Five per cent of York car parking spaces to become electric charging stations

The council is set to make at least five per cent of its parking spaces at all car parks into superfast electric charging points – by 2023.

And all council vehicles are set to become greener – as the local authority bids to reduce carbon emissions from its fleet of 535 cars and vans by a third.

Senior members of City of York Council are set to get an update on progress to reduce CO2 emissions across the city – after councillors declared a climate emergency in March 2019.

Plans to upgrade the city’s electric vehicle charging network include installing chargers at five per cent of bays across the city.

40 charging points

A report says in 2014 there were 1,510 charging sessions, but by 2018 that had increased to 13,695. And that, as a result, drivers can find it difficult to recharge.

There are currently 40 fast charging bays in York – the report says the city needs more.

It adds: “The difficulty in finding an available charge point has been compounded by unreliability, which resulted in less than 50 per cent of the infrastructure being operational in early 2019.

It says this was down to the points not being proactively maintained and breakdowns.

Under the plans – the fees for charging will be increased to 20p per kWh for fast chargers and 25p per kWh for rapid and ultra-rapid chargers.

And people who park in the bays without charging their cars could be fined – with time limits also imposed for the spaces.

Greener and cleaner city

Cllr Andy D’Agorne, executive member for transport, said their strategy will provide a “high quality charging network that meets the needs of residents, fleets, through traffic and commuters”.

• To guarantee the best result for residents, we plan to continue to own our charging network.

  This allows us to plan how the network will grow, set tariffs, makes us directly accountable and enables us to deliver next generation chargers as quickly as possible.

Councillors will also be invited to agree to plans to replace the authority’s fleet of vehicles with low emission versions over the next four years.

Cllr Paula Widdowson said: “We’re committed to creating a greener and cleaner city. Key to achieving this is our ambition to reduce carbon emissions to zero by 2030.

“Introducing a new green fleet to our waste, highways and housing teams will go a long way to achieving this goal.”