What this data is, and is not

This site publishes one thing: where public electric-vehicle charging stations are in six American cities, and what is known about each. It sells nothing and takes no bookings.

Where it comes from

Every station is drawn from OpenStreetMap — nodes and ways tagged amenity=charging_station inside each metro's bounding box, read on 7 September 2026 through the Overpass API. Operator, connector types, rated power, bay count, access and fee are reproduced as mapped. 95 of the 1,065 carry a cross-reference to the U.S. Department of Energy's station register, which is a good sign that a human checked them.

The map data is © OpenStreetMap contributors and available under the Open Database Licence.

A metro area is not a city

Each city is gathered from a rectangle drawn around its metropolitan area, because that is what the mapping API takes. A rectangle is a search area and never an address: the New York box reaches across the Hudson, and 53 stations inside it stand in New Jersey. An early build of this site published them as "New York, New York", which was simply false.

So a station's location is now taken from its own record — the town and state a mapper entered — and never from the box it was found in. Where a station carries no town of its own, the page says the metro area rather than naming a city it cannot vouch for.

Who is allowed to plug in

Access is recorded for 542 of the 1,065 stations: 380 open to the public, 139 for customers of the business only, and 23 private. For the remaining 523 nobody has recorded it.

Those unknowns used to be shown with a green Public badge, on the reasoning that an untagged charger is probably public. That is a guess wearing the clothes of a fact, and it has been removed: a station with no access tag now says nothing about access at all.

What it cannot tell you

Whether a bay is free. OpenStreetMap records infrastructure, not occupancy, and no open source publishes live availability across networks. So no page here says "available now", and no counter on this site ticks. Check the operator's own app before you rely on a stall being open.

Whether it is working. A mapped charger can be broken, fenced off, or long removed. 1,065 stations is what the map holds, not what a technician would find.

Complete coverage. OpenStreetMap is contributed, so coverage is uneven — dense in Los Angeles, thin in Milwaukee. A city with fewer stations here may simply have fewer mappers.

An exact total. The register is read through the public Overpass API, and when its main endpoint refuses a request the harvest falls through to a mirror. Mirrors replicate on their own schedules, so two runs hours apart can differ by a handful of stations. Every city records which endpoint answered it, so a thin result can be traced rather than puzzled over.

Numbers that are counted, not typed

Every figure on this site is derived from the register at the moment the page is built: 1,065 stations, 80 operators, 259 rated at 50 kW or more. Where a fact is missing it is left out rather than filled in — rated power is known for 312 stations and connectors for 536, and the rest are counted as stations and excluded from those breakdowns.

What was here before

This domain previously carried a page advertising an autonomous taxi service: a pulsing LIVE badge over "127 cabs active right now", "42 CABS AVAILABLE" in Miami, a 4.98 rating from 184,000 completed rides, and a nearest cab 1:42 away. None of it was fed by anything — the figures were written into the HTML by hand, and there was no fleet. They have been removed rather than restyled, and replaced with a register that can be checked.

Names that are not ours

Operator and network names — Tesla, ChargePoint, Electrify America, EVgo and the rest — are the trade marks of their owners. They appear here only to say who runs a given charger. This site is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to any of them, or to any vehicle manufacturer. The typeface is Chakra Petch, under the Open Font Licence, and the cab on the front page is our own drawing of no particular vehicle.

Your position

The Near me page asks the browser for your location to sort the list by distance. That coordinate stays in your browser: the sort runs there, against a copy of the register. Nothing is sent to this server, logged, or stored, and the page works without it.