Recently, a team that includes Corey Harper, an assistant civil and environmental engineering professor at the Carnegie Mellon University School of Information Systems and Public Policy, received a grant from the Department of Energy to do research on EV charging infrastructure.

“We saw that, right now, in Pittsburgh, a lot of the charges are located in areas where there are either a lot of shops near the schools, or the Downtown area,” he explains to City Paper, referring primarily to the neighborhoods surrounding CMU and the University of Pittsburgh. “So, you know, pretty well-off areas.”

Harper explains that his DoE-funded research looks at creating “optimization tools” for cities, in this case, Pittsburgh and Seattle, to best determine where EV chargers should be located based on a number of factors.

Harper says that, while there’s a growing demand to adopt EV technology, Pittsburgh and other U.S. cities need to make the transition in an equitable way.