In March, San Francisco politicians and agency staff trundled onto a Duboce Triangle sidewalk outside the electricians’ union hall to admire the city’s first curbside chargers and tout the future of electric driving. The two hip-height silvery posts had been in the ground for nearly a year. They were still the only ones the city had. But not for long, the officials promised.
Mayor Daniel Lurie announced that, as part of his campaign to cut government red tape, a new ordinance would centralize permitting under the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. Transportation Director Julie Kirschbaum pledged “a scalable and resilient curbside charging program” on the way to “our city’s goal of 100 EV chargers by 2030.” Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman praised the reform as “real, tangible progress.”
But his statement belied ongoing frustration. Other cities already had hundreds of on-street charging devices. At a City Hall hearing three months earlier, Mandelman had asked program staff why they planned to take an additional four years to install just 100 plugs. “Can you talk more about why this is hard and what’s taking so long?”
San Francisco’s slowness in rolling out curbside charging has many local causes: limited permit-desk staffing, competing priorities for crowded streets, electrical constraints and the lack of any one department empowered to say yes.
California also bears much responsibility for the struggles at the local level, having failed to implement several reforms that could have helped. The Legislature calls expanding on-street charging “a matter of statewide concern.” Yet in recent years it has repeatedly killed or narrowed proposals for technical support and permitting reform amid concerns about their cost, and offered cities no dedicated funding to move projects forward.
The result is a patchwork of improvised, limited-scale solutions — some quite successful. Through a single city bureau that already owned the poles and the power, Los Angeles says it so far has mounted 936 chargers on its lampposts. Other cities, like San Francisco, where multiple departments share authority over the curb, have struggled to expand past small pilot projects despite promises of environmental leadership. How many of California’s 483 cities have installed even one curbside charger no one can say, since a proposal to get state planners to find out also died in the Capitol.
California knows how to speed up charger installation — but so far, only in parking lots. More than a decade ago, the Legislature stripped cities of their power to arbitrarily reject charging stations on private property, and in 2021 it granted automatic permit approvals if cities failed to act within 20 business days for small sites.
When a lawmaker proposed extending the same rules to the public right-of-way, cities argued that the curb was more complicated and they were not ready for it. They won that argument in 2023 before the idea ever got a hearing. Nothing in state law has required cities to build EV infrastructure on public streets or to approve permits on any particular timeline.
Lacking guidance, San Francisco wrote its own code. The rules it published last month lay out the permitting checklist, fee schedule and siting criteria that the state ordered its business office to draft for cities two years ago and has still not published. They invite vendors to submit detailed applications, setting strict deadlines for the companies.
But the city set no time limits for itself, and reserved the right to reject proposals that meet every published requirement.
California pivots to electric
Transportation is the largest source of the greenhouse gases driving climate change in California, which is why the state adopted a rule four years ago to end sales of new gasoline-only cars by 2035, a mandate now in limbo after Congress revoked its federal waiver last year. The state Energy Commission says California will need 1.01 million public and shared chargers by 2030 to handle the surge in demand — nearly five times the 216,445 it counted last month.
With the commission projecting 7.1 million plug-in cars on California’s roads by decade’s end, the shortage most acutely affects apartment dwellers, only about one in six of whom can currently charge at home, according to its own survey.
Washington has made that harder. A 2021 federal infrastructure law set aside $7.5 billion to build a national charging network. Last year, the Trump administration froze most of the $5 billion that should have gone to the states. Early this year a federal court ordered the release of California’s $379 million share but less than two weeks later Congress permanently repurposed $500 million of the program that other states had not yet committed. The funds are aimed mostly at highway fast-chargers.
The financing wars have meant that at the city level, where subsidies are lacking but the need is great, success turns on whether governments can relinquish some control of a finite, monetized and jealously managed resource: parking spaces. In many places, that has not gone well.
The people who build the charging equipment have grown frustrated. Shannon Dulaney, who directs public affairs for It’s Electric, the company that installed San Francisco’s two pilot chargers, said one of the state’s most eco-conscious cities has buried a workable idea under process.
