But creating more charging stations, and especially more publicly accessible ones, is “the holy grail,” says Mike Nicholas, a senior researcher who studies electric vehicles at the International Council on Clean Transportation, a nonprofit research organization. A recent analysis by Nicholas and his colleagues estimates that the country will need 2.4 million public and workplace chargers by 2030 if it wants to meet its goals. Today, it has 216,000…

But the country also needs to focus on a more complicated issue—how to make charging viable for people who live in apartments or use on-street parking. A few years ago, Jeremy Michalek used a plug-in hybrid car for work. At the time, he lived in an apartment in Pittsburgh. If he wanted to charge his car at home, he had to snag the parking spot in front of his house, then snake a long extension cord up a flight and a half of stairs, to an outlet he could call his own. The thing created a tripping hazard on the sidewalk. Fortunately, he could mostly charge at work, at Carnegie Mellon University, where he studies electric vehicle policy as a professor.
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