Picture this: you鈥檙e driving your electric vehicle from Courtenay to Victoria.

You don鈥檛 have quite enough charge to make it all the way down to Victoria, but you know that you can stop along your way at a fast charger and get the electrons you need to finish the trip.

Depending on how you drive, this recharge will take about half an hour or so. You can get to Nanaimo before you need to charge. You have two choices in Nanaimo, either a fast charger downtown within walking distance of cafes, restaurants and shops, or at a gas station.

Which one are you going to choose?

When I put it that way, it seems like a pretty easy choice. Even at their fastest, electric vehicles take a little while to charge. Almost everyone would prefer to spend that half hour in the walkable, cultural and diverse downtown core rather than at a gas station on the side of the highway.

Why then are we building the charging infrastructure at some of the most boring places to be?

The map I鈥檝e made of EV chargers between here and Victoria is pretty extensive. There are a lot of places for me to stop and recharge, but most of them are in some of the most boring places to be. Don鈥檛 get me wrong, I鈥檓 super grateful that there are gas station EV chargers because in a pinch I鈥檇 much rather be bored and recharging than panicking on the side of the highway with a 3,000 lb Hotwheels car. But that doesn鈥檛 mean we can鈥檛 have it the other way too.

The way I see it, we could treat EV chargers like one of two things. We could either treat them like traditional gas stations, or we could look at them like we do paid parking.

To be clear, when it comes to downtown, urban transportation I think our focus should be hierarchical, starting with the most vulnerable of transportation methods. Walking is better than cycling is better than taking the bus or train is better than driving. But if we are going to insist on driving, which it seems like might be the case - at least for now - we should truly focus on driving electric cars, for affordability and environmental reasons (see my previous column about how buying a used EV is a sneaky way out of paying for high gas prices and the carbon tax). And finally, if we鈥檙e going to do that, we need to re-think charging.

Now back to the thought experiment that started this article. If we鈥檙e going to have more EVs on the road, they鈥檙e going to need to be charged. Charging takes a while, so it makes sense to put chargers near places people will want or need to stay a while: think community centres, shopping districts, grocery stores and parks.

Chargers will have a benefit to those businesses and organizations who install them too. A recently published study on the effects of EV stations on the economic vitality of local businesses says that installing just one charging station nearby increases annual spending at businesses by 1.4 per cent. The closer that business is to the charger, the more spending goes up too, up to 3.2 per cent per year.

鈥淧ublic EVCS tend to attract higher-income, exploratory visitors, and local residents. Moreover, they notably enhance businesses in underprivileged areas, defined as disadvantaged and/or low-income areas,鈥� the study says. 鈥淭his study highlights EVCS as drivers of local economic growth and stresses the economic benefits of multi-host EVCS setups.鈥�

One of the biggest questions I had before I made the switch was about where I would do my charging. The thing is, even if I didn鈥檛 have charging available at work, I would be fine. There is a charger at the Lewis Centre, which happens to be the gym my partner attends, and if we needed to we could charge there regularly. Now, if there was even one charger at most public parking lots in the Valley, drivers could charge a bit whenever they needed to, and that stress would be gone.

Yeah, there will be a bit of an upfront cost to this. Current figures show that it would cost about $6,000 to install a half-decent level 2 charger. However, the province and federal governments are offering rebates for up to $5,000 for this kind of charger. An apartment building in the West Kootenays was able to install a set of chargers for about $1,600 per unit, after rebates. The fact that users pay for the energy they use, and while they鈥檙e waiting they鈥檙e likely to spend even more money inside the business makes it so the initial cost would easily be returned.

For the past century, we鈥檝e gotten very used to the way we drive. Typically we park our cars at home, drive them everywhere, park them at our destinations, and when we run low on gas we go to the gas station and fill up in a matter of minutes. But trying to make the new technology of EVs meet that paradigm doesn鈥檛 actually make sense when you think of it.

I completely understand the reason for chargers at highway-side gas stations. Pulling into a gas station as your battery is flashing 鈥渓ow鈥� is much much better than being stranded in the middle of nowhere. I can waste a good half hour on my phone in the car, scrolling Instagram. But for charging stations within towns, I think we should re-think the whole way it works.

Instead of trying to get as much power into the EVs as we can in the shortest amount of time, we should be taking advantage of the idle time when we鈥檙e not using the cars. A lot of the work done up until now has been connecting communities, and BC Hydro has done a great job with its network of fast chargers. But for the people who use their cars to get around in town, the DC Fast Chargers are way overkill.

The amount that I drive my EV means that I have to fully charge it at least once per week. That鈥檚 enough juice for me to get around as far away as Cumberland, or into the Merville area. A full charge at level 2 takes about seven hours or so. If I charge a little bit now and then when I go out for dinner, or go grocery shopping, or to the movies, or the gym, then we鈥檙e being way more efficient than going to the nearest gas station and just sitting around for half an hour.

And when I go to Victoria, I'll stop for lunch in Nanaimo along the way.