“We’ve put so many layers and so many things that cities have to meet in order to get anything done that it makes it impossible to do anything,” she said.
San Francisco’s DIY solution
Adam Gill bought a Tesla in 2018 with no easy way to plug it in at his Noe Valley home, so he kept it charged at his office in Cupertino and at a Walgreens on Castro Street, where the machine often malfunctioned. Today, half the cars Gill sees in the neighborhood are EVs, but there are still few nearby charging options. He has asked the neighbors whose children play with his whether they ever thought about going electric. “They’re like, well, we park on the street,” he said, “so that’s probably not going to happen.”
Around 2019 he started emailing city departments to complain, and went to his supervisor’s office hours with a packet of photographs of extension cords running across sidewalks, evidence that people were improvising their own charging arrangements. The city, he said, was not ready for the coming EV transition.
Quickly he found that the issue had a champion in high office. Mandelman, who has represented District 8 on the Board of Supervisors for eight years, has been pressing city agencies on curbside charging for most of that time.
At a hearing last December of the board’s Land Use and Transportation Committee following years of work, Mandelman’s exasperation showed. “I don’t doubt that you share the urgency around it,” he told city staff. “If I think this is a problem and you think it’s a problem, how do we get it done more expeditiously?”
When staff presented a proposal to make the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency the “front door” for applications, Mandelman asked the interagency team whether this would move things any faster. Kate Toran, director of the agency’s Taxis, Access and Mobility Services Division, cautioned that many steps remained in the way of a charging company seeking an installation permit, because the “cast of characters” that signs off on each site — about half a dozen city departments whose jurisdictions overlap at the curb — “will remain.”
Mandelman discusses the tempo of the curbside charger program with transportation agency official Kate Toran last December at a City Hall hearing. Video: SFGovTV
The ordinance that passed in May made the transportation agency that single entry point, sparing companies a separate public works permit to occupy the sidewalk. The rules the city published in late August are more detailed and in many ways more difficult for EV charging companies to navigate than the pilot phase. Much of what they describe is exacting and knowable in advance. Yet parts of the approval process are subjective, unpredictable and undefined. An applicant passes, the rules say, when it shows “a high level of commitment and strong capacity” in materials that are “clear, well-organized, and specific.”
The city never says how long any of it takes. In May, while the rules were still being written, a transportation agency spokesperson said the goal was to review sites within weeks, not months, with the caveat that staff capacity and the number of sites in the queue could change that. Asked this week whether the agency commits to any review period, a spokesperson said the city “is committed to reviewing all applications in a timely manner and providing quick feedback,” and encouraged applicants to line up power, neighborhood support and installation logistics themselves “to speed up the entire process.”
After a company obtains an operator permit from the transportation agency, it applies again for each cluster of sites. Those proposals go before the fire, police and public works departments, then to the Department of Building Inspection for electrical permits, back to public works again for excavation, and to the city Public Utilities Commission or Pacific Gas & Electric Co. for power. Separate approvals are needed on land controlled by the port authority, the Recreation and Park Department or Caltrans. Each site also needs the city traffic engineer’s sign-off. Staff cautioned the agency’s board in April that the first permits were unlikely to receive final green lights until the spring or summer of 2027, though none of the newly published program documents sets a date.
The agency weighs 10 listed considerations “and any other factor the Director of Transportation determines to be relevant” in deciding to approve or deny a permit. And sites that would “cause an imbalance in the geographical distribution” of chargers can be turned down.
Equity goals might derail an otherwise sound application. For evaluating sites, the rules say only that the city “may consider” density, socioeconomic demographics and proximity to apartment buildings. Every proposed site, the rules say, remains “subject to review and approval,” and officials may amend the specifications “from time to time.”
Achieving the ideal geographic spread can be difficult in a program that is entirely market-driven. If private companies are paying, they tend to put chargers in neighborhoods where the most EV drivers live and profit potential is high, a dynamic that could “create gaps in a well distributed citywide network,” the consulting firm Arup wrote in an April 2025 feasibility study in collaboration with transportation and other city staff. The report said directing both public and private investment could be part of the solution. Yet earmarked subsidies for curbside chargers have not materialized.
