Wednesday’s Headlines: Fast Tracking Fast Charging Edition
From the assignment desk (if you don’t mind being scooped): Today, at a Lower East Side garage, the city will unveil four super-fast chargers for use by electric car owners.
Ever the eager beaver, the Post decided to preview the 10 a.m. Department of Transportation presser about the four new spaces and the 24 more fast chargers that are coming to other city garages next year. But there’s a lot more to the story of electric vehicles and New York City — a lot more. The city will install another 76 fast-charging stations on public streets over the next year.
Count us as dubious. As we have reported (and others have opined) on our national site, electric cars may remove the guilt of driving, but they are certainly not a climate change silver bullet.
Plus, they do not solve the other problems that cars cause in cities: congestion, road violence, bad allocation of street space and, of course, aggression.
Meanwhile, amNY had its own story about electric charging, focusing on a ConEd grant to help the city fuel its growing electric fleet. About 11 percent of the city’s 29,718 vehicles run on electrons not gas. No matter how those vehicles are fueled, there’s too many of them and city employees do too much driving.
OK, off the soapbox. Time for the news:
- Joe Biden was in Queens on Tuesday, linking the floods to climate change and promoting his $1-trillion infrastructure plan (which, as we’ve covered in Streetsblog USA, would not do enough on global warming). (NYDN, NY Times, amNY)
- Nice to see the Post covering efforts to kill the “wrong way” LaGuardia AirTrain. The story wisely quotes Friend of Streetsblog John Kaehny of Reinvent Albany.
- The day’s carnage:
- You’d need a microscope to find Council Member Mathieu Eugene’s legacy in this Billy Richling story about the longest-tenured city lawmaker as he prepares to be term-limited out of a job. (Bklyner)
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