The EV Push Adds Grave Weight To New York City's Garage Collapse Concerns

When a four-story parking garage in Manhattan’s Financial District collapsed last month and killed an attendant, concerns arose over the age and condition of some of the city’s thousands of parking structures.

New York City inspectors quickly went to work and determined several other parking structures were at risk of collapse after years of code violations went unaddressed and forced them to shutter. But as the concern for the structural health of the city’s parking infrastructure rises, an important factor has been largely undiscussed — the advent of electric vehicles, which can weigh thousands of pounds more than gasoline-fueled cars.

“We have one of the fastest aging infrastructures in the country,” said Robert Cornegy, a former New York City Council member who co-sponsored legislation mandating parking garage inspections. “There should be legislation that suggests, as we move forward and exercise or implement application of new technologies like electric vehicles and electric charging stations, that we bring those codes up to standard.”

Cars have gotten bigger and heavier over the last several decades — an increase that’s related to the number of electric vehicles on the road. The chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, Jennifer Homendy, has said that the weight difference between electric vehicles and lighter vehicles could cause serious damage in a collision.

An electric GMC Hummer weighs 9,000 pounds, and its battery pack — roughly 2,900 pounds — is the weight of a typical Honda Civic, she said. 

“I'm concerned about the increased risk of severe injury and death for all road users from heavier curb weights and increasing size, power and performance of vehicles on our roads, including electric vehicles,” Homendy said in January.

That weight is cause for concern for parking structure owners and operators in New York City. It would lead parking structures to be able to hold fewer cars on average, which means two things Centerpark CEO Gregg Reuben told Bisnow.

First, even less overall parking space, despite the fact that there are 85,000 more cars in Manhattan than before the pandemic, pushing the price of a parking spot higher for customers. Second, some parking owners will decide that it’s not worth keeping the parking structures in place as they are — portending potential conversions, sales and seeking alternative uses. 

“The reality is that the ability to retrofit these facilities is limited,” Reuben said. “I just don't believe a lot of the garages will be retrofitted to accommodate electric vehicles. I think the expense is high, I don't know if the market will even allow for the additional pricing that would be required … I just don't know if the economics will pencil.”

Rather than pay to upgrade and reinforce their structures for the added weight, Centerpark has already converted portions of some of its own garages.

“We converted here elsewhere in New York and Manhattan,” he said. “We've converted portions of our garages to self-storage facilities, to fitness centers. In places where we can create ground-floor retail, which is sometimes very limited, we do that.”

Following the collapse of the 57 Ann St. garage, the New York City Department of Buildings did a sweep and issued full or partial orders to vacate 15 garages in the city, a spokesperson said.

The common thread binding the shuttered garages wasn’t as much their age as their conditions, with cracked and spalling concrete, exposed rebar and leaks, according to the inspection files.

For the city’s well-maintained, older garages, they might be better able to accommodate the weight of electric vehicles, said Boris Hayda, a managing principal at DeSimone Consulting Engineers.

“Yes, electrical vehicles have a lot of weight in their battery systems,” Hayda said. "But if you compare it to cars from the early '60s or '50s, that were made out of solid hunks of steel, they're not that much different weight-wise."

Reuben agreed, but noted that there were also far fewer cars on the road in the 1950s and 1960s. The U.S. population has almost doubled from 1950 to present, per Census Bureau data, and car ownership was estimated at roughly 25 million in the U.S. in 1950, but almost 276 million today.

Hayda said the way many New York City garages are operated also adds to the risk — parking attendants and valets are commonplace, and they are incentivized to park as many vehicles as possible.

“For the city, they’ve said, ‘OK, we're gonna put 50 cars in here.’ But the operators quite often figure out a way to get 70 cars in there," he said. “I actually don't even want to go in and count up because I may get scared.”

For owners concerned about managing the added weight, there are some lower-cost fixes that could help update a small number of garages to accommodate heavier cars without sacrificing parking spaces, such as adding more support for columns.

But those likely won’t be enough for most parking structures, Hayda said: Some will need measures as extreme as updating the building’s foundations.

“There are certain garages, when [owners] get presented with the work they need to have to bring them to a state of good repair,” he said, adding that in Manhattan, with the introduction of congestion pricing, owners will decide it’s not worth it.

“I think that will be kind of a process of low-hanging fruit, or by elimination, kind of like a survival of the fittest," Hayda said.

Structural capacity isn't the only consideration for garage owners looking to prepare for the government-funded societal adoption of electric vehicles. Heavier cars mean more severe collisions, which might mean electric vehicles are more likely to cause structural damage if they bump into the walls of a garage, parking expert Henry Grabar told Bisnow.

“It's not just the vertical load and the weight of the car, but the weight of the car multiplied by the acceleration and the horizontal impact,” said Grabar, a journalist who recently published a book on parking in the U.S., Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains The World. “You're trying to back out of the 7-Eleven or whatever, and you accidentally put it in drive, and instead of bumping into a bollard, you just go flying through the bollard and into the store. That seems like a risk for garages.”

Garages also need to consider charging infrastructure for electric vehicles, Grabar said. The heaviest lift on a parking structure’s power currently is often their elevator, meaning building owners whose properties feature parking — not just garage owners, but retail, office and multifamily owners — will need to upgrade their electric systems for electric vehicles to charge. 

Building codes need to be updated — not just for the extra weight, but also for charging facilities — in order for the U.S.’ push toward electric vehicle adoption to succeed, Grabar said. Even in regions like the West, where adoption has been faster, building codes haven’t been updated as quickly as they need to be to encourage consumers to make the switch.

NYC follows the International Building Code, which was last updated in 2015 and adopted by the city in 2021. It takes a while to update code because it has to pass layers of government including the city council, experts told Bisnow.

Former council member Cornegy said he is confident that the city council will make the necessary changes in the future.

“Hindsight is always 2020. But the reality is that where we are making these advances in technology, we have to make sure that it doesn't come at the expense of loss of lives and endangering New York City's residents,” he said.