A method for deciding where a city's next chargers go, and what charging should become once electric cars are the default rather than the exception. Cincinnati is the case; the method travels.
Weigh who lives there, what they earn, how hard the roads work, and where chargers already aren't, and Cincinnati's next charging sites pick themselves.
Today's worries are range and charging speed. Adoption moves the problem to capacity, and to who gets left without a plug.
2021 figuresElectric cars are coming whether the infrastructure is ready or not. Every major automaker has put a date on the end of the gas car, and the 2021 infrastructure bill set aside $7.5 billion for half a million public chargers. The charging network has to grow faster than the fleet, and it has to grow in the right places.
Early owners rarely feel the gap. They tend to own homes with garages, so they charge overnight and worry mostly about long trips. Seven in ten American homes have off-street parking (The Economist, 2021). The other three in ten do not, and that is who a public network exists for: renters in dense neighborhoods, people who park at the curb, households buying an EV because that is what the dealer sells. They depend on a network that mostly does not exist yet. That is the bottleneck this thesis set out to get ahead of.
Source for the parking figure: The Economist (2021, December 9). A lack of chargers could stall the electric-vehicle revolution. The Economist's own source is Boston Consulting Group data.
Two lines of research run side by side. One reads the city; the other reads the owners. They meet in the synthesis below.
Spatial · HumanThe order matters. Literature first, then the questions and hypotheses, then two case studies to borrow from. GIS found the sites; a survey found the users; coding the survey produced values and principles; the principles scored the solutions; the city judged them. The flowchart is the thesis in one column.
Two published studies set the approach. A Dutch team had shown that publicly available GIS data can describe an urban context well enough to predict how charging stations get used. A Portland project had targeted the people most likely to be stranded: multi-family housing without access to transit. This thesis borrowed both, and pointed them at Cincinnati.
Four layers were reclassified onto a common scale and combined in a weighted overlay. Each earns its place for a reason.
Why equal weights. The thesis had no evidence that one factor should outrank another, so it used a neutral baseline: 25 points each, 100 in total. It says so directly, and names alternative weightings as the first thing future work should test.
Two more layers then filter the regional result down to local sites, both taken from the Portland study: multi-family housing outside a quarter mile of any bus stop, and the zoning found within a quarter mile of existing chargers, used as the signal of land use that supports a station. Sites that matched or beat the qualifications of current stations went forward. Four did.
The map says where. The owners say what for. With IRB approval, a 22-question survey ran for 14 days as a paid national Facebook ad and, with permission from the operators, as a QR code posted at four Cincinnati charging sites: the Cincinnati Art Museum, Findlay Market, the Fountain Square South garage, and the Clifton Court garage at UC. Eight minutes to complete, hosted on SurveyMonkey.
Who answered. 43 people, narrowed to the 37 who drive an all-electric car. They look like one person.
What they said. Asked what they like, they named cost of ownership, performance, and low maintenance. Asked what they dislike, the most common answer was "nothing," then range. Asked their biggest concern, nearly half chose "other" and wrote in "nothing" again, alongside cold-weather batteries and long trips into Canada. Range anxiety, the headline fear in the literature, came third at 19%. The people who already own EVs are not the people the network is failing.
Two personas, derived by contrast. The data describes the Current User: older, wealthier, suburban, charging in a garage overnight, whose problems are mostly solved. The Future User is who the sample does not contain, built from what the literature says is coming: younger, renting, in denser housing, buying an EV because it is affordable and the default, and dependent on public charging. The thesis is explicit that the solutions are for the second person.
The early adopter. Established career, close to retirement, a house in the suburbs with a garage, so charging is rarely a concern. Environmental conviction drove the purchase, and they will tell you so.
The next generation of owners, who in a few years will buy an EV because it is the affordable default. Still building a career, unlikely to own a home, likely renting in a dense neighborhood where the parking is on the street.
From thesis Fig. 23, rebuilt in HTML.
Each card states its own base. Q8, Q9, Q21, and Q22 count all 43 respondents; Q16 and Q20 count the all-electric owners who answered. Tallies under Q8 and Q9 are mentions, coded from the written answers.
The survey was coded into six user values. The values produced six design principles. The principles scored the solutions.
Values · Principles · ScoresEach proposal was scored against every value and every principle, one to three points per cell. The totals are honest about which ideas the research actually supports, and they do not line up neatly with the horizon they sit on.
Out of a possible 36. The highest-scoring idea is also the one the city called least feasible; see below.
The method and findings were presented to the City of Cincinnati and to Electrada, a charging-station contractor. Both favored the GIS work and agreed it would transfer to any city with similar data. Electrada had already been looking at Northside on its own.
Built for the Future User, staged by when the technology and the politics could plausibly land. Scores are from the matrix above.
3 to 35 years
Use the GIS method to put new public stations where transit is thin and multi-family housing is dense. Equip them with the Ford and Purdue cable that cools by changing phase, cutting a charge to under five minutes. Bill through a toll-tag sticker so payment is automatic. Until charging is that fast, build stations as destinations with shops and parks around them, not as stops.
Jumper cables for the electric age. A bi-directional cable and an app let one car give another enough charge to reach a station. Owners opt in to donate, set how much of their battery is on offer, and every transfer is logged. Every parked EV becomes a potential charging point.
For the dense neighborhoods where parking is at the curb: 120V and 220V outlets phased into on-street spaces as demand grows, with piezoelectric paving on busy streets feeding some of the load from the traffic and footfall above it.
Not a whole-battery swap: a small, standard reserve module in every EV that detaches without touching performance and carries enough charge to get home. Roadside services carry spares; drivers keep one in the trunk like a spare tire; stores sell them like AA cells.
Gas stations convert in stages as the fleet turns over: a quarter of pumps to chargers within five years, three quarters within fifteen. Never all of them, because some gas cars will stay on the road. Analysts expect most stations to be unprofitable by 2035 otherwise.
Stretches of road that charge the car as it drives, paid for with a flat road-style tax. GIS picks the heaviest-traffic corridors first. Charging companies could compete for lanes the way fuel brands compete for corners. The highest-scoring idea in the matrix.
Once cars drive themselves, they can charge themselves, the way a robot vacuum finds its dock. The owner never thinks about charge and summons the car back like a ride-hail. Charging infrastructure stops being a place you go.
A thesis is a method with its confidence stated. Here is where this one is thin, in its own words translated.
Read this before citing itUnderneath all five is one instruction the thesis gives itself: run this again when electric cars are common. With under 1% of the fleet electric, the norms of charging have not formed. When they have, this study will be confirmed or corrected, and either outcome is the point.