this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2026
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I think this might finally force cities to address all the issues with street parking. Owning a car is an individual benefit, so it's ridiculous that the rest of society has to provide public areas for car owners to park their belonging. It made sense for accessibility 50 years ago, when only few people had cars, but not anymore. There simply isn't room in the public space in cities for everyone to park their car.
It also seems that more and more parking lot these days are managed by parking companies, even a lot of those that used to be free. Car owners are gonna have to pay for using that space now. And since they're paying for it, they should also expect to be able to charge there.
In Copenhagen, they're currently talking about increasing the annual subscription by something like 500% to have a guaranteed parking in these places, because quite simply, the area could be used for other things that reflect the price of the city square meters much better than just storing inactive vehicles.
Tl;dr: Don't buy a car if you don't have a place to put it. Once you figure out where to put it, place your charger there. If you can't place your car anywhere in a dense city, perhaps public transport is a better option to begin with.
That's a very reasonable point of view and the problem is that many places are not reasonable. Yes, many cities got their shit together and have proper public transport infrastructure. Cars are optional there and it's easy to treat them as a luxury. At the same time many cities have terrible public transport and you can't get to work/school/store without a car. Yes, the right solution is to offer good public transport but most places will just shift the problem to the public. "You can't charge your car? Fuck you, not my problem". Mostly poor people will be affected by this, social exclusion will get worse.
The chargers are not the issue. They just need to be where the cars are parked.
If those cities don't have public transport they are going to need parking lots. It doesn't matter if the parking is free or part of the apartment complex or separate garages or whatever. That's where the chargers are going to be. The issue is only for those who expect to throw their car anywhere that doesn't have bollards preventing them from doing it.
I dislike paid parking as much as everyone else, but it has become an inevitable cost of owning a car - existing because there are too many cars. If you can't afford parking, then you can't afford a car. Car dependency is the real problem for poor people, because they also can't afford not to have a car.
Cities has a whole lot of barrieres for poor people, and the car, parking and chargers are really only the symptoms of everything that has gone wrong in unregulated urbanization. If the lack of chargers turns out to be the breaking point, then I'm all for using that as leverage to open up the debate of how poor people are supposed to even live there.