Although the price tag is outrageously steep (about $50,000 if it were for sale in Canada), I am driving what appears to be a truly acceptable car – a Mitsubishi i-MiEV electric car – in a city where the mayor rides a bike for photo-ops, whole bridge lanes are barricaded off for bicycle riders and past mayors and city councils have diligently worked to rein in the automobile in every way imaginable.
Vancouver is a spectacular city, but car-friendly it is not. That's by design. Cars are at best a necessary evil here, at least among a large and vocal subset of the city's residents.
Decades ago, the likes of former mayor and later B.C. premier Mike Harcourt made sure Vancouver would not have overhead highways like Toronto's Gardiner, nor have city expressways like Calgary's Crowfoot Trail. Not here. You want to drive from A to B in Vancouver, you go stoplight to stoplight.
Harcourt has not been alone with this sort of thing, either. Virtually all city politicians since the 1970s have bought into this anti-car mentality.
As I zip past the Cambie Street city hall, where Mayor Gregor Robertson works, it's obvious that something is afoot here and it's more than an ad-hoc effort. Something resembling a plan is taking shape.
For instance, construction of the new Canada Line to the airport and Richmond has just ended, making Vancouver the first city in Canada with downtown-to-airport rapid transit.
And now Robertson, a former NDP member of the legislature and co-founder of organic juice company Happy Planet, has led Vancouver city council this summer to approve unanimously new regulations for electric vehicle charging stations.
The idea here is to begin addressing one of the major barriers to electric cars: recharging infrastructure. Vancouver is the first major city in North America to make developers include plug-ins for electric cars in at least 20 per cent of parking stalls in new condominium and apartment buildings, along with some city-owned parking lots. Price tag: between $500 and $2,000 a stall.
The city is also in serious discussions with companies involved in building and selling electric vehicles. Manufacturers such as Nissan and Mitsubishi have planted the flag here, along with others. And that's why I'm driving an i-MiEV on city streets. A car just like this will be in regular city service by November.
Mayor Robertson, of course, is a big fan. He says electric vehicles are becoming more common around the world and the city needs to be a leader in supporting them. Indeed, the city already requires one- and two-family homes to have plug-in vehicle capacity. After dealing with apartments and condominiums, the next step is to provide for electric vehicle charging locations in parking lots and even at various street locations.
Right now there is no place on the street for me to charge up my i-MiEV, but Mitsubishi Canada wants Vancouver to fix this. So the company has cut a deal to provide Vancouver with two production-ready, highway-capable cars. One will be used by the city, the other by BC Hydro. Fleet testing under real-world conditions should provide answers to questions about the practicality of zero emissions cars on a day-to-day basis.
The Vancouver initiative is, supporters say, the equivalent to: If we build it, they will come. That is, if the city fosters an electric vehicle infrastructure, people will buy the electric vehicles.
Groups like the Vancouver Electric Vehicle Association say it's a no-brainer. Once the charging infrastructure is in place, buyers will be jolted into action. There is nothing at all wacky about this idea, they say.
The Urban Development Institute says otherwise. This organization, which represents developers, says it's too soon to predict if electric cars will sweep the continent. Its members want developers to install outlets voluntarily, which of course means almost none of them would.