“We’ve never had money to do this as a city, so it’s all vendor led,” Nicole Appenzeller, the clean transportation lead at the San Francisco Environment Department, said in an interview. So, the city’s only leverage is approving or rejecting sites each company brings forward.
Many stakeholders
The transportation agency collects about $52 million a year from thousands of metered parking spaces. The feasibility study said those spots had been “automatically disqualified” and not considered for the site suitability analysis “to prevent the City from losing revenue or impacting commercially established zones.” The August guidelines sound less categorical.
Broderick Paulo, a planner for the city’s transportation agency, said metered parking is a better use of commercial-zone curbs requiring quick turnover than is EV charging. Standard curbside Level 2 AC power hookups can take hours to fully charge a battery.
Vendors need to earn “community support,” and local resistance could block a permit. Before appearing at a public hearing on each site, a company must notify the district’s supervisor, neighborhood associations, merchant groups within a quarter mile and the owner of every property fronting the site — and hand out flyers in the languages the agency indicates that the neighborhood’s residents speak.
If a company cannot win over key constituencies, the agency “may hold the application from advancing” until support emerges. The rules set no threshold for opposition, no vote and no time limit, and they advise the company to “encourage stakeholders from community to attend and speak in favor” at the hearing.
“It takes quite a bit of time to get community buy-in,” Paulo said. “And if there is significant pushback, we ask the vendor to look for a new site that is suitable and supported by the community.”
A multistep approval process faces charging equipment companies. Officials reserve the right to deny permits for numerous reasons, including neighbors’ objections. Source: San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency
Given the myriad procedural complexities, city staff said, their public goal of 100 chargers was intentionally conservative. In fact, it is far lower than the roughly 800 that a city-sponsored study, drafted by the International Council on Clean Transportation at the start of this decade, said could be deployed by 2030 under a scenario in which the city built a curbside charging network for the expected flood of new EV drivers living in multifamily housing. The city’s overall charger network targets come from a different scenario in the same study, the one that assumes no curbside buildout.
Asked in April where the 100-charger goal came from, Mandelman said he presumed it originated in that study. That number appears nowhere in it.
Appenzeller said it emerged from staff discussions as a “reasonable goal to start out with” given the city’s simultaneous focus on building hundreds of chargers in parking lots. She emphasized that the number is “a floor, not a ceiling,” to be revisited as data from the new program comes in.
Mandelman said he understood the need for balance in parking policy.
“There is a pitched battle going on in neighborhood commercial corridors across San Francisco right now over curb space,” he said. “I think I agree that not adding another competitor into the very fraught neighborhood commercial fight is probably the correct move.”
City officials were doing the best they could while balancing many interests, Mandelman added. “I’m cautiously optimistic that the pace will pick up,” he said. “But I remain concerned.”
Crowded streets, tough choices
The curb is hardly empty space waiting to be claimed. It already abuts bus and bike lanes, loading zones, shopping areas and accommodations for people with disabilities. A poorly positioned charger can set a mistake into the concrete where a mass-transit route or wheelchair ramp should someday go. That geospatial complexity is the city’s top reason for reserving veto power even for parking spots that initially seem OK.
San Francisco’s answer to this tension is a block-by-block siting tool sorting the city into three colors: red for off-limits curbs, yellow for sites that “might warrant a little bit more discussion” and green for those that “should kind of be good to go,” as Appenzeller described it.
The online map, published in August, shows the geographic limitations facing curbside charging. Feasible curb runs almost unbroken through the Richmond, the Sunset, Parkside, the Excelsior and Visitacion Valley, neighborhoods of single-family homes and driveways. It thins to almost nothing in South of Market, the Tenderloin, Chinatown and North Beach. Those are many of the same blocks that hold the highest concentrations of people living in apartments with nowhere else to plug in — precisely those where curbside chargers would be most useful. The map is where the program’s two promises, serving the renter and protecting the curb, collide in plain color.
Yet by the city’s own account the tool is merely a guide. A disclaimer says it “does not determine whether a charger can ultimately be installed at a specific location.” A site that looks good on the map would go to a standing interagency meeting, where departments that control the curb decide whether to advance it, Paulo said before the rules were published.
