Garage orphans are EV customers with no garage or driveway access, such as multi-family and urban dwellers. Although garage orphans may face similar challenges, differences in context at the neighborhood scale, based on density, land-use and parking demand, provide an opportunity to customize solutions that can be categorized and scaled to include areas with similar characteristics. 

As the nascent electric vehicle (EV) market has developed in the United States, urban areas are emerging as an unexpected soft spot in the market’s growth. In the Boston Metropolitan area, just 38 EVs were purchased in the urban core out of 407 total between 2014 and the publication of this report in June 2015. The primary challenges for EV adoption in urban areas are a lack of dedicated parking and ownership structures that include multiple stakeholders and/or do not include EV users.

WXY developed a toolbox of policy, technology, and market economics solutions to address the challenges garage orphans face in an urban context. The effectiveness of each tool was then evaluated in relation to different neighborhood typologies to yield a basket of solutions that could be tailored to variations within cities.