for the car park owner. For a gov/council workplace there is "do the right thing". Might be a harder sell to private employers.
I think it could work in public car parks as well. For council run there is the incentive of all those juicy fines they could hand out for infringement. Not sure how you get privately owned public car parks to play along when they just want to fill the spaces and not have to worry about enforcement. Maybe the gov could get involved and mandate a proportion of dedicated EV parking in ALL public car parks. The number to increase each year.
This is not something I have ever really seen or heard of before. Anyone else come across something similar?
Would it work?

 

[Yev000]

It's better to just provide 3 pin plugs for x4 as many parking spaces and call them "EV"

That way you could just plug it in and forget moving it for a day.

The employees don't need to spend 15 min of their day re-parking. Which would likely cost more in terms of time lost than providing EV-only parking spots for re-parking. In your case it would also still encourage you to arrive early.

The whole 7Kw charger per parking slot is overkill. 2KW charges a model 3 @ 7MPH and after 8 hours of work you get 56 miles. If your commute is longer than that one way then you really need to reconsider your commute distance.

Another plus point for the employer is that it will cap the amount of electricity they give. Unless of course these are paid for points. In which case invest a single rapid charger that can do 50KWh so you can visit it for a top up and sell the electricity to re-coup costs.

 

[tsh2]

We seem to have something over 2 EVs per charger (12 chargers) - People tend to move at lunch when there is less pressure on parking, but the 11 kW chargers are handy, it means if I get in early, I can move before all the other spaces are gone, and 3 or 4 cars can use that slot in a day. More sockets would be nice, but it's kind of hard to predict the demand - doubling every year seems plausible.

I think type2 sockets score quite a lot higher on the long term reliability/safety (for the business) than a 13A socket, and there is not a lot of difference in installed cost between 3/7/11kW (until load sharing becomes an issue).

 

[WannabeOwner]

after 8 hours

If you work 8 hours. Plenty of our people don't, and of the ones that do many are only there half a day before/after visiting clients.

Cabling the whole car park, even if low amperage, is much more expensive than doing half of it and getting people to move at lunch time IME.

We have 11 EV chargers, and about 20 parking spaces. Not many EVs yet, but we would like to encourage them, and Government paid 50% (which they might not do in a year or two's time ...)

 

[ACarneiro]

Well, you don’t REALLY need a charger, I suppose.
If it’s an indoor park then it should be enough to just make a 3 pin socket available at each space and let people use their granny chargers.
Trickle charging should be all that’s needed, maybe?

 

[CMc1]

Wait until the BiK kicks in and more ”senior managers” in the workplace can’t charge because the bays are occupied with those pretending to charge/hogging chargers.
Rules will soon change and be enforced.

Unfortunately at the moment, awareness is poor since it doesn’t benefit those in charge.

 

[Yev000]

Cabling the whole car park, even if low amperage, is much more expensive than doing half of it and getting people to move at lunch time IME.

Well, company bureaucracy and creative accounting aside, an engineer charging £60/hour spending 15 min per day, every day, to re-park their car will get expensive fast. It's a perpetual cost.... Where as cabling is a one off cost and will have to happen eventually anyway.

The there is the 3 pin plug VS an actual wall charging unit, which is an order of magnitude more expensive times however many spaces you have. Even if you have to cable 4 times as many it will still be half the price of a single 7KW charger.

 

[j1mgg]

Canw get more petrol pumps at the work car parks aswell?

What incentives would companies get for having more chargers, or have more spaces available for people with EVs?

Unless there is something to be made out of it, I couldnt see a company doing it out of the good of the environment. On that, does anyone know if there is a discount for parking in Edinburgh, similar to London where you only pay, I think, 80p per hour, compared to £4.

 

[WannabeOwner]

I couldnt see a company doing it out of the good of the environment

We do ... apart from personally wanting to promote Eco, Employees see it as a perk (it only psychological, its peanuts a year in Cash terms), but all visitors see the chargers in the car park and are aware that we are an Eco Conscious company. One extra contract on the strength of that would pay for the whole shebang ...

Conversely, not doing it, and an existing customer deciding we should be Eco conscious and aren't ... "Costs 6x as much to get a new customer as to keep an existing one" and all that Jazz.

I reckon on this, and similar situations, "Fortune favours the brave". And government paid 50% of our install cost ... that won't last.