In planning lingo, approvals are either discretionary or ministerial, another word for a determination relying on clear rules. For chargers on private property, state law makes approvals ministerial. San Francisco aims for curbside approvals to be “as ministerial as possible,” Appenzeller said, “while still maintaining some discretion for ourselves,” in particular, to steer applicants away from over-served neighborhoods.
Asked whether the city should move to an algorithmic, by-right approval, Mandelman said, “From my perspective, that would be ideal.” His hope was that “as they get experience, they’re able to make this more of a kind of checklist process, with less discretion and less need to think through a bunch of things.”
When San Francisco invited charging companies to stake a claim at the curb and offered no subsidies, it relinquished ownership and revenue, leaving the siting decisions to entrepreneurs. Researchers studying how to spread electric driving beyond homeowners with garages caution that under such conditions, officials must ahead of time decide exactly where the equipment is preapproved, so firms preparing to build hardware are not forced to spin their wheels for months or years waiting. But San Francisco is trying to have it both ways. The city puts up no money, takes no share of what the chargers earn, and still wants final say on every placement.
Focusing on San Francisco in a 2025 paper in the Journal of Transport Geography, University of Illinois transportation engineers Ruolin Zhang and Eleftheria Kontou found that an advance, criteria-based map lets a city plan an equitable network up front, instead of rejecting applications one by one. They also found using the curb the cheapest way to add capacity.
“Unlike traditional public chargers that require land acquisition and parking development,” they wrote, “curbside stations utilize the public right-of-way and existing electrical infrastructure.”
LA far ahead
Los Angeles has been doing exactly that for years. Its Bureau of Street Lighting owns the poles and the power and has hung its chargers on streetlights by tapping the 9,000 miles of conduit and 27,000 miles of copper wire already beneath the street. Miguel Sangalang, the bureau’s executive director, calls it “one of the largest municipal deployments in the nation for EV chargers” and envisions a pace San Francisco’s rules never contemplate. “What if we could install an EV charger on a pole within a day near you?” he asked an interviewer last year.
The city took advantage of the conversion of streetlights to energy-efficient light-emitting diodes, freeing up excess power for electric cars. Flo, a charging company, said it worked with the city to design a special mounting bracket and swappable parts to recover quickly from vandalism. After a 2018 pilot, the city’s first order of 75 units was up and running in about 90 days, the company said.
The city did not solve this by having fewer agencies. In 2018 Los Angeles exempted public chargers from the need for a permit that governs other above-ground equipment in its right-of-way, and in 2022 it let transportation staff designate a charging stall without a City Council vote. Chargers there sit at metered spaces, and the department told the council the program costs it no meter revenue.
Sangalang said in a statement that aside from owning the poles, the city had intangible advantages: “leadership to give clarity and purpose to the goal” and “a management structure and culture that encourages innovative thinking.”
Los Angeles is not relying exclusively on city-owned infrastructure. Last year its transportation department announced 90 more curbside ports in partnership with It’s Electric, replacing chargers left behind by a retired carshare network. It is the same company that installed San Francisco’s two.
New York is testing the centralized planning approach at scale. Last month, its transportation department said it would expand its public curbside network from 88 chargers to nearly 700 across the five boroughs within three years. The pilot project was a collaboration with local utility Consolidated Edison. In this phase transportation officials will control pricing, providing access to “low- and moderate-income communities where private charging companies have made few investments.”
In the spring, Philadelphia selected It’s Electric to install up to 1,000 curbside chargers across the city, including along commercial corridors. Small curbside charging programs are also operating in Boston, Detroit, Washington, D.C., Kansas City, Portland, Seattle, Yonkers, N.Y., and the Northern California cities of Sacramento and Alameda. To accommodate EV drivers, some cities have simply legalized do-it-yourself solutions as a stopgap. Early last year Oakland began letting residents run covered charging cords across the sidewalk to their cars, one of the first cities in the country to do so.
