Get the latest stories from THE CITY delivered to your inbox each morning.
Your questions answered about the greatest city in the world. Tire
The New Yorkest podcast. Twice weekly.
Daily newsletters to keep away your NYC FOMO.
Data tracking the pandemic's effect on New York City. Updated daily.
The fight for fair wages.
How New York's landlords are keeping rentals vacant during a housing crunch.
The underground world of scammers who trick people out of their homes.
Your questions answered about the greatest city in the world.
The New Yorkest podcast. Twice weekly.
Daily newsletters to keep away your NYC FOMO.
Data tracking the pandemic's effect on New York City. Updated daily.
The fight for fair wages.
How New York's landlords are keeping rentals vacant during a housing crunch.
The underground world of scammers who trick people out of their homes.
Get THE SCOOP newsletter for original reporting and news you can’t miss.
In New York City, officials have tried what they can to rein in dangerous e-bikes and e-scooters as the poorly manufactured batteries in the devices continue to kill and injure city residents.
In just the first three weeks of 2024, there were nine fires related to those batteries and eight injuries. Since 2019, the first year the FDNY started tracking the data, injuries related to battery fires have increased 1,053% from 13 to 150 in 2023.
Last year, 18 people died in battery-related fires, up from six deaths the year before.
To combat the trend, officials have passed local legislation that bars the possession or sale of refurbished lithium-ion batteries. A committee hearing on Wednesday in the City Council will discuss a slate of more local e-bike safety measures. Gov. Kathy Hochul this month said she plans to propose a bill banning their sale. And leaders in the city’s public housing have moved to limit the number of e-bikes per household.
But safety experts say the only way to truly curb the threat is to regulate them at the source: as they are manufactured.
That will require federal legislation in the most sharply divided and least productive Congress in a generation. But, surprisingly, regulating the devices’ batteries seems to be one of the only issues on which House Republicans and Democrats agree these days.
A bill is now pending in Congress to give the Consumer Product Safety Commission an explicit directive to create federal, mandatory standards for how to safely build and import those batteries. (Without that, CPSC doesn’t have the regulatory authority to make a mandatory standard on its own.)
Democratic New York senators Chuck Schumer and Kristin Gillibrand and Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-The Bronx) began a push last year for legislation to give the commission the go-ahead it needs to fast-track new rules.
Without that permission, said Will Wallace, associate director of safety policy at Consumer Reports, manufacturers would have to abide by safety standards only voluntarily — something many e-bike and e-scooter makers have ignored.
“We are nowhere near substantial compliance,” Wallace said. Without that, poorly made products flood the market, which lead to battery malfunctions, explosions and fires.
As the bill winds its way through the House of Representatives, Wallace noted, it has had a remarkable base of support. Last spring, a first hearing on the bill at the CPSC saw disparate stakeholders all saying the same thing: Please regulate.
“It was incredibly striking because … you had 15 or 20 different people there from industry, from consumer groups, from the FDNY and everybody was there saying: We need a federal rule,” Wallace said.
This past fall, the bill achieved a rare occurrence in the steeply divided, Republican-led House: unanimous approval.
Just after the chaotic hunt for a new speaker played out, the battery bill quietly sailed through its subcommittee in early November. It again passed the House’s Energy and Commerce Committee unanimously in early December.
“This bill had universal support and it was voted out with members on the record. It was voted out unanimously on a bipartisan basis,” Wallace said.
From here, the bill must go to the House floor for a vote by the full body. Rep. Ritchie Torres told News 12 Bronx earlier this month that “we’re confident we’re going to pass it on a bipartisan basis this year.”
The movement is encouraging, consumer product safety experts say, but it will hardly be an overnight fix.
First, the bill must wind its way through the Senate. Requests to the office of Schumer and Gillibrand were not immediately returned about its status there.
Even if the bill sails through the full House, and does the same in the Senate, a mandatory standard wouldn’t start applying to the industry for at least another year or so, experts said.
Still, the legislation is a good step to Ibrahim Jilani, consumer technology director at UL Solutions, the product safety company formerly known as Underwriters Laboratories. He said he constantly hears from fire officials across the U.S. who are trying to figure out how to stem the tide of e-bike and e-scooter battery fires. Some are trying to replicate the local legislation New York City has created.
“I am getting calls from every fire department you would imagine in this country,” he said.
Fire officials from New York have been particularly vocal on the subject. Earlier this month, FDNY Commissioner Laura Kavanagh traveled to Washington, D.C. to speak about the problem at the U.S. Conference of Mayors. She emphasized that the issue is “by no means [only] a New York City problem.”
“We met with a bipartisan group of legislators on the Hill yesterday and every one of them has had a lithium-ion battery fire in their district,” she said at the Jan. 18 visit.
To Jilani, the solution is not to just regulate these specific lithium-ion batteries, but to make a federal mandate for any lithium-ion battery operated devices “or it will just re-emerge under another group of products and then there will be more loss of life, more property damage, more injuries,” he said.
If you total up all the people who have been hurt, died or had property damaged from various lithium-ion batteries over the years — from power banks, to hoverboards, vaping devices and power tools — Jilani says it’s not just a few hundred but tens of thousands of people.
“This is a no-brainer to keep people safe from dangerous goods. And it’s been an ongoing epidemic for a decade,” he said.
THE CITY is an independent nonprofit newsroom dedicated to serving the people of New York.
Sign up and get everything you need to know to be an active New Yorker delivered to your inbox each morning. See more.
Children Bicycle This site is protected by reCAPTCHA.