On East 2nd between Avenues B and C, one can sometimes catch sight of a yellow extension cord being thrown down from a window in a brick co-op, where it is then picked up by a man who pulls the cord through the bars of an iron fence, duct-tapes it to the sidewalk, and plugs it into his Lincoln Corsair. A block away, on East 3rd, another guy was recently doing this same choreography. “He’s a legend,” says a woman walking into the building who overheard me asking Joe McGinty about the setup. McGinty lives nearby and was walking his dog past the building when he first saw the cable, looped around the restaurant sign, crossing to a tree and down around the back of a Tesla. He said he admired the hustle, the grit, the problem-solving: “I thought, Okay, so someone’s found a way to do it.” Many someones, in fact. A Cybertruck owner on West 175th Street had his charging rig go semi-viral in a video last November and was blamed for a brief power outage this fall. In Crown Heights, an extension cord hooked around a brownstone’s parlor-floor window frame and looped around a lamppost is listed publicly on a map of local charging stations. Then there are the drivers who are hiding EV chargers so well you might not spot them at all — with outlets inside little free libraries, on utility poles, and in dog-poop-bag dispensers. But more on that later.
McGinty’s video of the setup on East 3rd Street.
To be clear, none of this is legal, and it’s happening for the same reason that New Yorkers double-park, block bike lanes, and buy gray-market weed: We’re a speedy city run by slow-moving bureaucrats. Right now, New York is both the wild west of unregulated DIY EV charging and a “hotbed of EV charging innovation,” per The Wall Street Journal’s reporting on how companies selling chargers are trying to fill a gap here. The basic problem is that New Yorkers don’t live like suburban EV owners, who pull into garages, plug in at home, and wake up to a full charge by morning. (It can take four-to-ten hours to charge a car battery off a standard 220-volt outlet for a home dryer.) About half of car owners here park on the street and depend on just 2,000 chargers, compared to Los Angeles’s 8,000 or Amsterdam’s 15,000. Some of New York’s are far from homes and businesses or work only with some types of EVs, like the Tesla chargers under the Best Buy on Atlantic. Some are wildly expensive becuase of upcharges for their speed and convenience or just wildly inconvenient with locations in private garages. (A Brooklyn EV owner considered paying $800 a month, for example, for access to a garage with dependable charging.)
There are some attempts to meet New York’s scale with charging hubs that offer more than a couple of chargers or faster charging, like a gas-station-esque model launched by Revel with five locations from Pier 36 in Manhattan to JFK. It’s pricier, since it adds fees for the speed of its superchargers — a feature one might appreciate more considering many stations can have long lines. (One driver told me he learned to wear running gear to charge up, since he’d have time while waiting to get in a jog.) At a few municipal garages, the city has similarly speedy chargers with rates that can be a third cheaper than the ones at Revel. But there aren’t enough of them, and they’re spread thin. (This fall, the Bronx got its first city charging hub with a grand total of eight chargers.) For street parkers, the city has installed just 50 street chargers with two hookups each, and they’re extremely popular, in use pretty much around the clock — except when they get blocked in by a regular old car.
The City Council is trying to build more. A bill now lingering in committee asks the Department of Transportation to look at retrofitting 400,000 lampposts to become EV chargers, much like London did. This seems pretty nimble and a good use of existing infrastructure and is perhaps politically savvy compared to the prospect of huge EV chargers blocking views out of multimillion brownstones, but it may not be simple. The city is against the idea because the lampposts don’t have the right voltage to charge a Cybertruck overnight and getting them there would require upgrading the electrical supply. That sounds slow. So does the first step in the council’s proposal: identifying which of our 400,0000 lampposts might support the upgrade. In short, we’re at the Borgesian stage of EV adoption known as Maybe Asking a City Employee to Make a List.
Voltpost says its chargers wouldn’t be tough to install and that even the upgrades to the electrical supply can be made in less than two hours per post.
Photo: NYCEDC
Other cities have taken a more direct tack: Oakland and Washington, D.C., allow the ad hoc extension-cord charger, publishing guidelines that spell out the requirements for the cords (outdoor rated) and the ramps that cross them (ADA compliant). But this assumes everyone does these things, and does them well, and that the city stays on top of enforcement — not a given. Plus burying a cable is safer, and cities from Boston to San Francisco allow property owners to just put a line from their building to the curb, a system that one start-up installs for free, splitting profits with owners — which might appeal to cash-strapped co-ops here. But in New York, there’s no system that allows buildings to install street chargers; only the city can, and very slowly at that. So some drivers have figured out a few tricks of their own.
Google Maps has been catching extension cords looped around windows and winding around lampposts.
Photo: Google Maps
“I just did it myself,” says Matt, a Brooklyn dad who has been hiding an on-street charger inside a dog-poo bag dispenser and, for obvious reasons, asked that I not use his real name. He’s a gadget guy, the son of an auto mechanic. Someone put him in touch with Alfred Hansen, a contractor who worked on the Times Square Toys ’R’ Us Ferris Wheel and the Battery Park Carousel, among other less glamorous jobs. “The weird stuff everyone else runs from — that’s when I get a phone call,” Hansen told me. He considered an EV street charger to be “a simple job,” and was tickled by how Matt intended to hide it: within a dispenser for dog-poo bags, the same one already used by the city.
The charger is easier to spot when it’s in use. Adriane Quinlan.
The charger is easier to spot when it’s in use. Adriane Quinlan.
The work took about a day and involved breaking up a sidewalk, laying a trench, putting in a protected line, then pouring cement for the new sidewalk (the power comes from Matt’s house, not the public supply). The total cost was $6,000, or 1/43rd of the cost of each of the city’s 50 public chargers. Unlike his anonymous client, Hansen wants to go public. “New York is supposed to be a leader in almost everything, and in some ways we’re not,” he said. Without a healthy system of on-street chargers, the city is incentivizing extension cords that can trip up pedestrians or overheat and cause fires. On the other hand, the charger he installed for the Brooklyn dad was built up to code for buried lines — it ran 18-inches below ground in a sealed pipe that’s rated for outdoor use, along with all the fittings. As for whether it’s legal, “the only thing we didn’t pull on this is a permit because there isn’t a permit to be pulled,” he said.
To start the power, all Matt has to do is flick open an app connected to the charger (one that’s generally marketed to people who want to preheat hot tubs). A camera on the box sends him a notification when the spot is empty, though he has never had a problem getting it on street-cleaning days. It’s all working so smoothly and the added cost is so minimal that he has been asking neighbors with EVs to let him know if they want to plug in. So far there are no takers. But as for the poo bags, which he keeps stocked, there has been, he says, “a measurable effect.”