Shocker: FWIW was years ahead of the WaPo in pointing out the inherent racism of electric car mandates

Uh huh. One for each parking space, @ $2,000? $4,000 per? (Parking meters cost $200, installed)

It’s fair to say that the editors of the Washington Post don’t spend a lot of time reading back issues of this blog, so give them credit for independently noticing an inconvenient truth: there are neither garages nor street charging stations in the slums. Of course, lots of city dwellers of all races have to park to the street and will encounter the same problem, but it’s popular these days to focus on “BDM — Black Drivers Matter” — and boy, are they going to be hammered.

Here’s what the paper’s discovered: Without access to charging stations, Black and Hispanics communities may be left behind in the era of electric vehicles

Look at any map of charging stations in the United States, and in most of the big cities, what is immediately apparent are big blank spaces coinciding with Black and Latino neighborhoods. Electric vehicle advocates call them charging deserts.

While electric vehicle use is growing rapidly in well-to-do, mostly White communities, minority neighborhoods are being left behind.

This being the WaPo, of course, their proposed solution is another federal taxpayer-funded program. And If the term “charging deserts” doesn’t convince you, how about … “mobility justice”?

“If residents of the city cannot participate equitably in the EV market, that would be a failure,” said Stefan Schaffer, a strategist for the American Cities Climate Challenge at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “You want to make sure all communities can participate in the economy of the future.”

It’s a question, he said, of “mobility justice.”

But without easily accessible charging stations in Black and Latino communities, advocates in Chicago and across the country say, it will be hard to make progress. In urban neighborhoods where residents lack driveways or garages and must rely on street parking, public chargers are a necessity to persuade consumers to buy electric cars. Yet without EVs in place, there is no commercial incentive to install them.

Electric chargers on the street? Aside from supplying an unlimited source of copper for junkies to steal and sell for scrap, how long will these stations last? You might as well ask how long public toilets withstood attack before city authorities gave up the effort. For those of an earlier generation who can still remember payphones, do you recall the increasing difficulty of finding a working phone, one that hadn’t been destroyed by the deranged and the drug-addled? You won’t be goin’ nowhere in that fancy Chevy Volt, Brother.