In one Canadian town, the issue is whether the parking space becomes a space for anyone, or whether it is reserved for a charger technician. No rule on this is written and one has to guess. What do you think?
In one Canadian town, the issue is whether the parking space becomes a space for anyone, or whether it is reserved for a charger technician. No rule on this is written and one has to guess. What do you think?
It is slightly ambiguous because if it is labelled as “for EV charging” and you have an EV parked there and it is not charging, you are supposed to vacate the spot. So - if the charger is broken, the spot should be vacant. I can’t see parking enforcement being able to really handle that though unless there’s a connection between charger and enforcement.
But in that case, an ICE vehicle should still never park there.
It’s akin to delivery-only parking on a bank holiday. You still can’t park there even though the shop is closed.
The entire issue: by-law, signs, reserved space, is built a charger that is working. The purpose of everything is to charge a car, not to prevent parking. Without a working charger, everything collapses and EV drivers are not affected at all.
The entire premise is built around the idea that the spot is reserved for charging. If the charger is broken, the simple answer is that nobody can park there, not that laws cease to apply and the spot can be ICEd.
Well if a charger is broken, it makes no sense to reserve the space for charging. A sidewalk analogy would be whether a sidewalk is “broken”. If 50 feet, or 200 feet of the sidewalk was missing, people would consider parking there.
Yes, if the charger is broken, it does make sense to reserve the space for charging. To maintain the standard of it being for charging only. If it is reserved for charging, but the charger is broken, then no one parks there until the charger is fixed. Unless the charger is being permanently taken offline, then the space should revert to parking for anyone.
This is because the charger being broken is a temporary status. If it turned into a free parking spot whenever the charger were broken, even if people didn’t vandalize the charger they could simply say “oh, I thought it was broken”, or “it was broken earlier when I parked here”.
“no one parks there until the charger is fixed”
I disagree. That is a waste of valuable space (real estate). If a driver has to park to read a sign (or figure out whether a station is broken), that is ridiculous. Ticketing officers can easily tell if non-activation is due to the station owner or the driver. If a transaction is the condition for parking, and the station owner cannot complete the transaction, the driver cannot be penalized for that failed transaction.
If I park in a bakery parking lot “for customers only” and go in to buy a loaf of bread, the baker can’t refuse the transaction because his oven is broken, and penalize me instead for parking without buying bread. The driver is not responsible whatsoever for the baker’s broken oven and it would be ridiculous for the baker to penalize him for parking with intent to be customer.
The baker absolutely could penalize the person for parking there if, after being unable to purchase bread, the car owner left the car in that spot as they walked around the rest of the town. No one is suggesting a car owner be penalized the second they park in the spot. But if they decide to stay there after discovering it is not a valid spot, that is on them.
If the space is reserved for customers, and customers cannot exist because of the malfunction, the space is reserved for no one and therefore not reserved at all.
I’ve seen chargers being left broken for over a year. In the meantime, there was no way to tell whether they’ll ever be back online.