Tuesday, October 9, 2012

A trip around town

Today's post is all about my car. Well so most of the posts are about my car but today is about my car at the charging stations around town and include the pictures.

In the Kansas City metro area there are approximately 40 different charging locations. Here are pictures of my visits to some of them. Here we see ...we see...well when I signed up at the Nissan owner portal I had to pick a nickname for my car. Below is Prince By-Tor, Centurion of Evil, the Devil's Prince as he's being charged at the Westar office at 83rd and K-7.



The employees at the office were genuinely curious and polite the first time I plugged in and were glad to see that EV's were out and about. They explained that their company policy is to only purchase Chevrolet vehicles and had several Volt electric-hybrid vehicles in their fleet. I checked the web more and found that all Westar offices have public EV charging stations. Thanks Westar. I would like to reciprocate but the local utility for me is KCPL but the office where I work is a Westar customer.

About six miles south of here there are a pair of charging stations at the county Youth and Family Services building. It's a beautiful new building and the parking lot is very interesting. There are signs in the lot for car/van pool parking, handicapped parking, low emitting and fuel efficient vehicles and also the two electric vehicle charging stations. The median is filled with native plants which gives it a slight over grown weedy look but the more I looked at it the more it grew on me. Really the only problem with the lot was the SUV parked in the low emitting and fuel efficient vehicle parking.

In what universe would any SUV be considered a low emitting or fuel efficient vehicle? I guess compared to an M1 tank it's fuel efficient (1.5 gallons to the mile).





My oldest son even commented that there was a special parking icon on the asphalt just for me.










Around the corner and down the street a couple miles is the Olathe City Hall with its parking garage. The first time I visited this station one of the stalls was ICE'd (filled with internal combustion engine vehicle). The second trip both stalls were empty and I pulled right in to place.



Then around the corner and further down the street on Santa Fe is one of the several Walgreens Pharmacy stores around town with electric charging stations. They definitely have me sold as a customer from now on except the one by us doesn't have a station. I checked with the manager at the location in Olathe asking what she felt a reasonable purchase in the store would be for a person to charge from their stations while eating at the surrounding locations. She said 'anything' even a pack of gum. I found her attitude refreshing and she was genuinely curious about the vehicle. On the flip side they do need to repaint the asphalt.


The last trip of the day was across town from Olathe into the heart of Overland Park and the county library on 87th Street. The parking here is different from everywhere else that I've seen in that the parking stalls are nose to nose instead of side by side. I'll have to get down to the library out south to see how they're doing on adding signage.


Note...I checked a few days after I started this draft and the signs were still not up on the library out south on 151st Street.

These spots are not only near the library but are within easy walking distance (aka same parking lot) of a McDonald's and an Arby's.





Signing off for today
KSNOGAS
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Try reading a book, it's a novel experience.

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