I’m still trying to sort out where we can charge the car – Delia has found a charging point nearby that we can use for a short period to bleed in a little bit of charge – while we wait for the PodPoint at our front door to be fixed. Which might be an indeterminate amount of time, as the PodPoint engineer came out during the week and confirmed that yes, it had been backed into, yes it was defunct, and yes they would need to embark on a complicated arrangement with Berkely, Rendall & Rittner, and Greenwich Council to get it fixed.
We just received the SourceLondon RFID card in the mail, which caused me to google off to find who on earth “Bluepointlondon” are. Which in turn led me to this article at the Financial Times.
The timeline turns out to be like this:
- May 2011 Boris Johnson ordered TFL to build a network of charging stations across London. TFL coerced the boroughs and councils to install (at their expense) the charging stations, and Boris patted himself on the back for a job well done
- September 2011 TFL flogged the network off to Bolloré for a total of £1 million, on the understanding that the new owners would pay for the upkeep.
- The network falls apart because nobody is maintaining it
- Bolloré believes it’s only supposed to reimburse anyone who makes repairs £500, but the repair costs is higher.
And so it’s a mad merry-go-round. Bolloré aren’t fixing the network they own, because as far as they are concerned it’s someone else’s problem. The manufacturers – PodPoint, Chargemaster and similar – are not maintaining the network because as far as they are concerned it’s someone else’s problem. TFL aren’t maintaining the network because they made it someone else’s problem, but are not sure whose. The councils aren’t maintaining the network because they cannot afford to. Meanwhile Boris Johnson strolls off taking credit for having built a network of charging points to take London into a green future, without actually having achieved anything that works.
Golf Clap.