An electric car does not
“fill up” as quickly as a gasoline car.
Gasoline is such an energy marvel.
You just pour into your tank and “Voila!” you can drive for hundreds of
miles. Of course, this convenience is
the magic of fossil fuels and why we are so loathe to switch to alternative
fuels. A battery, on the other hand,
takes some time to recharge, which is why recharging stations are not located
at gas stations. There is nothing to do
at a gas station while your car charges, unless you really love fountain
drinks, Ding-Dongs, and dirty restrooms.
Car charging stations are best
located where people hang out for a while.
Georgetown was pretty smart about their charging stations. There are a couple at the recreation center,
one at the library, and two separate locations downtown. (There needs to be one at Wolf Ranch as well,
and at Southwestern.)
Every new technology develops
an etiquette for its use, but sometimes that etiquette is slow to appear. The etiquette for cell phones is still
evolving, which you know if you have ever tried to talk to someone who is using
his cell phone under the table, a situation which makes me want to grab the
phone like a teacher confiscating a furtive note passed between students. “Now Jeremy and Marissa, let’s share your
little private conversation with all the other children.”
So what is proper etiquette
for car charging stations? It should go
without saying that if you drive a gasoline car (yes even a hybrid), you should
never park in a charging spot. Even if
you resent the concept of electric cars and believe from the bottom of your
heart that God created parking places for pickup trucks, you should still never
park in a charging spot. Almost 96,000
electric vehicles were sold in the US in 2013, and more electric vehicles on
the road means more people are looking for a charge. Somebody might be arriving from another town
and counting on that charging station for enough electrons to get home. Round Rock Nissan sold 40 Leafs last year,
practically in Georgetown’s backyard.
There are currently over 400 Tesla owners in Texas. Leaf
owners are rather mild-mannered and usually don’t react if you hog the electric
parking spot, but you do not want to mess with someone who drives a Tesla.
Last week I took my Leaf to
the Arboretum. I can make it back from
the Arboretum on one charge, but charging allows for some extra side trips and
a margin of error. There is one charger
with two designated parking spaces in the parking lot behind Barnes and
Nobles. A Leaf was hooked up to the
charger but had finished charging, as indicated by the lights on the dashboard,
a code that Leaf owners can easily recognize.
The second designated space was occupied by an SUV, in spite of the fact
that the parking lot was virtually empty.
Let’s give the driver the benefit of the doubt and say that when he parked
absolutely no other spaces were available, and he must have gone into the
Cheesecake Factory whereupon he suffered a massive heart attack, and was even now
lying prostrate in the ICU, his recovery hampered by extreme guilt over preventing
me from charging my car. I parked on the
far side of the SUV, thinking that just maybe the cord would reach. Touching somebody else’s car in a garage
breaks some kind of modern automotive taboo, but the other Leaf was definitely
finished charging, so I unplugged it, swiped my own Chargepoint card, and tried
to stretch the cord past the heart attack victim’s SUV. It was not to be. The cord was about three feet too short. I thought about leaving a note but decided
that would not improve my karma, and besides, he had probably suffered enough
already.
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