San Antonio can’t seem to help itself. Every time the City of Austin comes up with a way to waste tax dollars, they have to have one too. This time, San Antonio wants to add more electric-car charging stations around the city… just like Austin did months ago.
We already saw part of this narrative play out in October. After the City of Austin made plans for a $1.3 billion boondoggle light-rail project, the City of San Antonio came up with it’s own $180 million project to build a streetcar for a two-mile stretch of the city (that’s $90 million/mile if you weren’t paying attention).
Back in July, we found out that both Austin and San Antonio were prepared to waste millions of taxpayer dollars on a new “bike-sharing program”, where people would rent bikes from a city-owned kiosk and ride them around the downtown area. Each bike was estimated to cost a whopping $1,500.
Now, the City of San Antonio wants to get in the electric-car race-to-nowhere, just like their cohorts in Austin have been spinning their tires on for months. The city is spending $10,000 of grant money from the Department of Energy to build six electric-vehicle charging stations. Two stations are already in place at the San Antonio International Airport.
But if you’re worried that all those swarms of Chevy Volt drivers will keep the free charging stations permanently occupied, don’t be. It’s estimated that there are only 50 electric vehicles in use in the entire city. If you assume only half of San Antonio’s 1.3 million people drive, that’s still only 0.0076% of the population! (And just like Austin, San Antonio wants to offer a rebate (i.e. subsidy) for installations of home charging-stations.)
They’ve got a long way to go, but San Antonio is certainly trying hard to become a cesspool of government waste and inefficiency like their neighbors in Travis County.
Exit question: How long until San Antonio bans plastic bags and builds a Formula 1 track?
