Toronto’s flagging electric-vehicle project given a jolt as council adds more on-street chargers

A five-year-old pilot project has produced only nine on-street parking spots with $2-per-hour chargers.

Thestar.com
Feb. 4, 2022
David Rider

Toronto is getting a boost in electric vehicle chargers for on-street parking spots after city officials admitted they have let a five-year-old pilot project languish.

City council on Thursday voted to order Toronto Hydro, a partner with the city in the project launched in 2017, to add at least 17 more on-street chargers this year.

The move, proposed by Mayor John Tory, came after councillors grilled senior city officials on the ongoing pilot project intended to encourage EV adoption and help reduce tailpipe emissions contributing to global warming.

Coun. Paula Fletcher said Toronto-Danforth residents with no driveways or garages are clamouring for public charging spots so they can switch from gas-powered vehicles to EVs.

City staff told her the pilot project she helped create has produced 17 chargers across Toronto -- nine at on-street parking spots and the remainder at other sites, including Green P lots.

“I don’t know enough about the program to say if that’s sufficient or not,” deputy city manager Tracey Cook told Fletcher, who later said she is “embarrassed” at Toronto’s progress behind other Canadian cities in encouraging EV use.

Cook added: “That’s certainly not where we want to stay and we are committed to improving that number” of on-street EV charging spots.

Cook’s boss, city manager Chris Murray went further, saying nine is “nowhere near the number” of spots the pilot project should have produced, adding he’ll work with Toronto Hydro chief executive Anthony Haines on an effort “much more focused and with better results.”

Staff from the city and city-owned Hydro were more upbeat about the pilot project last March when the Star profiled it. It was suffering low usage partly, experts said, because there are still way too few $2-per-hour chargers on residential streets to encourage Torontonians to invest in an EV.

“We urgently need a reliable and convenient network of on-street charging across Toronto to help speed up adoption of EVs,” Ian Klesmer, strategy and grants director at The Atmospheric Fund, told the Star then.

“Right now we’re not even close to hitting Toronto’s goals of 3,000 public ports by 2025 and 10,000 by 2030,” he said. “Vancouver and Montreal have more than twice the public charging stations per person than Toronto. We hope this pilot is just a first step in a rapid build-out of on-street charging.”

Tory rejected concerns that Toronto’s electrical utility is slowing, rather than accelerating, city progress toward a climate-change goal of jump-starting EV ownership to one-fifth of all vehicles in the city by 2030.

The mayor said Toronto Hydro’s Haines raised concern about the “seven-figure” cost of installing 17 or more on-street chargers this year, but that the city and its utility will figure out how to accommodate the cost.

Council voted to shift responsibility for the on-street chargers and expansion of the program to city-owned Toronto Parking Authority, which operates the Green P parking garages and metered on-street parking spots.

City council also approved the addition of 25 photo radar cameras to the 50 currently snapping photos of speeding vehicles across Toronto.

The “automated speed enforcement” devices started appearing, two per ward, in school and safety zones in July 2020. By the end of 2021 they had triggered the issuance of more than 336,000 tickets.

Preliminary findings from researchers at the Hospital for Sick Children found a significant drop in the percentage of vehicles speeding in 40 km/h and 30 km/h zones after the cameras were placed in their first locations.

But advocates say that, given the plague of pedestrians and cyclists killed by drivers on Toronto streets, several hundred or even thousands of cameras should be deterring speeders, including on wide suburban roads that are especially deadly.

City council also voted to not make any major changes to its seven city-owned golf courses, rejecting calls from some public-space advocates to repurpose the green spaces for urban farming or other uses.

Councillors also rejected a city staff proposal to change Dentonia Park course on Victoria Park Avenue from 18 holes to nine holes to free up space for other uses, after a backlash to the proposal from golfers.

The city will instead look for ways to encourage more public use of the courses, five run by the city and two contracted out, including non-golf activities such as hiking and cross-country skiing in the winter.