Electric Bus, Car Charging Stations Planned

Rock stars and environmentalists rejoice: College Street will soon be home to four new electric vehicle charging stations, two for buses and two for cars.

The former will allow touring musicians to lounge comfortably in their air-conditioned buses without those vehicles spewing diesel fumes into the air above College Street.

The latter will allow local electric automobile owners to juice up their cars at the city’s first on-street charging spots.

Those double Downtown electric updates came at Monday night’s regular monthly meeting of Park New Haven, the city’s parking authority, at the authority’s headquarters at 232 George St.

The commissioners voted unanimously in support of entering the authority into an amended, $53,200 agreement with the Hamden-based engineering and design company Silver Petrucelli + Associates.

The amended agreement will have Silver Petrucelli design two new bus charging stations, one to be located outside of the College Street Music Hall and the other to be located just around the corner on Crown Street.

It also employs the Hamden-based company to design two new electric vehicle (EV) charging stations, to be located across the street from the Crown Street Garage on College Street.

Both sets of charging stations will tap into the Crown Street Garage’s electrical system, and both will require sign off from the city’s Traffic Authority before the city can begin construction.

“These buses idle a lot and they just spew out all their diesel fumes,” Park New Haven Engineer Jim Staniewicz said about tour buses that frequently park for extended periods of time on College Street whenever the music hall or the Shubert Theatre brings in big-name, out-of-town performers.

These private tour buses, he said, often have both diesel engines and battery-based generators on board. So with the new proposed bus charging stations, he said, the parked buses “don’t have to run their diesel engines. They can run off of the power that’s provided through these charging stations.”

Doug Hausladen, switching on the fly between his roles as Park New Haven’s acting executive director and the city’s director of Transportation, Traffic, & Parking (TT&P), said the EV stations will be paid for largely by a $15,000 United Illuminating (UI) grant that is currently before the Board of Alders.

While the city’s parking garages currently house around 23 different EV charging stations, Staniewicz said, these two proposed College Street locations would be the city’s first on-street EV charging stations.

The Traffic Authority will ultimately have to approve whatever regulations apply to these new EV charging stations, Hausladen said, including how much it will cost to park there and how long a vehicle can stay there.

The Traffic Authority will have the final say on the permit fees and parking regulations for the bus charging station spots, Hausladen said.

In fact, he said, TT&P and the Traffic Authority will have an extra wrinkle to resolve with the proposed Crown Street bus charging station, because that stretch of Crown Street is currently a two-lane, one-way road with no on-street parking.

Even though Crown Street is currently extra-wide with a four-foot shoulder, Hausladen said, the city will have to figure out how to close down part of the right-hand lane whenever a bus uses the charging station.

Hausladen described the bus charging stations as creating a sort of virtuous cycle whereby a touring performer visits New Haven, enjoys the comfort of his or her bus without exacerbating Downtown’s air quality, thereby boosting the city’s economy without hurting its natural environment.

“It’s a better experience for the performer,” he said, “who wants to return more regularly, who then puts butts in restaurant seats.”