Outside the United States on-street charging is ordinary street furniture. More than 20,000 of London’s charge points are slow or low-power, many on lampposts and along curbs, and plugs are common on residential streets in Paris, Amsterdam and other European cities.
Ted Lamm, a researcher at the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment at the University of California, Berkeley, published a 2024 study comparing nine cities’ curbside programs. He said in an interview that if California cities want to get polluting gas cars off the road, they will have to demonstrate to drivers interested in switching to EVs that a robust charging network is under construction.
“More important than speed actually is predictability and assurance,” said Lamm, who lives in San Francisco and has advised staff building its program. He said the city is, “I think it’s fair to say, a little bit behind where it ought to be. Doesn’t mean it can’t catch up pretty quickly.”
Cities resisted California reform
Public charging has a few vocal advocates at the state level, too, including Kevin McCarty, who represented Sacramento in the Assembly before his election as mayor in 2024. He authored several bills aimed at making it easier and quicker to deploy charging equipment. McCarty said promoting infrastructure in the public right-of-way can help accelerate urban EV adoption.
“Big picture,” he said in an interview, “I think this is needed if we want to conquer the next wave as far as electrification of our transportation.”
McCarty said many drivers who lack garages are ready to switch to electric but need a reliable way to keep their car batteries topped up by charging at night close to home.
“It’s easy for a lot of people, but other people, it’s super-complicated,” he said. “They live in apartments, they live in condos. And so, I think if we’re going to continue — we lament that we’re not doing enough and going fast enough on climate change — you need to keep making it easier.”
Twice McCarty proposed curbside fixes in the Legislature and each time they were narrowed, priced out or silently left to die. The proposed fixes that could have accelerated curbside charging included:
- A deadline: McCarty in 2023 brought Assembly Bill 1504, which would have written curbside chargers into the definition the state already used everywhere else, and with it the 20-business-day permitting clock and automatic approvals. The League of California Cities objected that fast-tracking chargers would let electrification leapfrog other local priorities, among them disability access and affordable housing. McCarty deleted the provision before the bill’s first hearing.
- A plan: What remained in AB 1504 asked cities for something far smaller: to decide in advance where curbside chargers should go by adopting a plan. Republicans still voted no in committee hearings. One Assembly committee estimated the plans and permitting would cost local governments “millions of dollars statewide,” McCarty’s office said. Legislators set the bill aside in a suspense file and quietly let it die in January 2024 without a floor vote.
- A map: California has never asked any agency to determine where curbside chargers are most needed. Legislation McCarty introduced in 2024, Assembly Bill 2427, initially would have directed the California Energy Commission to sort locations “by income level, population density, multifamily housing density, renter density, and geographical area,” and to locate utility and light poles that could carry chargers. That language cleared four committees and an Assembly floor vote, but on June 17, 2024, the author struck it. The commission had priced the work at about $190,000 a year plus a one-time $250,000, at a time that the state faced a budget deficit in the tens of billions. “Likely, the high cost was the main reason that the provision was amended out,” McCarty’s office said.
- A playbook: The bill ultimately passed with the support of 19 organizations, including such diverse interests as Rivian, ChargePoint, car dealers and the Union of Concerned Scientists. It assigned the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development to produce a sample permitting checklist, model zoning ordinances and best practices on permit costs and review timelines. But the Legislature set no deadline for any of that to happen. The office got no money for the job. “The work is being done with existing resources and staff,” a spokesperson said. The most recent edition of the office’s permitting guidebook appeared in January 2023, before the law passed. The office said the model materials should publish this fall. Cities of 250,000 or more must, by the start of 2027, “consider” the state guidebook and any updates to it, and publish a list of everything a complete application must include, a menu of fees and siting criteria. Cities may also declare that they have no appropriate curbside locations.
The Energy Commission said related planning continues and last month announced it intended to spend $95 million to support diverse charging programs statewide. None of it is earmarked for the curb, though a commission spokesperson said the agency “continues to assess all opportunities for expanding EV charging for passenger vehicles, including curbside charging,” and noted that some existing programs, among them block grants for community charging, can pay for curbside projects serving apartment buildings. Commissioner Nancy Skinner told an Assembly committee last November that the agency was working to “more specifically identify EV charging deserts and optimal public access locations.” The commission is also putting some research money into technology, awarding It’s Electric $1.1 million from a ratepayer-funded innovation grant to develop a curbside charger that can feed power back to the grid.
