How Washington State maps current — and future — EV charging

Washington State is a leader in the adoption of electric vehicles, with more than 200,000 registered as of last year and EV purchases accounting for more than 20% of new car sales in 2024.

Despite a national slowdown in EV adoption, the Evergreen State is still charging forward, but one of the biggest concerns remains around charging infrastructure. Even as battery capacity has continued to grow, range anxiety remains among many who worry about running out of electricity and not knowing where to charge.

To try and combat those concerns and meet future demand, the Washington State Department of Transportation and the Washington State Department of Commerce created the EV Mapping and Planning Tool, known as EV-MAP.

It’s built on technology by geographic information system software company Esri and brings together more than 100 public datasets related to EV infrastructure and demand, including existing charging stations, planned investments, traffic counts, EV registrations and forecasted need. The tool is designed to help government leaders, businesses and utilities plan for future EV investments.

Kara Symonds, a transportation planning specialist at the Washington State Department of Transportation, sat down with Route Fifty recently to discuss the new tool.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Route Fifty: In terms of charging infrastructure, that's something that people are very concerned about. How is that process going?

Kara Symonds: Here in Washington, we benefit from a 10-agency Council, the Interagency EV Coordinating Council. It's a way to coordinate transportation electrification across the government sector. Just recently, the EV council put out a transportation electrification strategy, and that outlined, with our state's emission goals, what adoption rates [are] and how many chargers do we need to support that. We took some of that transportation electrification strategy data, and put that in the EV-MAP tool, so people can get an idea of what the current adoption rates are and the modeled need according to forecasted growth rates. We did see that we were behind in direct current fast charging ports, and we were doing okay in Level Two charging ports, but growth is needed in both areas. The EV mapping tool was created as a way to share that timely information in a curated manner.

Route Fifty: Would you say that's one of the biggest challenges when it comes to EV adoption and rollout in Washington?

Symonds: The infrastructure is always cited as a barrier to adoption. That's why state agencies are focused on grant programs to get infrastructure out in the communities along highway corridors, in multifamily residential areas, and for fleet and workplace charging. The majority of charging is done at home and the workplace, so that's a need as well. It's a very multi-pronged strategy to increase EV adoption rates and infrastructure is a part of that.

Route Fifty: Tell me about the map that you guys put together. What's on it? What can we see?

Symonds: Here in Washington, our legislature directed the creation of the tool, and really their primary focus was delivering timely data so that we could build out infrastructure in a coordinated manner. The main layers you're going to see when you open the tool are all related to current EV adoption rates, modeled need for infrastructure, existing infrastructure, and we've also added planned infrastructure, so if people are starting to think about where they want to charge in their community, they can see where ones currently exist, and where some are planned but not yet built. The timely part was really important. We wanted to make sure we were consistently getting out the relevant data for infrastructure planning in a curated and organized manner.

Route Fifty: Is that hard to pull off: timely data? How do you achieve that?

Symonds: It's important that we find the authoritative data for each specific dataset. We did make sure we researched and proposed the best timely authoritative data for every subject, and then sometimes we'd have to build it in a GIS format if it didn't already exist. We did want to make sure that we put in as many jurisdictional boundaries as possible, so we wanted to make sure you could look at the data for your town or your county or your Census tract. We did spend quite a bit of time researching the best data sources, the most timely, and what is authoritative in that realm.

Route Fifty: The state legislature said you had to do this, but what's helpful about this tool, from a planning perspective? How does this help you do your job?

Symonds: This will help us with our grant scoring. We do solicitations every couple of years for highway corridor infrastructure, and this will show us the community benefits all in one map. Our map includes our overburdened communities and vulnerable populations data, which is an environmental health dataset, so you can immediately see what community benefits. It's a visual aid; are proposed charging stations going to fill a gap, what is the distance to other fast charging, and then sharing the planning data should help all agencies that are working on a grant program. DOT is one of many Washington state agencies that have grant programs for EV infrastructure, so it's a coordinated way to show what is going to be built. It gets back to, is this filling a gap, or is this filling a need in a community? There's a lot of ways to judge that with all the layers in the tool.

Route Fifty: You mentioned there's a lot of agencies that have their hands on EVs. How helpful has that been?

Symonds: It's important that we are sharing our standards, sharing our programs’ focus. We're in different budgets here at the state, and those budgets have different priorities, so we follow our budget’s priorities with each of our grant programs, and then the EV council helps coordinate that we're looking at the right locations and monitoring any potential overlap in the programs.

Route Fifty: What advice would you have for others looking to do similar work around EVs?

Symonds: We built this tool based on other examples, and I think some of the biggest lessons learned are to be confident in your authoritative data sources. Have a maintenance schedule for data updates that ensures that it's going to be delivering timely information. We spent a lot of time looking at all the other publicly available data sets, because publicly available was important to this project, and we spent a lot of time looking for the best platform. It's nice to put this out in a platform that folks can build on themselves. We've curated this dataset, but within this system, there's access to thousands more datasets in The Living Atlas, and then you can add your own datasets as well. We really love that there's this platform that folks can build and research for their own communities. It's an adaptable tool for different geographic areas.

Route Fifty: What's next? What are you looking at with this tool, or EV adoption broadly?

Symonds: We're on a biennial budget cycle, so our 2025-2027 budget was just recently passed, and we're wrapping up our 2023-2025 budget cycle. There's many programs involved in transportation electrification, so for this tool, we really want to ensure that we're sharing those investments in a geographic framework so everyone can have access to that in terms of planning, because there's investments being made in multiple sectors. We're close to launching a medium and heavy-duty rebate incentive program to purchase zero emission trucks and install associated infrastructure. We have a number of state grant programs, including the one I work on, which is highway corridor charging. We have port electrification. We're just about to kick off our 2025-2027 budget and all the electrification goals that are within that. The EV council will continue to go on, and that's really important with our coordination with the Department of Commerce, which has another grant program, the Department of Ecology, which has another grant program, our Department of Enterprise Services has one as well.