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Geodesign is a participatory planning approach in which stakeholders use geographic information systems to develop and vet alternative design scenarios in a collaborative and iterative process. This study is based on a 2019 geodesign workshop in which 17 participants from industry, government, university, and non-profit sectors worked together to design an initial network of hydrogen refueling stations in the Hartford, Connecticut, metropolitan area. The workshop involved identifying relevant location factors, rapid prototyping of station network designs, and developing consensus on a final design. The geodesign platform, which was designed specifically for facility location problems, enables breakout groups to add or delete stations with a simple point-and-click operation, view and overlay different map layers, compute performance metrics, and compare their designs to those of other groups. By using these sources of information and their own expert local knowledge, participants recommended six locations for hydrogen refueling stations over two distinct phases of station installation. We quantitatively and qualitatively compared workshop recommendations to solutions of three optimal station location models that have been used to recommend station locations, which minimize travel times from stations to population and traffic or maximize trips that can be refueled on origin–destination routes. In a post-workshop survey, participants rated the workshop highly for facilitating mutual understanding and information sharing among stakeholders. To our knowledge, this workshop represents the first application of geodesign for hydrogen refueling station infrastructure planning. 

The recent growth in the California hydrogen fuel cell vehicle (FCV) market offers the opportunity to analyze how refueling stations that drivers use after some experience compare with those they initially intended to use. Online surveys completed by 124 FCV adopters in California in early 2019 were analyzed. Respondents listed stations they initially planned to use, stations that they later used, subjective reasons for using them, and important travel destinations. Network GIS analysis was then used to measure estimated travel times between both available and planned retail hydrogen stations and home, work, and frequently traveled routes, both at the time of adoption and at the time of the survey. Results show that 40% of respondents changed refueling stations over time. Those with stations objectively nearer to home, work, and frequently traveled routes were less likely to change their list. Drivers were more likely to subjectively label stations as near home and less likely to label them as on the way compared with objective measurements of these criteria, though these differences are greater for respondents who changed stations. Regardless of whether the station was available pre-adoption or opened post-adoption, stations that respondents added to their lists were farther from home than those they initially intended to use. For stations available pre-adoption, reliability positively influenced adding them after experience, while stations added by drivers that opened post-adoption tended to require short deviations to reach. These results indicate that a mixture of geographic and station-level characteristics contribute to FCV drivers changing stations over time. 

The market for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (FCVs) continues to grow worldwide. At present, early adopters rely on a sparse refuelling infrastructure, and there is only limited knowledge about how they evaluate the geographic arrangement of stations when they decide to get an FCV, which is an important consideration for facilitating widespread FCV diffusion. To address this, we conducted several related studies based on surveys and interviews of early FCV adopters in California, USA, and a participatory geodesign workshop with hydrogen infrastructure planning stakeholders in Connecticut, USA. From this mixed-methods research project, we distil 15 high-level findings for planning hydrogen station infrastructure to encourage FCV adoption.