The Los Angeles city council has unanimously passed a motion that calls for the electrification of the city’s entire vehicle fleet. The Electric Vehicle Master Plan envisions adding more than 10,000 electric vehicles to the city’s fleet and building the appropriate charging infrastructure, according to Electrive.
“Historically, this city has the worst air quality in the nation thanks to freeways, sprawl, gas-powered vehicles,” council president Mitch O’Farrell said during a city council meeting on Wednesday. “The automotive age of the last century turbo-charged our descent into that dubious distinction that we all live with today, especially disadvantaged communities that bear the brunt of this degradation because of their proximity adjacent to major transportation infrastructure, thoroughfares, arterioles, freeways, underpasses.”
The goal is ambitious, to say the least. At the present time, the Los Angeles municipal fleet consists of exactly 24 electric sedans, 46 plug-in hybrid vehicles, and two hybrid street sweepers. Four light electric trucks are to be delivered later this year. “The city’s fleet has more than 10,000 city vehicles of various types. There’s a lot of work to be done over the course of the next few years,” O’Farrell said. It should be noted the city’s public transportation department had been a leader in the US in terms of adding electric buses to its fleet.
The cost of the initiative is unclear at the moment. According to NBC Los Angeles, Councilman Paul Krekorian, who proposed the motion, said the effort would be carried out in coordination with the LA100 initiative, which aims to make the city 100% carbon-free by 2035 and builds on the city’s prior pledge to eliminate tailpipe emissions by 2028.
The plan also calls for electric vehicle charging stations to be installed on the more than 600 properties of the Department of General Services. The city expects to need about 97,000 charging stations by 2030. In the last five years, the city has installed 350 electric vehicle charging stations, 140 for the city fleet, and 210 for the public and city employees at 19 locations across the city. O’Farrell hopes the city’s measures will provide an incentive for the private sector to also install charging stations.
Maybe this policy is pie in the sky, but policies do matter when it comes to promoting a transition to new technologies. There is no word on who will supply all those electric vehicles to the city or when they will be delivered. The important thing here is that the new policy would have been laughed out of the council chamber just a few years ago, proving that the EV revolution really is moving forward.
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