Electric Brighton
It's Earth Day today! 🌍 Which is a tenuous link for me showing off a site which I've been working on recently.
Last year I switched to driving an electric car, and in doing so I got to discover all the ins and outs of what making that switch entails. It made me more aware of the barriers to entry and how perhaps some of those barriers could be reduced.
One of my personal goals for 2017 is to continue to focus some of my energy on acting on climate change. After some thinking about how best I could apply my skills, I decided upon trying to help people at a local level in making the switch to electric cars.
So, Electric Brighton was born, a simple site which aims to promote electric and plug-in vehicles in Brighton & Hove. One of the first things you have to learn after buying an electric car is who operates all the various chargers, where they are and how they all work. The site aims to help solve that by providing detailed and thorough profiles of each facility, complete with micro-directions as to how to find each charging point. Might sound simple but some charging points can be extremely hard to find on foot, let alone when you're in a car with people behind you. The site also amalgamates the various charge providers and puts them into one list, with live status updates for which ones are available now. This information is available elsewhere, but not altogether in one place and I'm already finding it quite helpful even just for me. I'm hoping that this information is equally useful to Brighton residents and visitors.
There's also some basic information with an FAQ section and details of local dealers to talk to about plug-in vehicles. I will be updating and adding to the site over time, I'm also aiming to create a mailing list of local EV drivers in the hope of running surveys with to provide better insight in to the local infrastructure usage. We'll see.
Well, that's kind of it really. It's been a weekend and evening project since the start of the year and I'm still testing. If you notice any issues, please do let me know.