Burlington MA "Planning Board" needs to hear from the Tesla community at their next meeting on 7/15 @ 7pm. Will you join via Webex to get your voice heard? The issue is that the board has asked Tesla and Simon Malls to make 33% of the charging spots available for any car (ICE or otherwise) to park 'short term.'.
Meeting 7/15/21 - 7pm - Webex instructions
Meeting number: 173 253 3661 Password: 1645
Please, comment below if you will join me on this virtual call. When it gets closer to the date/time, I will update if I learn more. Here is the speech that I plan on giving:
The 5/27/21 Planning Board meeting minutes had this stated on bullet point 2D regarding the Tesla Superchargers at the Burlington Mall:
4 of the 12 stations should allow for short term parking as well.
This new ‘planning board’ requirement will now require 33% of the spots to be co-utilized for non-charging... . Meaning, anybody can park any type of vehicle there for any reason and utilize the spots while they shop at the mall. If I understand it correctly, there are over 5,700 parking spots at the Burlington Mall. Why do 4 of these precious EV charging spots have to made for 'short term parking' as well?
There is a well known term for this in the EV world, and it is called “ICEing”. That is, the act of parking in a space intended for electric cars, without making use of, or having any need for, the charger. In other words, a car with an internal combustion engine (known as an ICE vehicle) using a parking space reserved for charging electric cars.
I would like you to picture this for a moment: You are on a long drive back from vacation and your car is low on battery. You have an EV, so a gas station is not an option, you look on your Tesla screen and it says: "Burlington MA - 4 out of 12 stalls open" So you pull into a Tesla Supercharger at the Burlington Mall thinking 4 spots are open because the Tesla app/screen said they were open. You arrive and find ZERO spots open because all these stalls are taken by "gasoline cars" that parked there because the sign says: "short term parking allowed". You now have to sit there for an hour waiting for the change to start to charge. For the board members that own gasoline cars: How mad would you be if you pulled into a Shell gas station and there was 4 cars blocking the gas pumps because their owners are eating lunch at the restaurant next door?
You may not know, but Tesla does everything possible to encourage people to not park at Superchargers if they are not charging. How? Once the car's battery is full, if one continues to leave one's car plugged in, you would be charged an idle fee of $1.00 per minute. Believe me, that is a huge incentive to move the vehicle so others can charge. What the planning board is doing is the opposite – encouraging people to park without charging.
It is true - Tesla will not police the spots... But, if the spots are labeled: "For EV active charging only", people with gas cars will not generally park there. Yes, you get some people that want to be jerks and park there anyways... but that is fundamentally different then having Burlington's Planning Board request that 33% of the spots be utilized by gas cars and putting up signs stating this. You may or may not know, but another mall in town, the Burlington Crossroads Mall, had the same problem with their 2 EV chargers. The signage said: “Short Term Parking allowed” and it created a mess and caused all sorts of ill will and problems between gas and EV vehicles. Once the mall changed their sign to EV charging only, the problem went away.
I also would be remiss if I didn’t point out that on the state level, the MA state legislature has passed law (Chapter 448 of the Acts of 2016) allowing local towns to enact fines of up to $50 for parking in EV spots. Why would the Burlington Planning board do the exact opposite and encourage short term parking here?
Summary: If the Burlington Planning Board makes "short term parking" a requirement of the permit for the Burlington Mall, that would be a disaster. I highly suggest that you revisit this and change it to: "Only EV's that are actively charging are allowed to utilize these spots".