How early hydrogen fuel cell vehicle adopters geographically evaluate a network of refueling stations in California

Abstract

After a few years of initial sales, there is an opportunity to analyze how early hydrogen fuel cell vehicle (FCV) adopters evaluated the spatial arrangement of a network of stations prior to adoption. Since strategies differ on how best to arrange initial stations in a region to facilitate adoption, understanding how they did so informs future station planning methods. We distributed a web-based survey to 129 FCV adopters throughout California in 2019, asking them where they lived and traveled at the time of adoption, up to five stations they planned to use, and subjective reasons for listing those stations. We estimated shortest travel times to respondents' homes and other frequent locations, and deviations from frequently traveled routes. We compared differences in subjective and objective convenience for primary, secondary, and lower-ranked stations, and tabulated the different combinations of stations that satisfied adopters' various geographic criteria. Over 80% planned to rely on a portfolio of multiple stations subjectively convenient to key activity locations, and nearly 25% who provided subjective geographic criteria for listing stations did not include “near home” as their top reason for their primary or secondary station. Estimated travel times to stations subjectively considered “near” home, work, and other location types exhibit variability, but consistently decay beyond 90 min. Primary stations are subjectively and objectively more convenient to home and work than lower-ranked stations, and more associated with subjective convenience to home and objective convenience to work than secondary stations. Other destination types align with lower-ranked stations.