Our Study of Electric Vehicle / Hybrid Charging Potential in The Pocket

I’ve often thought about how further electric vehicle (EV) infrastructure will arrive in the neighbourhood, and even how many homeowners might be blessed with the ability to have their own EV charging station on their property – as we do for our EV.

So in April of 2021, Susan and I decided to count the number of parking spots in The Pocket that could potentially become charging stations for privately owned electric or hybrid vehicles. Initially we speculated that the total might get as high as 200. We were unprepared for the actual counted total.

So what criteria did we use to determine whether a property had a potential charging location? 

1. Private property - the location had to be on private property and have the ability to host a level 2 charger as an extension of the household wiring.
2. Garages – we counted spaces in one- and two-car garages but when we saw that a two-car garage was used for storage plus a car park we counted the garage as only one space.
3. Parking pads – parking pads were included if it was obvious that in the future a charger could be installed. Many parking pads were located on the front of the house adjacent to the street, and others were located off laneways.

Off laneway parking is a large fraction of the total amount of private parking available to residents. We drove all the lanes as well as the streets in The Pocket and counted the parking locations available. We were careful to attribute each potential EV parking location to an associated street and house.

We estimate our accuracy to be +/-3%; that’s about +/-14 spaces.

Our conclusion: There is plenty of room to grow EV usage in The Pocket supported by private property charging.