Rapid urban population growth is driving many cities around the world to reduce their carbon footprints. In Canada, two major policy agendas are designed to achieve this: boosting urban density and promoting low-carbon transportation such as electric vehicles (EVs).
Despite their overlap, these goals are often pursued separately through disjointed planning strategies. In time, ad-hoc policies could be counterproductive and stall the shift to EVs, by making ownership expensive, inefficient and complicated.
Most Canadians live in cities, where the deployment of EVs has two main advantages.