Chappaqua to Get Electric Car Charging Stations

The Chappaqua train station's parking lot will soon have 10 spots with electric car charges, New Castle town officials have said.

The spaces will be given out through a lottery, Town Clerk Jill Shapiro told Patch. They will be located near the LUKE pay stations, around the western side of the northern lot.

The spots will be added due to a program that the town entered into with the New York Power Authority and NYSERDA. Town Administrator Penny Paderewski, according to minutes of the June 25, 2012 town board meeting, explained that the town applied for the program in December 2011 and was then awarded the 10 charging stations. NYPA and NYSERDA would provide an 80/20 match, Paderewski said at the meeting.

The program is not the first of its kind in Chappaqua. A similar initiative at the train station was done in the early 2000s, Shapiro said, but it was discontinued. It was called the Clean Commute Program, Paderewski said at the June meeting, and included 20 chargers. The program involved using leased TH!NK electric cars from Ford, according to a federal report about the program, but the company stopped making them. New Castle also won a municipal planning award for the program, NYPA noted in a 2002 announcement.

More recently, the town embarked on a Clean Pass program, which gives preferential train station parking for gas-electric hybrid vehicle drivers.