New York City is finally fixing the absolute worst part of owning an EV in an apartment

If you live in a dense American city and want to buy an electric vehicle, you basically have two options: own a private garage, or casually dangle a heavy-duty extension cord out of your third-floor window. Because off-street parking is a luxury most urbanites cannot afford, entire swaths of the country remain total charging deserts. To finally bridge that gap, New York City just tapped a Brooklyn-based startup named It’s Electric to blanket the five boroughs with 700 brand-new curbside chargers, according to reporting by InsideEVs.

The cleverness of this specific rollout comes down to how the hardware actually gets its power. Instead of begging the local utility company for permits and ripping up the asphalt to lay new high-voltage grid connections, It’s Electric simply wires its chargers directly to the spare electrical supply of the adjacent apartment buildings. This “behind-the-meter” bypass completely eliminates the usual bureaucratic nightmares, and the startup actively shares the charging revenue with the landlords to sweeten the deal.

New York previously tested the curbside waters with a small pilot program of 88 Level 2 chargers operated by Flo, which proved that the local demand is absolutely rabid. According to the city’s Department of Transportation, those pilot stalls were occupied by an EV roughly 70 percent of the time, peaking at an absurd 99 percent utilization rate in certain neighborhoods. People desperately want to charge their cars where they sleep; they just need the infrastructure to actually exist.

The ticking clock for rideshare drivers

This massive infrastructure push is not just about making life slightly more convenient for wealthy early adopters. The city is currently operating under a self-imposed regulatory ticking clock known as the Green Rides Initiative. By the end of 2030, every single high-volume for-hire vehicle on the streets—including the massive fleets operated by Uber and Lyft—must be completely zero-emission or wheelchair accessible.

Right now, that impending mandate is a logistical nightmare for the gig workers who actually keep the city moving. For a rideshare driver living in Jackson Heights or the Bronx, keeping a battery full currently requires driving miles out of the way, waiting in massive queues at a handful of public fast chargers, and paying premium commercial electricity rates just to stay on the clock. It is a brutal, exhausting system that actively penalizes the working class for adopting green technology.

Flooding residential neighborhoods with standard Level 2 chargers fundamentally changes the economics of driving an EV for a living. By putting the hardware directly where these drivers park overnight, gig workers can essentially plug in, go to sleep, and wake up to a completely full battery at a fraction of the cost. It transforms charging from an active, stressful daily chore into a passive, invisible background process.

Borrowing Europe’s minimalist playbook

If you take a stroll through Amsterdam or London, curbside EV charging is just a mundane, ubiquitous piece of local street furniture. The United States is embarrassingly far behind its European counterparts when it comes to integrating power into the public right-of-way. To finally bring that density stateside, It’s Electric had to design a piece of hardware capable of surviving New York’s notoriously strict Public Design Commission.

The resulting chargers are a masterclass in radical, vandal-proof minimalism. There are no fragile digital touchscreens to smash, no clunky credit card readers to skim, and most importantly, no heavy charging cables bolted to the side of the machine. To the casual pedestrian, the sleek, stainless steel posts look more like modern architectural bollards than high-tech fueling stations.

To actually use the system, drivers must carry their own lightweight, portable charging cable in the trunk—a “bring your own cord” model that is standard across Europe but practically unheard of in America. By removing the tethered cord, the startup instantly eliminated the biggest maintenance headache in the EV industry: copper thieves and negligent drivers destroying the cables. If New York can prove that this stripped-down, building-powered model actually works at scale, the era of the urban extension cord might finally be over.

This article is made and published by Asger Risom, who may have used AI in the preparation