Westminster City Council is celebrating the installation of over 1,000 on-street electric vehicle (EV) chargers as part of its rollout with Siemens.
This milestone was reached this month, with the two being on track to deliver a further 500 chargers by April 2022.
The chargepoints installed range from 3kW to 50kW, having gone in at key residential and commercial locations. They are available to all users, with the intention so making it easier for residents to switch to environmentally friendly transport solutions. Users are able to park their vehicles in dedicated EV bays, allowing them to charge for up to four hours between 8:30am and 6:30pm every day.
On-street charging is an important part of decarbonising transport to allow those without off-street parking to charge, with research from Siemens finding that 40% of motorists said a lack of access to charging points had prevented them from switching to an EV sooner.
Westminster City Council is looking to tackle this, allowing residents to request an EV chargepoint to be installed near their home using an online form.
In March 2020, Siemens and ubitricity fully converted the UK’s first residential street to lamppost charging, with the installation of the 24 lamppost chargers also being in partnership with Westminster City Council.
Figures released by the Department for Transport in August 2020 named the City of Westminster as the top borough for number of chargers, with 575 installed at the time. This was followed Wandsworth (444) and Hammersmith and Fullham (316), with 5,151 chargers installed across both inner and outer London collectively.
Bernard Magee, director EV charging, Siemens GB&I, said the work done in Westminster provides a “charging infrastructure blueprint to other local authorities on their own journeys to decarbonise transport and improve air quality across our towns and cities”.