E-bike Battery Regulation Isn’t Anti-immigrant or Anti-worker. It’s Common Sense. 

“We aren’t serving to supply staff by forcing them to cost unsafe, unregulated gear of their flats. We want extra regulation to guard these hard-working riders and their neighbors, not much less.”

There was one other e-bike battery fire last weekend. We’ve seen variations of this dozens of instances earlier than in New York Metropolis. This time somebody was charging 5 e-bikes in an condominium on the twentieth flooring of a excessive rise in Midtown. As occurred nearly 200 instances up to now 12 months, the batteries exploded. Nearly 50 folks had been injured and a number of households are actually homeless. The FDNY needed to carry out a daring rope rescue to save lots of a girl dangling out of a window. It was a miracle nobody died.

New Yorkers climbing out of their home windows to flee battery fires is changing into a extra common prevalence. Lower than a 12 months in the past, there was a fireplace in a NYCHA constructing within the East Village the place two teenagers needed to climb down a fifth floor drainpipe to escape. In response to that lethal hearth, and another a few months later within the Jackie Robinson Homes, NYCHA proposed an all out ban on e-bikes and e-scooters of their buildings.

This was met with furor from politicians and pundits who had been fast to criticize the coverage as overreaching, however with out providing any workable solutions on easy methods to cease the fires. NYCHA backed down a number of weeks later, saying they wanted to do extra analysis into doable options. Nothing to this point has been proposed as an alternative. When you stroll across the Riis Tasks, as I’ve accomplished not too long ago, e-bikes are everywhere in the hallways and being introduced up in elevators. There isn’t even a warning join anyplace.

On Monday, there’s an e-bike battery oversight hearing within the Metropolis Council with some frequent sense proposals on easy methods to take care of the battery hearth epidemic. One proposed invoice requires a battery security publicity marketing campaign, one other requires a ban on used battery gross sales, and one other requires a ban on the gross sales of e-bike batteries with no security certification. None of those payments appear to be getting any traction although, most likely as a result of council members are underneath the mistaken impression that rising regulation on e-bike batteries is in some way anti-immigrant, anti-worker, or anti-biking.

I don’t agree with that in any respect. The folks most affected by e-bike fires are sometimes the households of the supply riders or their neighbors, who stay in a few of the poorest neighborhoods of town. Each time there’s a hearth, a number of households are displaced, typically with no place to go. We aren’t serving to supply staff by forcing them to cost unsafe, unregulated gear of their flats. We want extra regulation to guard these hard-working riders and their neighbors, not much less.

A long run answer is to arrange a battery swap community of charging kiosks all through town that allows riders to swap their batteries for charged ones for a month-to-month subscription price. We’re within the early levels of constructing simply such a community of secure swappable batteries. Even higher, we’re constructing this swap community so seniors on mobility scooters can use the batteries as properly.