As federal incentives and concern about climate change have driven more people to buy electric vehicles in the last few years, cities around the country have tried to reduce barriers to EV ownership by installing chargers on street curbs, lampposts, and public parking lots.
Philadelphia has not been among them. The city has done little to create charging options for EV owners who don’t have garages or driveways, and who are thus stuck figuring out how to access the city’s smattering of public or semi-public chargers in parking garages and supermarket parking lots.
However, it now appears that could change — and potentially much sooner than had been expected.
Emulating cities like Boston and New York, earlier this month the Office of Transportation and Infrastructure Systems, or OTIS, put out a call for companies to submit proposals to install EV chargers on curbs and parking lots around Philly, especially in disadvantaged neighborhoods.
OTIS wants all the work — installing and maintaining the chargers, and operating an app, payment system, and data dashboard — done at no cost to taxpayers. It’s also asking companies to hand over a percentage of their revenues to the city.
Installations could begin as soon as January, according to the city’s bid document.
“A huge imperative” to build more chargers
Officials at OTIS have previously seemed skeptical about inviting EV charging companies to do privately funded projects. They said they were focused on applying for federal subsidies for chargers, and on training residents as electricians to install and maintain chargers.
“What we’re looking at is ways that we can use these federal funding opportunities, and also build up internal city resources to expand that charging infrastructure,” Anna Kelly, OTIS’s senior policy advisor for electric vehicles and parking, told Billy Penn in July.
When asked about curbside chargers, Kelly described them as a “tougher design problem” than parking lot chargers. She also said the city’s transportation policy emphasized serving pedestrians, bicyclists, and transit riders over EV drivers. In the past, other officials have said the city itself is not interested in building public EV chargers, just as it does not build gas stations. That’s despite the city’s goal of zeroing out its climate pollution by 2050.
It isn’t clear how OTIS decided to put out the new request for EV charger bids. Kelly and other OTIS officials did not respond to requests for comment.
However, in an online meeting with potential bidders earlier this month, Kelly noted that there are now about 11,000 EVs registered in Philadelphia, or 1.3% of all vehicles. Statewide, the number of EVs is increasing “at a very rapid rate, almost 60% increase year over year,” she said.
“So there’s a huge imperative to provide publicly available charging infrastructure to support this growing population of EV owners,” she said.
Philly has only 145 public charging stations with 378 charging ports, per the U.S. Department of Energy, including some on gated parking lots that are not freely accessible.
“They’re very clustered in Center City, with some in the northwest part of the city,” Kelly said during the meeting. “We’re interested in making sure that we can expand that network of publicly available EV infrastructure to other parts of the city, to make sure that access to charging infrastructure is less of a barrier to folks that want to purchase or drive an electric vehicle.”
While 80% of EV owners nationwide charge at home, that’s just not possible for most city residents, she said.
“Around 70% of our housing stock is row homes, so the math around folks being able to park and charge at their residence overnight is pretty different for Philly,” she said.
National firms express interest
Representatives of about 15 companies listened in to the meeting. They included two large EV charging firms that already have private chargers in Philadelphia, Blink and Shell Recharge, and two startups, Itselectric and Greenspot, that were recently selected to install curbside chargers in Boston.
Other companies logging on to the Zoom meeting were Voltpost, a New York firm that installs chargers on lampposts; Flowbird, a parking app company; and Virginia charger maker InCharge Energy.
A few Philadelphia firms participated, including EV charging company MC ElectraPark, solar provider Solar-States, and construction manager Talson Solutions, which had multiple representatives join the meeting. Philadelphia companies get a scoring bump when the city evaluates bids.
During the meeting, one person asked whether funding from the federal government’s National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program will be available to subsidize the new chargers. Kelly acknowledged the city has applied for federal dollars, but said there’s no guarantee it will receive more grants, and bidders should “just think of it as the vendor covering those costs.”
The city bid document says bidders must specify the percentage of their revenues they’ll hand over to the city, and urges them to propose increasing the amount annually.
Kelly said there was no requirement for the number of chargers to be installed, that the city was open to selecting just one or multiple companies, and that the deal would operate as a concession allowing firms to do business on city property. She said city officials would work with the selected companies to do outreach to City Councilmembers and community engagement during the site selection process.
Companies must have a website and app where drivers can find open chargers, make payments, and ask for maintenance, and they must explain how they will meet a federal standard of making sure the chargers function at least 97% of the time.
EV drivers often complain about poor maintenance and charger availability due to technical failures. City Council recently passed legislation, sponsored by Councilmember Nina Ahmad, mandating maintenance of public chargers and allowing Licenses & Inspections to penalize companies whose chargers aren’t working.
OTIS is open to having the winning bidder or bidders install either Level 2 or DC Fast chargers, or both. Proposals cannot include gated parking lots, they should include a map of suggested charger locations, and they should explain how the project will employ historically underrepresented Philadelphia residents, Kelly said.
Proposals are due October 11.
Separately, the city and the Philadelphia Parking Authority plan to install chargers on a PPA lot in Northern Liberties next summer. The project is being subsidized by NEVI, a program funded through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. It will have two charging stations, each with two ports.
Officials have said they’re applying for additional federal subsidies that could lead to more stations being installed on city, PPA, or SEPTA properties in 2026 or later. PennDOT is allocating at least $14 million from the state’s NEVI funds for future charger projects in Philly.
