This paper presents a novel and practical data-driven approach to sub-optimally allocate charging stations for electric vehicles (EVs) in an early-stage setting. Specifically, we investigate the following problem: For a city with a limited budget for public EV charging infrastructure construction, where should the charging stations be deployed in order to promote the transition of EVs from traditional cars? We develop a <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\delta$</tex-math></inline-formula> -nearest model and a <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$K$</tex-math></inline-formula> -nearest model that can capture people's satisfaction towards a certain design and formulate the early-stage EV charging station placement problem as a monotone submodular maximization problem utilizing fine-grained population, trip, transportation network and POI data. A greedy-based algorithm is proposed to solve the problem efficiently with a provable approximation ratio. A case study of Haikou is provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.