What can be done about charging station blockers?

If you charge your electric car frequently at public stations, you’ve probably already encountered this problem. Particularly at locations with attractive facilities in the surrounding area, such as restaurants or shops, charging points for electric cars are frequently blocked by vehicles that aren't using the spaces for charging.

This not only applies to petrol and diesel vehicles, but also to plug-in vehicles that either just appear to be charging or are still hooked up long after the charging process has been completed. Another curiosity are nightly tuning meetings, which sometimes take place at GOFAST charging stations, because the cars can be showcased perfectly on social media in the shimmering blue light. Whatever the reasons may be, it is annoying and not in the interests of operators and users.

What is the legal situation?

Unfortunately, it is not that easy to put a stop to this practice. First of all, the police are only authorised to hand out fines on public car parks. Many public charging stations, however, are on private property and neither the police nor landowners are allowed to give out parking fines there. However, there are still various ways of taking action against illegally parked vehicles on private property. A common measure is the charging of a compensation fee by property owners or other entitled parties (e.g. tenants). These are often requested by monitoring companies and usually amount to around CHF 50. If the parking space is needed urgently, the owner can also hire a towing service at their own expense. These costs can be reclaimed retrospectively from the person who parked incorrectly, but with the risk of time-consuming civil proceedings if they refuse to pay. In the event of a judicial parking ban and corresponding signs or markings, the owner also has the option of filing a report with the police.

However, customers who are unable to charge their electric car due to a blocked charging point are not entitled to take measures themselves, such as blocking the vehicle in or even towing it away.

A dilemma for property owners

Even though property owners have various options for taking action, they always involve costs and risks, which then always raises the question of proportionality. There is also another reason why, in practice, sometimes only half-hearted action is taken against the blocking of charging stations. As charging stations are usually also valuable customer parking spaces, property owners find themselves in a dilemma when it comes to taking sanctions against people who block them. While they want electric charging points to offer added value for drivers, they also don’t want to scare off their customers with combustion-engine cars by issuing ‘parking fines’. As long as electric cars still represent the clear minority on the roads, it is therefore expected that many property owners will refrain from a taking a tougher stance against charging station blockers. In the long run, however, this momentum is likely to be reversed.

A blocking fee and a touch of humour

As a tenant directly affected by this, GOFAST obviously also has a strong interest in charging stations only being occupied during the charging process. After an hour, i.e. when a fast-charging electric car has been safely charged with enough electricity, we therefore charge a blocking fee of CHF 0.25 per minute. The precise purpose of this additional fee is to ensure that electric car drivers release charging stations for the next customers.

Logically, however, this blocking fee can only be applied to cars that have also purchased electricity at the site. In other cases, we currently rely mainly on the use of a softer approach. To make people who block one of our fast charging stations aware of their offence with a touch of humour, we have created postcards with a variety of motifs that our sales staff can stick under the windscreen wipers of the vehicles in question (available only in german and french). By doing this, we can keep chipping away and raising awareness of the problem with a few more road users every day.