Charging site selection usually starts from a map of traffic counts and ends in a spreadsheet of addresses that a developer then visits one at a time. The visits are where the money goes, and most of them end in a no.
A lot of those no answers were visible from above. Not all of them — capacity never is — but enough that the order of the visits matters more than the length of the list.
1. Measure the parking, not the parcel
Parcel acreage tells you very little. What matters is the striped area: how many stalls exist, how they are arranged, and whether a bank of them can be taken out of service without breaking circulation.
- Stall count and orientation, read off the striping in current imagery.
- Drive-aisle width, because a charger island needs clearance the existing layout may not have.
- Where the low-value stalls are — the far corner of a lot is easier to convert than the row by the door.
- Whether the lot is shared between tenants, which changes who has to agree before anything happens.
2. Find the trench run
This is the measurement that most changes a site's economics and the one most often skipped at the desktop stage. Power has to get from the service entrance to the stalls, and every foot of that path is trenching, conduit and restoration.
Transformer pads, switchgear cabinets, meter banks and panel locations are frequently visible in good imagery. Measure from those to the stall cluster you would actually use, and note what the path crosses — a landscaped island is cheap, a structural slab or a live drive lane is not.
3. Read the frontage for three-phase
Overhead line configuration at the frontage is often legible in imagery, and some utilities publish distribution layers. Together they support an inference about whether three-phase service is plausibly available at the property line.
Treat that as an inference and label it as one. Conductor counts read from an aerial photograph are a screening signal, not a service determination, and a line at the frontage says nothing about what is spare on it.
4. Check the battery envelope early
If storage is part of the design, the siting envelope is a constraint from the first pass rather than a detail for later. Setbacks from lot lines, distance from building openings, and fire-apparatus access all narrow where an enclosure can physically sit.
Separation requirements vary by adopted code and by jurisdiction, so the desktop job is to measure the available envelope and flag sites where it is tight — not to declare compliance. That is the fire marshal's call.
5. Let dwell time set the value
Stall count is a capacity figure. Dwell time is a revenue one. The assessor use code, the gross building area and the businesses listed at the address together indicate roughly how long a driver stays, and that changes what a charger at the site is for.
- Grocery, retail centre and cinema anchors imply the half-hour to two-hour dwell that suits mid-power charging.
- Quick-service and convenience pads imply short stops, which argues for fewer, faster units.
- Hotels, apartments and workplaces imply overnight or full-shift dwell, where slower and cheaper hardware wins.
- Fleet depots — bay doors, van rows, gated yards — are a different business entirely, with a known vehicle count and a predictable overnight window.
6. Confirm there is somebody to ask
A site nobody can say yes to is not a candidate. The assessor record gives an owner of record and a mailing address, which is enough to tell a single-owner parcel from one that will need a landlord, a tenant and possibly a ground lease to align.
It does not tell you who controls the parking, whether an exclusivity clause already exists, or whether the owner has been approached by three other developers this year. Those come out of the conversation the ranked list exists to prioritize.
What a desktop screen does not settle
Available capacity on the circuit is the big one. No combination of imagery and public record establishes what the utility can actually deliver at a service address, and no responsible screen implies otherwise.
- Circuit capacity, upgrade cost and interconnection queue position — all utility answers.
- Whether the electrical infrastructure visible in imagery is energised, rated or spare.
- Soil, rock and existing underground utilities along the trench path.
- Permitting outcome, and whether the jurisdiction has an opinion about enclosures on that lot.
What the screen does do is decide which twenty sites out of four hundred are worth an interconnection enquiry, and give the developer the measurements to ask a specific question rather than a general one.