Planning and Regulatory Issues
Providing public charging facilities could be an attractive business proposition in the some circumstances, fulfilling a demonstrated need. Such services are still unusual and obtaining planning approval for such ventures is fraught with difficulties. With few precedents for the local authorities to rely on, objectors can make getting the necessary approval approval very difficult. In any case battery charging is not the kind of business local authorities like to promote for their city centres. Apartment dwellers also have problems to get charging points installed in their parking bays because local ordinance laws were not designed to cover this eventuality.
Even if these difficulties are overcome, there's still the electricity utility to deal with. Providing power to several Level 1 and Level 2 charging stations or a single Level 3 charging station can overload their existing distribution network and a business case must be made for installing new capacity.
Enthusiasm for EVs can wane when faced with all these difficulties.
The net effect of these bureaucratic and technical hurdles is that there are still very few available public charging installations.