America is on a fast road to adopting electric cars. Philly is already falling behind.

Ever since Henry Ford turned automobiles into a mass market commodity, the parking and fueling of cars have been seen as two distinct activities, carried out at different times, in different places. That’s about to change.

Last month, the Biden administration rolled out new regulations intended to dramatically ramp up the production of electric vehicles and reduce our reliance on the gasoline-powered variety, a major contributor to climate change. The new rules put America on a very fast road to an all-electric future: In just seven years time, 60% of all new cars sold in the United States will have to run on batteries.

And Philadelphia isn’t remotely ready to handle them.

It’s easy to think of electric cars as simply old wine in new bottles; all we have to do is just trade in our gas guzzlers for EVs and that will be that. But because EVs now take four to six hours to fully charge, Philadelphia will need tens of thousands of spots where car owners can park and plug in. Providing charging stations in every cranny of the city will transform our public thoroughfares as profoundly as streetlights and underground sewers did a century ago.

Since few Philadelphia car owners have garages or private parking spaces, it seems likely that the city’s future charging network will end up in that public nether land between the curb and sidewalk. Unless the city takes a strong hand in the design and placement of electric chargers, we could soon see a land rush as people claim curb space for ad hoc charger installations, resulting in the same kind of chaos we had with streeteries. And given the amount of street furniture already vying for curb space — traffic signs, mailboxes, bike racks, and Big Bellies — the visual clutter would be extreme.

Figuring out where to put these ports is just the beginning. The price of electric cars is falling fast. If driving greener does, indeed, become cheaper than it is today, EVs could lead to more car ownership. How will we manage the increased traffic congestion? Even more crucially, given our municipal obsession with parking, how will we respond to the inevitable clamor for more of it?

The good news is that the Kenney administration is finally starting to think about the massive changes that will be necessary once electric cars go mainstream. The Office of Transportation, Infrastructure, and Sustainability hopes to hire an EV specialist before Kenney’s term ends this year, its policy director, Christopher Puchalsky, told me. But that doesn’t mean transportation officials are committed to building a charging network.

“Electric vehicles are an industry problem,” not a city one, Puchalsky said. “We can’t be in a situation again where the city has to accommodate itself to the car.” This time, “we want to make transit a priority.”

Pulchalsky is half right. By privileging the car, Philadelphia has time and again compromised the charm of its Colonial grid. We’ve sacrificed distinctive buildings to create parking lots, increased the dangers for pedestrians and bicyclists, and diminished the potential of our transit network.

Yet it would be a mistake to reduce the EV problem to an either/or choice. Rather than dismiss electric chargers as someone else’s problem, the city should use the coming EV revolution as an opportunity to rethink its entire approach to parking.

The city now gives away one of its most precious assets: street space. In most residential neighborhoods, you can park on the street without paying a cent. Even in those areas where parking permits are required, the city charges just $35 annually, a token fee unchanged for decades.

Meanwhile, the all-seeing Philadelphia Parking Authority turns a blind eye to people who park illegally in the median on wide streets, like Broad Street and Washington Avenue. Motorists have become so brazen, they increasingly claim the sidewalks for their vehicles, creating an obstacle course and increasing the general atmosphere of lawlessness in the city.

Philadelphia streets have become a giant vehicle storage unit. Car ownership has been creeping upward since the ‘80s, to the point where two-thirds of Philadelphia households now own cars. But there’s just not enough street space to go around. The people most hurt by the city’s laissez-faire approach to parking are those who have no choice but to own cars.

Our insistence on providing parking for everyone is also driving up the cost of housing. As the Slate writer Henry Grabar argues in his new book, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World, America is increasingly overparked and underhoused. Even in a city with so many transit-rich neighborhoods, Philadelphia’s zoning code still forces builders to include off-street parking in most new projects.

We could lower the cost of housing simply by eliminating parking requirements, says Erick Guerra, a professor of urban planning at the University of Pennsylvania. Perhaps if there were more apartment buildings without parking, tenants would have to ask themselves whether it was really worth owning a car. “It would be a net positive,” Guerra says.

Of course, making such changes brings a good deal of political peril, which is why an early, innovative program to encourage EV use in Philadelphia no longer exists. The program, created by the Nutter administration in 2007, offered residents dedicated parking spaces in front of their homes if they purchased an EV and installed curbside charger. Their fellow car owners were so outraged by the prospect of their neighbors getting a “free” parking space that City Council killed the program in 2017.

The logic behind the Nutter program was indeed flawed, since every EV owner would have eventually become eligible for a dedicated spot. But once Council eliminated the original EV incentives, Kenney never developed an alternative. He did convene a task force to study the issue. It made a few tepid recommendations, such as suggesting that the city “engage” and “partner” with groups interested in promoting electric cars. That’s as far as things went.

As a result, there are just 184 publicly available charging ports in Philadelphia today, according to ChargeHub. Pittsburgh, with a quarter of our population, has 304. The few chargers that do exist in Philadelphia are mainly in parking garages and gas stations, notably those run by Wawa.

Those destination chargers will never be a practical daily option for Philadelphians, given how long it takes to juice up. The technology for fast chargers — ones that can replenish a battery in under 30 minutes — exists, but it’s much more expensive than standard chargers. High-speed chargers also require special approval from Peco because they suck up so much power from the grid.

Some early adopters of electric cars in Philadelphia have instead taken to jerry-rigging charging cables from their houses, either by hanging extension cords from second-floor windows or running them across the sidewalks. That’s not a long-term solution. Until chargers are distributed throughout city neighborhoods, Philadelphia car owners will simply delay switching to electric, and the city’s air will stay dirty longer, imperiling people with asthma and other lung diseases.

Biden’s new mandates should encourage the next mayor to take a fresh look at EV charging. By broadening the study to include popular issues like affordable housing, the new administration could gain wider political support for changing the city’s parking policies.

One thing Kenney’s task force got right was the idea that the city should partner with groups that specialize in EV chargers. In response to the Biden initiatives, several companies have sprung up to equip cities with EV chargers. One of the most interesting is the Brooklyn-based start-up, It’s Electric.

Founded by architects, the company has designed a sleek, minimalist charging port that blends in nicely on residential streets. They’ve eliminated the cord that usually wraps around the charging stand, since it often ends up getting tangled and broken. Instead, the company gives each customer a detachable cable, essentially a bigger version of the kind we use for our phones. Best of all, the company installs charging ports at no cost to the host city, making its money on service fees instead.

Of course, EVs are no panacea for climate change. While their lifetime carbon footprint is less than gasoline-fueled cars, it takes just as much energy to produce the steel for an EV as it does for a conventional car, and mining the lithium for the batteries creates a whole new set of environmental hazards. But the lack of a citywide charging infrastructure won’t stop Philadelphians from driving cars, only from driving the greenest available ones.