This section looks at the importance of community engagement as part of public EV charging infrastructure projects and the different forms that this can take.
It is very helpful to collect input from the local community and potential user groups early in the development of your public charging infrastructure. This will ensure you design the infrastructure to meet their needs. This engagement will provide you with valuable insights on the local context and the priorities of the local community; insights that may not otherwise be apparent.
Community engagement shouldn’t be treated as a tick-box exercise but rather as an invaluable step in the process of successfully planning, designing and implementing public charging infrastructure. Effective community engagement (and the education associated with this) may also encourage higher usage levels of the infrastructure once it’s installed. The community engagement process also provides an opportunity to educate the local community and address any knowledge gaps in relation to charging infrastructure.
Tools for community engagement can include focus groups, surveys, door-to-door engagement, and public information stalls either on the street or in other public spaces. Face-to-face engagement tools such as these are more resource intensive but can provide high-quality detailed information. Remote engagement tools, such as surveys and social media campaigns, can quickly collect insights from a large pool of people, however the information collected is likely to be less detailed. A mixture of face-to-face and remote engagement is therefore likely to provide the best results.
We here investigate how you can use each of these forms of engagement to good effect throughout your project.
