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But range anxiety affects the behavior of even enthusiastic adopters of electric cars. In 2009 Japan's Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) provided electric company cars to its employees with a central fleet charging station, and the company noted that most drivers were bringing cars back with more than 50% of the vehicles' charge remaining, a clear sign that the drivers were nervous about running out of juice on the road. TEPCO installed chargers throughout Tokyo and almost immediately drivers started coming back to base with less charge remaining in their batteries. Adding additional charging stations distributed throughout the city had alleviated the drivers' range anxiety.

There are plenty of places where Los Angeles could sensibly install vehicle chargers. Homeowners with electric cars can usually handle their own charger installation, but it gets more complicated when we're talking about public spaces. A Luskin Center report released this month, "Financial Viability Of Non-Residential Electric Vehicle Charging Stations," analyzes the costs and benefits of charging installations at commercial and business locations, and discusses different economic strategies for charger installation, operation, and maintenance. The study's authors call for continued subsidies for businesses that install chargers, while encouraging retail outlets to consider the promotional benefits of charger availability. They also caution that as improved battery technology increases electric vehicle range, the need for chargers per car will drop -- though that seems a less crucial concern given electrics' very low percentage of private autos. There are 2.5 million private cars in Los Angeles, and even if the city does gain 80,000 electric cars in the next three years that's still only 3% of the total.

A second Luskin Center report released last month addresses the non-homeowner side of the residential charging picture. More than half of Angelenos live in multi-unit dwellings (MUDs). MUDs present their own unique obstacles to installing vehicle chargers, from tenant-landlord negotiations to building upgrades to HOA politics to even just getting tenants to agree on swapping parking spaces. The authors of the Luskin Center's "Increasing Electric Vehicle Charging Access in Multi-Unit Dwellings in Los Angeles" offer a set of recommendations to make things easier for tenants, landlords, and HOAs to install chargers, from immediate measures such as enacting subsidies to longer-term solutions like reworking building codes to encourage charging stations.

Car-centric Los Angeles is uniquely positioned to become the center of the electric vehicle movement, both reports' authors maintain, with most auto commutes well within the range of available electric vehicles. Making it easier to charge those cars will go a long way to releive range anxiety among drivers who might be ready to make the switch.

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