This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate desk cooperation.
As he rolled up to a Tesla charging port, Illinois Republican Senator Dan McConchie grimaced that wheelchair users like himself couldn’t use it — or any of the others at the gas station where he was filming Instagram role. They were all placed on an elevated surface that he could not easily reach. McConchie has a state bill to improve applicable accessibility standards, including electric car chargers. But it’s a national problem: Electric vehicle charging stations are often inaccessible, despite being designed and built decades after the Americans With Disabilities Act, or ADA, became law.
By April 2023, the Department of Energy reported, there were more than 140,000 public EV charging ports in the US, up from about 80,000 just three years earlier. The number of charging ports accessible to disabled drivers is not easy to determine, a problem in itself; Department of Transport data estimated that half of disabled adults under 65, about 10 million people, drive themselves. By 2030, there will be more than 25 million electric vehicles on US roads, according to the industry group Edison Electric Institute. This includes a growing share of more affordable plug-in hybrids, driving even more demand for charging infrastructure. But for drivers with disabilities, inaccessible chargers make switching much less attractive: In a 2022 UK surveyalthough two-thirds of disabled drivers planned to go electric, most — more than 70 percent — said concerns about inaccessible infrastructure were taken into account. And in a society that sees EVs as the key to a more sustainable future, the proliferation of inaccessible chargers indicates that it is disabled. people were left behind.
Adam Lubinsky, of the architecture and design firm WXY Studio in New York, has worked with New York State to find ways to make future EV charging stations more accessible. “If we really want to move the needle and get to a place where we’re actually driving electric vehicles, we need to put them in the public realm,” Lubinsky said. In a city like New York, that means placing them on sidewalks so residents from different neighborhoods have reliable access. “Once they are in the public realm, we have to make sure they are like universally accessible design as possible.”
Public charging stations provided by private entities, such as the more than 2,000 operated by Tesla, are supposed to be accessible, according to the American Access Board, an independent federal agency focused on making infrastructure and services more accessible to people with disabilities. The agency is developing enforceable accessibility rules for charging stations, but there’s no estimate for when those standards will go into effect, said Juliet Shoultz, an access board transportation engineer and accessibility specialist who helped create its accessible design recommendations for EV charging stations. Meanwhile, nothing stops firms like Tesla, real estate developers or local governments from reaching out to the board for technical assistance.
The devices themselves, not just their locations, could be made more accessible, says Dak Kopec, a University of Nevada, Las Vegas architecture professor who focuses in part on how different health conditions shape our ability to use the built environment. Kopec has concerns about how aging people, or those with disabilities that cause muscle weakness, such as multiple sclerosis, will be able to operate the charging cord — especially while balancing something like a walker.
“These are all things that need to be considered as we begin to look at the design of these stations,” Kopec said.
Shoultz also looked at existing, enforceable requirements — not specific to EV chargers — under the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Rehabilitation Actand the 1968 Architectural Obstacles Act. Under those rules, chargers must be at a height where people using mobility devices can reach the power cable; they also need a clear and wide path with which people with walkers, for example, can reach them. Chargers that rely on screens need speech output for people with low vision, and other communication features for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Under the ADA, for example, the highest operable part of a charging station must be no more than 4 feet off the ground. As with many accessibility issuesShoultz says that enforcement “would probably be by someone filing some kind of complaint.”
It is not always easy to come up with more effective ways for disabled people to access EV chargers. Many are on raised platforms in car parks. Car-to-car differences mean accessible parking spaces may not necessarily become EV stations. Build more municipal chargers on sidewalks near pedestrian ramps can enable wheelchair users to integrate more easily. These loaders will also help clear sidewalks blocked by the long, sturdy lines of household chargers which is used by some drivers without garages.
Charging stations are not the only accessibility issue for electric vehicles: If Business Insider reported last year, there is not a fully wheelchair accessible EV, with a large door opening and entrance ramp, on the US market. (The more accessible Volkswagen ID Buzz will not be launched in the US until almost 2025.)
That’s no reason to delay the pursuit of accessible EV charging, Kopec says: “Transition costs more than just doing it the right way to begin with.”
