Powering the transition: Public charging stations and electric vehicle adoption in Montreal, Canada

Abstract

With an increasing interest for electric vehicles (EV) and the associated charging needs, understanding how public charging infrastructure networks impact the adoption of such vehicles is central for planners and policymakers. While most studies are conducted at the regional or national scales, urban contexts present specificities for the deployment of these networks, given the scarcity of private parking spaces and the strong competition for land. Using data from a survey (n = 642) conducted in Montreal, Canada, this work investigates the influence of public charging infrastructure accessibility on EV adoption in an urban context. Three measures of accessibility are analyzed: 1) objective (number of charging stations near home), 2) perceived (perceptions about the current public charging network), and 3) prospective (expectations on the public charging network in five years). The findings reveal the importance of perceived and prospective accessibility measures as opposed to objective ones, and thus demonstrate that the deployment of public charging networks is an issue tied by perceptions. We also find that non-EV owners underestimate their accessibility to public chargers, thereby illustrating how perceptions may vary across individuals. The results suggest that, in addition to expanding the public charging network, efforts aiming at better informing citizens on the presence and the locations of these charging facilities could contribute to increasing EV adoption. This study highlights the importance of perceptions and expectations and provides a nuanced understanding of how integrating accessibility-based policies into electrification plans might speed up EV adoption in metropolitan areas.

Keywords:

• Electric vehicle (EV)
• accessibility
• public charging stations
• perceptions
• urban network

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the Electric Circuit and Hydro-Québec for providing essential data with respect to Montreal electric charging network. They also thank the team of IT technicians at Polytechnique Montreal who have helped tremendously for disseminating the survey. This study is part of a research cluster on smart cities and mobility, funded by Jalon Montreal; and Mitacs.

Declarations of interest

No potential competing interest was reported by the authors.

Ethics approval

This study was ethically approved by the Research Ethics Board (REB) of Polytechnique Montreal (approval number: CER-1920-50-D). An informed consent form, which contained information about the research and the anonymity of the collected data, was given to all survey participants.

Notes

1 EVs include both battery-electric vehicles (BEV), 100% powered by electricity, and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV), a development of hybrid electric vehicles (HEV) that allows charging the battery from the electrical grid.

2 Results based on participants’ primary (most frequently used) car. A participant can only belong to one category.

3 In gravity-based measures, a weight is assigned to each “opportunity” according to the travel time from the origin, using a travel time decay function (Boisjoly & El-Geneidy, 2016).

4 Hydro-Québec, the electricity supplier in Quebec, calculates a cost of $2.27 to drive 100 km in an EV (if charging is done at home) while this cost rises to $10.65/100 km for a gasoline-powered vehicle (assuming a price of gas of $1.50/litre) (Hydro-Quebec, 2021)

Additional information

Funding

This study is funded by Mitacs and Jalon Montréal.