A Broken Charger Is the Same as No Charger
Paren Municipal Series, Part 3 of 4 | June 2026
Ask any EV driver about their worst charging experience and you'll hear a version of the same story: they drove to a public charger — one that showed as available on the map — and it didn't work. Maybe the screen was frozen. Maybe the connector wouldn't authenticate. Maybe it had been out of service for two weeks with no visible indication.
That experience doesn't just inconvenience one driver. It erodes trust in public charging infrastructure broadly — and that erosion is a real drag on EV adoption at the city level.
Reliability is the metric cities and DOTs need to be tracking. Most aren't.
The Uptime Problem
Uptime measures the percentage of time a charging station is operational and available for use. Across U.S. public charging networks, reported uptime varies widely — but so does how it's measured and who's doing the measuring.
The key word is reported. Most uptime data in circulation is self-reported by CPOs (Charge Point Operators). They have an obvious incentive to present favorable numbers. Independent tracking tells a more complicated story: outage frequency, duration, and station-level reliability differ substantially across operators and markets.
Paren's Q1 2026 data shows most U.S. states now fall in the 90–95% reliability range, with lower-performing markets between 78–88%, and laggards like Oklahoma at 77.7%. That improvement is real — but it also means roughly 1 in 14 charging attempts in the worst markets ends in failure. At scale, that's not a rounding error.
This matters for public policy in ways that don't always get surfaced in infrastructure planning conversations:
A charger that's down 20% of the time is not 80% of a charger. For a driver who arrives at a broken station with a depleted battery, the reliability failure is total. The coverage and utilization metrics cities track tell you nothing about whether the charger works when someone shows up.
Reliability variance by network is significant and consequential. Not all CPOs perform equally, and that performance is not uniformly visible. Cities directing public dollars toward charger installation should have access to independent reliability data — not just the operator's own reporting.
Why This Is a Policy Issue, Not Just a Technical One
NEVI's federal guidelines include a 97% uptime requirement for funded corridor stations. That's a meaningful standard — but it applies only to NEVI-funded locations, and it's largely self-policed. Local programs don't have equivalent requirements in most jurisdictions.
The cities that are getting ahead of this are starting to build reliability language into incentive agreements directly: minimum uptime thresholds, reporting obligations, and consequences for sustained underperformance. That's exactly the right instinct. Public investment should come with public accountability — and that includes the charger working when a resident needs it.
Community trust is the other dimension. When a city promotes EV adoption and points residents toward publicly-supported charging infrastructure, it's implicitly endorsing that infrastructure's reliability. A pattern of failures at city-adjacent or city-funded sites becomes a political liability, not just an operational one.
What Good Reliability Oversight Looks Like
Cities and DOTs don't need to build monitoring infrastructure themselves. What they need is access to independent, network-wide reliability data — and the contractual leverage to act on it.
Practically, that means:
- Requiring uptime reporting (with independent verification) from CPOs receiving public incentives
- Establishing minimum thresholds for program eligibility and renewal
- Using reliability track records as a factor in evaluating which operators to support in future programs
- Monitoring performance at publicly-visible sites (transit hubs, municipal parking, community centers) with particular scrutiny
Where Paren Fits In
Paren tracks station-level reliability independently across public charging networks in the U.S. — not from operator reports, but from actual network behavior. That data is accessible via our Site Lookup tool and API, and our quarterly SOTI reports surface reliability performance by state and operator. Your team gets independent visibility into how infrastructure in your jurisdiction is actually performing — without relying on what CPOs choose to share.
Reliability data shouldn't be a nice-to-have. It should be a requirement for any city serious about its EV infrastructure.
Final post in the series: Your EV Registrations Are Outpacing Your Infrastructure — why the EV-to-charger ratio is the leading indicator every city should be watching.