The economic development office said it had not received requests from cities for technical assistance, “although local jurisdictions have expressed an interest in learning from one another in these areas.” Without state guidance, municipalities must make do with peer networking.
McCarty was philosophical about ushering ambitious new ideas through the statehouse. “You start bigger and you have to compromise along the way in order to get your bill signed,” he said. “The law as far as the charging with the curbside has been, I think, yet to be achieved.”
When told this reporting had surfaced gaps in his law’s follow-through, McCarty invited ideas for policy solutions. “You give me some good material,” he said. “I’ll find an author for next year.”
Two years and counting
A hundred chargers, whenever they arrive, will not be enough for the hundreds of thousands of San Franciscans living in apartment buildings that lack off-street parking. It’s Electric co-founder Tiya Gordon said the two charging posts were in use 70% of the time, a rate the company considers too high for people who need to plug in regularly. She said 325 drivers remain on the wait list for the invitation-only pilot phase, proving the demand is there.
Ashkan Javaherian is one of the few already plugging in. A scientist who researches therapies for Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases, he bought his first electric car in 2021, when the employer he commuted to in Menlo Park had chargers. Then his work moved back to the city, where his Lower Haight condominium has no garage and no plug. A space in a parking garage ran $20 a day, he said, and the nearest fast chargers sat in a Whole Foods lot, where a two-hour stop was hard on the battery and on his schedule. Almost every EV driver he knows has a private spot to park.
“Those that are renting or don’t have a garage, they just don’t have EVs, because of this issue that they don’t know where to charge,” he said. Then the two posts appeared.
“I was actually thinking about getting rid of my EV until I saw those,” he said. “Just having them one block away made it possible for me to keep charging in a practical way.”
The curbside pilot, which opened to proposals in June 2024, invited three vendors with a diversity of technologies and business models. It’s Electric draws power from adjacent buildings and shares the revenues with the owners, and asks drivers to carry compatible cables with them, a method popular in Europe. Voltpost attaches pull-down plugs to existing utility poles. UrbanEV uses off-the-shelf charging equipment.
The companies scouted and proposed sites by the dozen, and staff reviewed more than 80 of them by their own count. The city allowed each company one. Two years later, only It’s Electric has anything built.
Voltpost’s site does not exist, because the utilities and the city could not settle on a way to deliver power to chargers from poles. Stanford researchers studying public charging statewide found the problem was widespread: permitting delays persist in many jurisdictions despite the state’s streamlining laws. Getting power to a site is often the hardest problem.
Urban EV was picked for the pilot at the start of 2025 and was ready to spend its own money on five chargers in the Dogpatch neighborhood. It took until this March to win the transportation board’s sign-off on a site, and by June the company was still waiting on PG&E and had electrical and encroachment permits ahead of it. Waiting can cost money. PG&E charges $3,500 for the engineering assessment a charging project needs and the paperwork expires after 90 days. This week the transportation agency said the utility review had finally cleared, though it had no estimate for when the ports would be usable.
“The quantity of stakeholders is vast; UEV, SFMTA, SFPUC, SFDPW, City Hall, PG&E, CEC, BAAQMD, Dogpatch Neighborhood Association, and adjacent property owners,” Alex Grant, Urban EV’s founder, wrote in an email, demonstrating his fluency in local bureaucratic nomenclature. Satisfying them all, he wrote, has “drawn out the timeline and ultimately increased costs for the project.” While he praised the city’s staff as excellent to work with, he called it “a pilot program with many unexpected twists and turns.”
Dulaney of It’s Electric offered a more plainspoken assessment. She said San Francisco has “very dedicated, passionate people” working under too many constraints. “We’ve really let the perfect become the enemy of the good, I think,” she said, “and not recognizing the fact that that just feeds into community distrust of the ability for the government to do anything. And that’s not specific to San Francisco.”
Support for this reporting comes from the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University.
