Toronto wants you to drive an electric car — but only on its terms

NationalPost.com
June 15, 2017
Chris Selley

When it comes to greenhouse gases, Toronto has some remarkable ambitions. Should city council adopt the TransformTO staff report, the city will be pursuing — at least nominally — nothing short of revolution. The report envisions the number of people who commute by car will drop from two-thirds to one-third in 30 years, and the number who walk or cycle will triple to 35 per cent. By 2050, furthermore, “100 per cent of transportation options — including public transit and personal vehicles — (will) use low or zero-carbon energy sources.”

Canada is a distinct laggard on the electric vehicle front: according to the International Energy Agency, the market share in 2016 was just 0.6 per cent — significantly behind the United States (0.9 per cent), never mind the Netherlands (6 per cent) or Norway (29 per cent). But Norway tops the table; getting from there to 100 per cent by 2050 is a bold target for any jurisdiction. And for Toronto … well, meet Todd Anderson.

Anderson lives in Riverdale. He works in the electricity industry. And he is evangelical about his 2017 Chevrolet Volt: “It’s awesome. I can beat a Lamborghini off the line because of the torque. I never have to make oil changes. I never have to go to a mechanic.” He fills the reserve tank so infrequently, he says, that he doesn’t remember which side of the car it’s on. In addition to all the money he saves, he says he enjoys buying clean surplus power from his home province, at off-peak hours, that would otherwise be sent off to the U.S. at a loss.

As one of the city’s 110,000 street parking permit-holders, however, Anderson faces an obstacle: getting the juice from the charging station he installed on his front lawn to his vehicle. It’s not an especially daunting challenge, admittedly: traversing the width of the sidewalk. But Anderson has a dead-easy solution to avoid tripping hazards — one he borrowed from Berkeley, Calif.: he would pay a contractor to cut a little trench through the sidewalk for the cable to run through, and install a sturdy grate atop it. Half a day’s work at the most, surely.

The city wants none of it — though Anderson says remarkably understanding traffic-enforcement officers did stop ticketing him after an initial blitz last year. Instead, five years after City Council supported a charging station pilot program that just never happened — whoops! — some councillors are determined again to have the city bridge this gap. In the fall, staff are set to report back on options for expanding charging stations in both public places (schools, parks, Green P lots, city rights of way) and private (“residential developments, parking lots, industrial, commercial and retail sites”).

Coun. Mary Margaret McMahon brought forward the idea to resurrect the initiative, but she isn’t sold on Anderson’s solution. It could be “tricky,” she says. Better would be for the city and Toronto Hydro to team up and install charging stations on existing power poles in neighbourhoods like Riverdale, and set aside spaces for electric vehicles. And she’s right that it could be “tricky.” Parking politics are always at least tricky in Toronto; often they’re downright ferocious.

Anderson tipped me off to two other rogue DIY front-yard/curbside chargers in the Danforth-Riverdale area. One is actually buried beneath the sidewalk and pops up on the grass fringe next to the curb — on city property! — as a plastic pipe with a lock on top of it. It’s elegant and unobtrusive, and couldn’t have cost much money. But to scale this model up you would have to essentially reserve permit parkers a space in front of their own homes. People would howl.

Mind you, this is Riverdale. Are electric vehicle owners not entitled to superior parking options purely by dint of moral superiority? Is the city trying to push people toward electric cars or isn’t it? Anderson doubts many are going to want to charge their cars overnight in school parking lots and other disused public spaces. It’s certainly a fraction of the incentive curbside charging would offer, and would doubtless come at daunting public expense — and interminable delay — that individual Torontonians would not incur.

If the parking police, of all people, can find their way to tolerating Anderson’s solution, surely it shouldn’t be beyond city councillors. In the meantime, we should salute this scofflaw ingenuity. In the short term, at least, it is far more likely to get the job done than City Hall.