An Equitable EV Transition Leveraging the Scale of Ridehailing
Like many American cities, Rochester offers easy commutes for drivers, while low-income households without cars suffer from poorer access to jobs and air quality. To achieve their climate, health, and equity goals, cities must establish new norms of sub-20-minute trips by foot, bike, transit, micro-mobility or, when necessary, electric vehicles. These transportation solutions can't be successful if imposed top-down with marginalized residents asked for too little input, too late. Our team will instead work in equal partnership with disadvantaged communities, offering facilitation, technical support, and business model development, to guide the planning and implementation of transformational clean mobility solutions.
Community-designed projects will draw on a menu of zero-emission technologies, supporting programs, and infrastructure, including:
- mobility hubs that pair zero-emission options with other amenities;
- placemaking that brings destinations within reach of mobility alternatives; and
- street redesign that prioritizes those alternatives.
Our team will track changes to access, emissions, and community-identified indicators.
Our program replaces today's incremental, organic, single-stakeholder efforts and creates a scalable system that brings together key partners, including vehicle supply/operations (Drive Sally), deployment platforms (Uber/Lyft), infrastructure (BP/EA/EVgo), and grid integration (ConEd), with community and local government engagement, facilitation, research, and analysis (RMI/GCF/EPRI) to drive the local results that are essential and ensure the replicability of these results on a much larger national scale.
This whole-system approach will ensure EVs are the best choice for ridehail drivers, demonstrate that private investment in equitable charging infrastructure is profitable, and provide cities and utilities nationwide the tools to expedite charging infrastructure. To support enduring progress and establish replicability across low-income communities statewide, a jobs training program will prepare residents for quality careers in EVs and infrastructure.
Over three years, we'll deploy 1000 EVs and 100+ direct current fast charger (DCFC) chargers - the single, largest deployment of ridehail EVs in the US - providing sufficient observable data and process engagement to learn from and scale nationally. And this program establishes a critical charging infrastructure backbone, delivering 30 million clean miles per year, paving the way for NYC to achieve its climate goals.
We'll tackle key barriers by leveraging partner locations for charging infrastructure, ensuring affordable EV rental and charging costs for ridehail drivers, and speeding the utility interconnection and city permitting processes. By offering training and jobs to low-income individuals in public housing and installing critical public charging infrastructure across multiple low-income communities, we'll deliver both intense local and broad impact for NYC's disadvantaged communities.