Austin EV charging use: where a charging site is permitted outright

Principal use only — a charger in a car park is not this

The first two subsections do all the scoping, and they are worth reading before anything else. §25-2-820 applies to electric vehicle charging as a principal use, and expressly does not apply to it as an accessory use.

So this is the rulebook for a charging site — a lot whose reason for existing is charging vehicles. Chargers in the car park of a supermarket, an office or a block of flats are accessory to those uses and none of the distances, size caps or roadway tests below reach them.

The old filling station has its own route in

Subsection (F) is a separate path from everything that follows, and the easiest one to satisfy. On a site with a commercial or industrial base district, charging is a permitted use where there is:

• an existing service station use; or
• a discontinued service station use — provided no later use of the site included a restaurant (general), restaurant (limited) or residential use.

No roadway test, no separation distance, no size cap, and any commercial or industrial district rather than only the seven listed later. The logic is plain enough: the site already sold fuel to vehicles.

The condition on the discontinued case is what stops a former station that has since become a café or a home being pulled back into a vehicle use.

The urban corridors are the harder ones, not the easier

The table repays a second look, because the conditions sit where you might not expect them. On a suburban roadway, highway, hill country roadway or internal circulation route, charging is permitted with no separation requirement and no size cap.

On a core transit corridor, future core transit corridor or urban roadway — the streets the city is otherwise densifying — it is permitted only if the site sits at least 1,000 feet from another charging site and is 25,000 square feet or less.

Both conditions point the same way. On the corridors where land is most contested, a charging site may be small and may not cluster; out on the highways it may be as large as the lot allows and sit next door to another.

Highway caps and stitches pull a site into conditional use

The last limb of §25-2-820(J) is the most obviously current thing in the section: a site within 1,000 feet of a highway cap or stitch is a conditional use, whatever roadway it faces.

A cap or stitch is a deck built over a sunken motorway to carry public space across it. Land beside one is about to become something quite different from land beside an open trench, and the section holds charging sites there to a discretionary review rather than letting them establish by right in the meantime.

One level below ground, and no further

§25-2-820(E) is a single line that decides a lot of garage design: charging stations may be located one level below ground and above.

So the first basement level is available and the second is not. In a multi-storey structure the whole above-grade stack is fine; it is the deep basement that the section closes off.