The federal Joint Office of Energy and Transportation has announced $43.7 million in grant funding for 25 projects around the country as part of the Communities Taking Charge Accelerator program which aims to grow at-home charging opportunities for cars, bikes, and other mobility devices, and expand electrified fleets.
Many of the projects to receive funding are part of innovative initiatives to advance charging where it does not yet exist in broad applications. The San Francisco Environment Department was awarded more than $1.2 million to help develop a pilot program to place electric vehicle (EV) and micromobility charging in public right-of-way areas like curbsides. This builds on the recently conducted Curbside EV Charging Feasibility Study to evaluate up to 44 curbside sites across the city, said Nicole Appenzeller, senior clean transportation specialist for the department.
The project will generate a “site suitability map” to include “up to 44 sites that have undergone readiness analysis and participatory community review,” Appenzeller said via email, noting 10 to 15 of these sites will be prepared for “pilot development.”
Curbside, multimodal charging hubs are expected to offer the kinds of charging infrastructure needed by owners of e-bikes, EVs and other devices that do not have access to home charging.
Curbside EV charging “is a topic we heard a lot of interest from, from communities around the country,” said Debs Schrimmer, the Joint Office’s senior advisor for community and urban charging.
About a dozen cities participate in a “working group” organized by the Joint Office as a place to share information related to setting up curbside charging programs. Some of the questions that come up involve permitting issues, site design for the placement of the chargers, and setting the right price rate for the spaces to ensure a regular turnover of vehicles.
“We’ve got a lot to learn,” said Schrimmer. “But I think we’re making some great investments.”
Other funding awards are targeted at expanding the use of devices like electric cargo bikes. Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) was awarded just more than $1 million to introduce electric cargo bikes into the the Pittsburgh bike-share program. Researchers at the university will “lead the development of planning tools, develop and implement deployment evaluation metrics, and provide overall project management,” Corey Harper, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at CMU’s Heinz School of Information Systems and Public Policy, said via email.
“The funding will be used to integrate a fleet of e-cargo bikes with an existing docked shared system, explore innovative approaches to charging, and assess the effects of this technology on congestion, energy use, emissions and economics,” he explained. “We plan to develop a road map that can be a key resource for cities, transport agencies, and operators interested in expanding existing micromobility fleets to include e-cargo bikes.”
Electric bikes are becoming an ever-expanding form of mobility in cities. They are credited with the uptick in cycling, according to the INRIX 2024 Global Traffic Scorecard, which tracks traffic congestion across the top 25 U.S. metros and in cities around the world. The report found cycling as a mode of commuting climbed 4 percent in 2024, but still remains down 5 percent from pre-COVID levels, largely due to remote work. However, the report called attention to Boston, where 8,000 more people biked to work in 2024 than in 2022, while in Portland, Ore., bike commuting increased 30 percent in 2024.
The increase in cycling trends is largely the result of the rising popularity of e-bikes, said Bob Pishue, a senior economist and transportation analyst at INRIX and one of the authors of the report.
“Without the e-bike, I wouldn’t see cycling growing that much,” Pishue said. “But with e-bikes, the possibility is there. It just opens up a ton of doors.”
With the e-bike comes the need to recharge the devices. And at-home charging for micromobility devices is increasingly needed as more e-bikes and scooters are purchased, often with the help of local incentive programs, Schrimmer said.
A project involving partners in Jersey City, N.J.; Minneapolis; Brooklyn, N.Y.; and Berlin, Germany, was awarded nearly $3 million to develop infrastructure hubs to provide both secure parking and charging infrastructure for personal e-bikes.
“If you live in a multifamily apartment building, maybe your building doesn’t have an elevator, and you don’t want to carry a heavy bike up the stairs, so looking at what are some of the best solutions so people can safely charge and park their bike [is] really important,” she said.
