I had to trench about thirty feet to install a charger in my back alley. It was expensive (about $1500) but I looked at it as a long-term investment that would pay off over a decade. If I could have shared that cost with, say, 10 neighbors it would have been pretty modest. My state also has a reimbursement program that will cover a portion of the installation costs. These capital costs are problematic but not really devastating. Even if nobody wants to use taxpayer funds, cities/utilities could propose investment programs with payback done via a small extra fee charged to electric usage over a few years.
The estimate was about 10X more than that -- I'm not sure what made it so expensive, maybe because the wiring had to be sized to handle all 30 units, the HOA wouldn't let it be built to handle just the few people that wanted an EV charger today. And there was some sort of upgrade that had to be made to the underground electrical vault.
A $15,000 loan, at 5% interest, works out to about $159/month over a decade. Divide that by ten neighbors, it's about $16/month per user to charge -- excluding the cost of energy. This isn't nothing, but it's a reasonable enough price if you have 10 people in the facility who are interested. Obviously the theory and practice are very different things, but as barriers go this one seems surmountable. Particularly given the fact that electric car charging is eventually going to be more and more popular/valuable to purchasers or renters. In short, this is a very tiny fraction of the price of a new roof.
