What High-Utilization Urban Sites Actually Look Like
The evidence from this metropolitan market is unusually strong, and it points to the curb. The New York City Department of Transportation, announcing an expansion of its curbside charging program in August 2026, reported that its existing curbside Level 2 points are occupied by a vehicle for the large majority of the time, approaching continuous occupancy at some locations, and are actively delivering energy for most of the time they are occupied, describing this as the highest rate of utilization of any public curbside network in the country. The agency also reported that utilization is high across neighborhood income levels, and that the most heavily used sites cluster in areas with dense concentrations of for-hire vehicle drivers. That is New York City data rather than New Jersey data, and the scope should be read accordingly, but it describes the same dense, low-off-street-parking urban form found across the Newark market.
The department earlier published an evaluation report on its curbside Level 2 pilot, among the first detailed public evaluations of such a program anywhere, and its findings remain the operating brief for any urban portfolio. Curbside Level 2 charging fills an immediate need where local vehicle adoption is above average and off-street parking is scarce. In areas with lower adoption, it improves access but delivers lower utilization in the near to medium term. Properly designed and maintained curbside equipment can sustain high uptime in street conditions. Those three findings distinguish sites that can support themselves financially from those built primarily for access, which require different funding models and should be underwritten accordingly.
Building Latent Capacity ahead of Demand
Nationwide implementation patterns clearly illustrate this reality. Data published by the Alternative Fuels Data Center at the US Department of Energy shows public charging ports being added far faster than new station locations, so the average site keeps getting larger. Concentrating ports raises the throughput that a single grid connection and one make-ready investment can support, improving the denominator in every site economics calculation; it also concentrates risk where the local vehicle base does not arrive on schedule. For infrastructure investors and charge point operators, portfolio construction has become a deliberate mix question between a small number of high-throughput hubs and a wider spread of lower-utilization access sites carried by other revenue.
New Jersey has taken a different route to the same problem, by requiring latent capacity to be built ahead of demand. P.L.2021, c.171, signed on 9 July 2021 and codified at N.J.S.A. 40:55D-66.18 and the sections following, designates charging equipment and make-ready parking spaces as a permitted accessory use in every zoning district in the state and sets installation and parking requirements for new multi-family and non-residential development, implemented through a mandatory model ordinance published by the Department of Community Affairs that took effect in September 2021. For real estate developers, commercial property owners, and multi-family housing operators, this turns charging from a discretionary amenity into a design requirement. Incorporating charging infrastructure during initial design significantly reduces future expansion expenses compared to the high cost of retrofitting an unprepared facility.
Site economics across curbside, multi-family, workplace, and depot deployments are benchmarked at Urban EV Charging USA 2027, testing utilization assumptions, pricing structures, and portfolio mix against real operating data from the operators, property owners, municipalities, utilities, and investors funding urban charging now that federal capital support has lapsed.
