New York City’s Department of Transportation just committed to installing nearly 700 curbside EV charging points over the next three years, choosing Brooklyn-based startup It’s Electric to supply the hardware. The company raised $15 million in fresh funding to support the rollout. Taxpayers are purchasing Level 2 charging posts with no screens, no credit card readers, and no attached cables. Drivers must supply their own charging cords. The posts draw power from adjacent apartment buildings and deliver roughly the same charging speed available in any home garage. This is municipal capital deployed to replicate what private parking garages already offer, installed on public streets where utilization patterns remain unproven at scale.
The infrastructure announcement sounds substantial until you calculate what nearly 700 new charging points actually means for a city where roughly half of car owners park on the street. That’s one charging spot for every several thousand street-parked vehicles. The existing 88-charger pilot network, which this expansion will build on, shows roughly 70% average utilization with some locations approaching full capacity. Those numbers suggest genuine demand, but they also reveal the core economic problem: the capital required to serve the remaining unserved population scales linearly while revenue per charger hits a ceiling the moment utilization peaks.
The Hardware Economics Don’t Scale Like Software
It’s Electric’s business model avoids the traditional utility interconnection costs by tapping existing apartment building electrical panels. This reduces upfront infrastructure expense, but it doesn’t eliminate the fundamental constraint: each charging post serves exactly one or two vehicles at a time, period. When a charging point reaches near-full utilization, the only path to serving more customers is installing another $15,000 to $20,000 post somewhere else. There’s no Moore’s Law for stainless steel bollards.
Compare this to the capital efficiency of a single DC fast charging station. A four-stall 350 kW site costs roughly $500,000 installed but can serve dozens of vehicles per day, assuming 20-to-30-minute charging sessions. The Level 2 curbside post, even at near-full utilization, serves perhaps 3 vehicles daily given typical 6-to-8-hour overnight charging sessions. Fast chargers deliver several times more energy throughput per dollar of installed capital. Curbside hardware costs less per unit but generates proportionally less revenue because physics limits how fast electrons flow through a 240-volt connection.
The pricing structure makes this math even harder. NYC DOT retains control over pricing, which remains unset, but the company’s CEO has referenced DC fast charging at around 50 cents per kilowatt-hour as a comparison point. Even if curbside Level 2 charging is priced well below that rate, it will still cost users meaningfully more than home charging for a full overnight session delivering around 200 miles of range. That’s economically rational for the operator trying to recover capital costs plus building owner electricity margins, but it’s poor value for the driver who could charge at home for a few dollars if they had a driveway.
Who This Actually Serves
The stated target includes the tens of thousands of rideshare drivers operating in New York City, who collectively make roughly 3 million EV trips per month according to the city. These are professional drivers with high utilization who would benefit enormously from accessible charging infrastructure. Level 2 charging delivers roughly 25 to 30 miles of range per hour. A rideshare driver working an 8-hour shift cannot afford to remove their vehicle from service for 6 hours to recharge. They need DC fast charging during meal breaks, not overnight curbside posts.
The actual beneficiary is the urban vehicle owner who parks on the street, drives fewer than 40 miles daily, and can reliably secure the same curbside charging spot each night. This describes a genuine but narrow use case. Most Manhattan residents who own cars use them infrequently enough that weekly charging at a commercial garage would suffice. Outer borough residents driving daily for work need certainty that a charging spot will be available when they return home at night, which becomes mathematically impossible once adoption exceeds charger supply by more than 3:1.
The utilization data from the pilot program supports this concern. If existing chargers are occupied roughly 70% of the time and some approach full capacity, the network is already near saturation before the expansion begins. Adding hundreds more charging points spreads infrastructure across more neighborhoods but doesn’t solve the fundamental mismatch: charging takes hours while parking spaces turn over within minutes in high-demand areas.
Capital Discipline Per Customer Acquired
It’s Electric has now raised $15 million and won contracts in Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Philadelphia in addition to New York. The company operates roughly 50 chargers serving several hundred customers. That’s substantial capital raised per installed charger to date, and a high figure per customer acquired. Even assuming the new capital funds several hundred additional chargers, the unit economics remain challenging. Each charging post must generate enough gross margin to cover not just its own installation cost but also the software platform fees, customer acquisition costs, maintenance, and the building owner’s electricity markup.
The durable competitive advantage here is municipal contract access, not technology. Stainless steel posts contain no proprietary innovation. Charging hardware is commoditized. Differentiation lies in having navigated the permitting requirements and established revenue-sharing agreements with building owners. That’s replicable by any competitor willing to hire the same permitting consultants and offer building owners the same revenue split.
The company’s decision to manufacture hardware in Queens adds local job creation talking points but increases cost structure. Charging posts are not complex devices requiring advanced manufacturing. The deliberate choice to add manufacturing overhead suggests the company is optimizing for municipal contract scoring criteria rather than unit economics. That’s rational if the goal is winning the next RFP, but it makes the path to profitability steeper.
What the Money Should Buy Instead
The $15 million would fund roughly 30 DC fast charging plazas with four stalls each, delivering around 120 total charging positions with many times higher daily throughput than curbside Level 2 posts. Fast charging infrastructure serves the professional driver segment that actually needs public charging, rather than the homeowner segment that merely lacks a driveway. The capital efficiency difference is not marginal.
Alternatively, the same capital could fund electrical service upgrades to hundreds of apartment building parking garages, enabling building owners to install Level 2 charging for their own tenants at cost. This would serve many more vehicles by leveraging the parking spaces drivers already rent monthly. The infrastructure would be usage-aligned: people who park in the same garage every night would have guaranteed charger access.
The curbside charging model makes sense as gap-filling infrastructure in neighborhoods where building garage access is genuinely unavailable. It fails as a primary charging strategy because it cannot scale to serve majority adoption. Every additional EV in the neighborhood dilutes charger availability for existing users. The network effect is negative, not positive.
Recognizing when municipal spending optimizes for announcement value rather than utilization efficiency matters. Installing nearly 700 charging points generates press releases and ribbon-cutting opportunities. Building out high-throughput fast charging in strategic corridors serves fewer locations but more drivers. Capital discipline means funding the latter even when the former photographs better.