An it’s electric kerbside charging post outside a brownstone. Credit: it’s electric New York City has selected it’s electric, a Brooklyn company that manufactures in Queens, to replace its curbside electric vehicle charging pilot with a permanent network across all five boroughs. The buildout runs for three years and takes the city from 88 curbside charging points to roughly 700. The award follows the transport department’s August announcement of the expansion, which set out 600 additional Level 2 points alongside 92 fast chargers and 180 further Level 2 units at municipal parking facilities.
The New York Power Authority procures the equipment and oversees construction; the transport department runs and maintains the network. The siting is the interesting part. Installations are targeted at neighbourhoods with dense rideshare populations and little off-street parking, which is the specific gap private charging networks have declined to fill. New York has more than 80,000 rideshare drivers, and most of them park on the street, which is the practical reason a driver covering high mileage stays on petrol.
The city’s Green Rides rule requires rideshare and taxi vehicles to be electric by 2030, a deadline that means very little without somewhere for those vehicles to charge overnight. “Just as fire hydrants are on every street, our vision is for EV chargers to become that normal infrastructure New York’s kids simply grow up with,” said Tiya Gordon, co-founder and chief operating officer. The company argues the manufacturing side matters as much as the charging: every unit it installs in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, Washington and Boston will be built in Queens. Uber’s senior director of public policy, Josh Gold, said more accessible charging is critical to helping its drivers switch: “More accessible charging is critical to helping Uber drivers make the switch to electric,” said Josh Gold, Senior Director of Public Policy at Uber. Uber is also an investor in the company, which is worth knowing when reading the endorsement.
Alongside the contract, it’s electric disclosed an oversubscribed bridge round led by Halogen Ventures, with Wisdom Ventures, Future Communities, E8 Angels, DiPalo Ventures, Alumni Ventures and Gaingels joining, and returning backers including Uber, Failup, Gratitude Railroad and the Partnership Fund for New York City. The round’s size is not disclosed, only the running total, and a bridge round is, by definition, the money a company raises to reach the next thing rather than to do the next thing. Fifteen million dollars is a modest base from which to install several hundred pieces of street furniture across five boroughs, and the structure of the deal matters: the Power Authority buys the equipment, which shifts a good deal of the capital burden off the startup and onto the state. Whether that arrangement holds as the network scales is the question worth returning to in a year.
The hardware is the reason the siting works. Curbside charging in a dense city usually fails on street furniture: a full charging post needs a foundation, a cabinet, and a chunk of pavement that New York does not have to spare. The company’s approach shrinks the street-side unit and draws power from an adjacent building rather than trenching to the grid, which is what makes a block-by-block rollout plausible at all. It also means every installation depends on a property owner agreeing, a dependency the announcement does not dwell on.
Engineering and construction fall to Maverick Corporation, with SWTCH Energy running the back end and the hardware designed with Billings Jackson Design. The company’s route here started in 2023 with a pilot at the Brooklyn Army Terminal in Sunset Park, the first project under the city’s Climate Innovation Pilot Program. What New York is testing is not really a charging technology. It is whether a city can use procurement to keep a supply chain inside its own boundaries, and whether the neighbourhoods private operators skipped can be served by making that omission somebody’s contractual obligation.
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