Transportation officials on Thursday unveiled the city's first curbside public electric charging station.

The new station in the Bronx is a welcome addition for electric vehicle owners. 

"With an EV, our money completely stays in our pocket — we don't even have to think about paying gas," Antoinea Knight said, while riding shotgun in an electric vehicle.

Knight and her fiancé Charles Miller deliver food in their electric vehicle, and it's a money saver for the couple.

But charging up means trips out of the Bronx, where they live, to a Nissan dealership in New Rochelle.

A nearby one, at Bay Plaza in the Bronx, is inconvenient.

"What I don't like about that, is that it's not designated just for electric vehicles so there would be plenty of other cars just sitting in that parking space and we wouldn't even be able to use it," Knight said.

Now, there is a spot just 10 minutes from their home, set aside for electric cars like theirs.

And it costs $2.50 an hour during the day, from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., and a dollar an hour overnight.

"Just being able to be out here for a couple of hours, just to charge up, grab lunch, get back out there, it's so beneficial," Miller said.

It's the first of two electric vehicle charging ports that went live in the city - the other is in Riverdale, in the Bronx - as part of the city transportation department's effort to increase the number of public charging stations in all five boroughs.

There are nearly 15,000 electric vehicles registered in the city, but the number of charging stations is just a tenth of that, at 1,500.

Most of them though are inside Manhattan parking garages, which charge electric vehicle owners for the spots and-or the power.

"What if you cant afford to park or choose not to park in a parking garage but you park on the city streets where are you gonna get your car charged?" said city transportation commissioner Hank Gutman. "Well, those people, all of us, need those chargers and we need to have them on the streets of the city of New York for the electric vehicles to take over as they should."

By October 50 of these charging stations will be installed around the city and each station can juice up to two cars at a time.

Con Edison also wants to make it easier for electric car owners to find a place to plug in.

The energy giant is using an empty lot it owns to install 18 publicly available electric vehicle chargers with a battery storage system to make the power grid more green.

"Over time we're gonna learn from this and how to scale this up so more and more access points in the city become available for people to charge their electric vehicle and create much more resilience on the grid," Leonard Singh, a senior vice president at Con Edison, said.

For Knight and Miller, parking in a garage is too costly. The city's effort means less stress about being stranded while behind the wheel.

"We're really grateful that it's going to be in all five boroughs," Knight said. "Now, we'll feel more confident driving out anywhere."