ASTORIA — A plan to bring designated parking spaces for electric vehicles to city streets is being proposed as a way to encourage drivers to go green.
Legislation being drafted by Councilman Costa Constantinides, who heads the council's environmental protection committee, would equip some street parking spaces with electric car chargers.
"For New Yorkers who drive, the quest to find a parking spot is one of the most agonizing and frustrating dilemmas that life can throw at you," the lawmaker said.
"This problem is far worse if you want to be an environmentally friendly motorist."
Constantinides said he's still in the process of writing the bill and is working with different city agencies to see how to make the parking spots a possibility.
He has yet to determine how many spaces and chargers the program would create, where exactly they'd be located or whether non-electric vehicles would be banned from parking in the spots.
"It's part of a larger plan to make our neighborhoods more sustainable," the councilman said.
The city has been working to make electric cars more ubiquitous in recent years. Currently more than 300 public charging stations exist across the five boroughs, a spokeswoman for Mayor Bill de Blasio said.
The website PlugShare.com, an app that maps charging stations and allows users to review them, shows a majority of existing city stations are in Manhattan. Many are in parking garages or car dealership sites.
In 2013, the City Council passed a law requiring 20 percent of parking spaces in new lots and garages to be equipped to support charging stations, but it doesn't require the garages to actually have them.
The city also has more than 300 of its own electric cars dispersed throughout its agencies and plans to add 2,000 more to its collection in the coming years, making it the largest municipal fleet of electric vehicles in the country, a spokeswoman for Mayor Bill de Blasio said.
Constantinides plans to introduce his bill sometime during the first half of this year, he said.
