A TRU professor is hoping to see more electric vehicle chargers in downtown Kamloops.
Michael Mehta says he reviewed Canada’s 50 largest cities using Plugshare and found Kamloops as one of only three without electric vehicle chargers in the downtown.
“For the downtown businesses that want to take advantage of this wave of electrification of vehicles, they are going to be losing out,” he said. “A lot of hotels and a lot of restaurants around the world are actually moving in this direction because they know that it can attract business.”
“Our downtown is suffering in lots of different ways, and I think that this might be one way to revitalize it.”
Mehta says the issue is something the city can easily rectify with a number of potential locations in the downtown.
“Certainly around the city hall area makes a lot of sense.,” Mehta added. “Various locations up and down Victoria Street that also work.”
“There needs to be a little bit of a systematic review of where these locations should be based on population and walking distance from then, and so on.”
Medicine Hat and Fort McMurray are the other cities without downtown electric vehicle chargers.
“The thing about electric vehicle charging stations is that unlike building a gas station which is a multi-million dollar venture, an electric charging station can typically be done for thousands of dollars.” he added.
“So you can do an awful lot of them and get quite a big result.”
The city recently turned down two subsidized EV charging stations in favour of developing its own strategy to encourage electric vehicles and bikes.