(The caveat to all of this is I can’t tell if this violates PlugShare’s TOS. Though I invite commentary on that.)

As many of us can attest, lines are getting longer at many charging stations. In my opinion, charging networks aren’t keeping up with the growth of EV adoption, particularly when so many drivers have free charging plans that incentivize them to reply completely on public charging for all of their needs.

As a small way to do something about this, I’d like to encourage drivers to mark a “Could Not Charge” checkin on PlugShare every time they have to wait for a charger. Note the length of the line and the approximate amount of time you had to wait.

If you do end up charging at that station, create a separate checkin for your successful charge.

This is in line with what Kyle Conner and some others started encouraging people to do late last year when they encounter broken public chargers. Originally he asked people to make one “Could Not Charge” checkin for each broken charger – PlugShare said that violates the TOS but allowed people to make one failed checkin for each station that had multiple failures. More on that here: https://www.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/10058jz/plugshare_is_editing_and_removing_legitimate/

The idea here is to name and shame charging networks. We know that PlugShare scores matter to them – they monitor the scores and know that drivers avoid stations with low scores. But if you wait in line for an hour and still get a charge, while you had a bad experience, it counts only as a positive for PlugShare purposes. A long line is a failure on the part of the charging network, and should be recorded as such.

(As a side note, I truly believe PlugShare should allow something like a 1-5 rating scale so that drivers can take into account broken chargers, wait times, downrated chargers, bad customer service, amenities, location, etc., in rating their charges, not just a binary “yes” or “no” on whether they got electrons.)