Hendersonville City Hall

It’s great to see Hendersonville City Hall install two electric car charging stations. It looks like it may be a week or so before they are operational. Hendersonville have committed to placing charging stations at a dozen or more locations in Hendersonville. To see where read Hendersonville City Website.

Location of Blink EV chargers at City Hall

The charging stations are located close to where a number of city vehicles are parked when employees are off-duty. So it appears they are intended for city and employee use. This is all well and good. However I do question the placement of the two stations right in front of the lane where the truck picking up the city hall dumpster will need to maneuver.

Notice the Tire Tracks leading to the dumpster

One can see the tracks of the dumpster truck leading up to and right in front of the two charging stations.

One assumes the parking spaces will be marked parallel to the kerb and not perpendicular. The two charging stations are separated by about 12 feet which suggests such an arrangement.

Who Killed the Electric Car?

Hendersonville City had put in a budget request to purchase an Electric Vehicle for their codes department, but a public outcry forced the City to rethink and they have instead fallen back to installing EV chargers which are funded by a DOE grant. Hendersonville mayor Scott Foster was taken aback by the vitriol he received when the purchase proposal was made. The politics and emotions involved with electric vehicles are surprisingly fervent. The City would have received free fuel for the vehicle under the DOE grant, called the EV Project. Instead they will continue to pay for fuel.

Update 2012-06-16: The charging stations are now operational. Interestingly despite being new units they are running an older version of firmware that does not require a zip code to activate.