Another E-bike fire

we can't even shut down obviously illegal pot dispensaries knowing that only 3 out of 10,000 in the city are actually legal..

but city council thinks we will find all the non-UL listed batteries..

I will hope that hardwired chargers for cars are engineered and built to higher standards, and the batteries as well, because it's certainly going to be a game changer when parking garages have a significant number of e-vehicles in them of various vintages and service histories, and one catches fire. Outside of poor engineering, the damage that the end user (owner, driver, parking attendant) can do to a vehicle or charger that renders is dangerous is non trivial.

Hate to think what the increase in insurance premiums will be for residential and commercial buildings with highly electrified garages. (And probably a new local law: mandated examinations / tests of sprinkler systems every 2 years)

Aaron2,
The plan is to electrify EVERYTHING and we don't have an electric grid built out to support that. We already have rolling brown outs every Summer (mostly in poor areas). This is going to be a disaster.

@Aaron2 - EVs are less of a concern because they are produced by big, regulated entities without idiots hot-wiring their own Alibaba batteries in. Further, EVs (aside from some early ones like the Leaf) have battery coolant loops and the cells are generally firewalled off.. so thermal runaways across the pack are rarer. They have battery management systems with lots of sensors, alerting and fail safes like relays that prevent using them while in a failed state.

It obviously can happen though, just like ICE car fires can happen.

The e-bike battery problem is that these guys are buying cells from who knows where, via who knows what website. No one is regulated and catching them is going to be very hard because they are just drop shipping via standard delivery. Doesn't take much to spin up a new brand/LLC/web portal/Amazon storefront and try again. Further we have

At least a garage fire will be self contained within concrete & steel.

We are seeing retailers and repairers doing god knows what right in the same buildings OTHER people live.
Remember we had the guy in Queens I believe who killed his whole family operating some sort of battery repair operation out of his kitchen. Of course he managed to run out of the front door with his arm on fire as his whole family perished from his decision making.

Apparently this shop in chinatown that killed 4 people was charging 100 batteries at a time or something insane. There's some scary photos online pre-fire. Had a few tickets/fines from the city before too..

There's a reason you don't generally see automotive garages in the ground floor of residential buildings...

There's six people in my building that have e-scooters which makes me uneasy.

The easiest way to solve this.. at least in condo/coop would be board requires an inspection/permit to have your e-bike stored indoors. Many buildings already have bike rooms with racks they rent out.

The challenge here is it has to cover people bringing their bikes up to their apartment, or detaching the battery and doing the same.

Really its the battery being UL listed / not some sketchy knockoff that needs to be checked for.

I guess the next concern is why don't sketchy knockoffs just put UL stickers on too if they can make fake Gucci bags already?

Further - the people buying sketchy batteries to save a buck are also the least likely to comply with and pay a fee to their building right, so...

That said, demographic wise, and where we are seeing these fires.. the above would have prevented zero or near-zero of the deaths.

All this falls into the category of "are we making rules that are only enforceable on the people already following them?"

@Steve -- fair points -- I do think the higher attention paid to the engineering and control systems reduces the likelihood of e-car fire. I might take issue with 'big regulated entities', given some of the market participants and the 'move fast and break things' ethos of their owners, but given the broadere and unregulated range of battery makers, I'll accept it. Residential buildings would do well to have central storage/charging for residents, with stronger fire protection to reduce risk (and could be made a selling point, I'm sure). I don't remember reading of an ICE-based car fire in a commercial garage in the 30+ years I've been in NYC (happy to hear about it if anybody knows of any).

For some time now, my office building has banned all e-bikes, -scooters, -boards, -etc., (or at least their batteries) on premises.

Our small coop building has banned the use and/or storage of ebikes in the building some months ago

Of course enforcement is a whole other thing

The forward solution will likely be a modernized storage/charging bike room where it is sprinklered/fire proofed .

Maybe making it an air tight room would be cheaper, with a fully sealing door and making sure there is no way someone can acccidentally get locked in.

Actually, that would be a great company to start.....air tight bike room conversions for buildings

My large coop building has banned the use and/or storage of ebikes and lithium-batter powered scooters as well, to the great displeasure of my sibling who used it to come and visit

People seem to think that anything electric is zero pollution, but that's nonsense. It's as much of a farce as "recycling." Most of NYC electricity is still generated by burning fossil fuels. We will see if emissions targets get hit, but for now electric conveyances mere shift where the pollution is.

You are not accounting for the difference in pollution. I haven’t studied it, but I imagine generating electricity via natural gas has less of a pollution impact than cars on gasoline per unit of energy.

More importantly, most people are similarly unaware of the pace at which renewables are growing to account for the share of electric production. Only 60% is fossil fuels today, with 21.5% as renewables and the remainder as nuclear. Most people are stuck in a decade-old mentality of renewables being some single-digit niche. Renewables are the only growth category. Fossil fuels won’t go away fully anytime soon, but they will represent a decreasing share over time. But in order to get there, you need to start going electric on the consumption side first.

My point is that it isn't zero. Especially when electrifying new things like e-bikes. And e-bikes aren't replacing cars, they're replacing pedal bikes.

Arguably even shifting where the pollution happens, and reducing it say 20% now, trending towards 50/75/100% in coming decades is hugely impactful.
What's better, tailpipe emissions in a congested city of 8M, or power plant emissions in a low population area..

EVs have some other upsides vs ICE, such as being way quieter so you don't have nearly as much car traffic noise from idiots revving their engines, near-zero consumption when idling in traffic, etc.

E-bikes yeah it's arguable how net positive they are, possible they just allow all the delivery services to deliver more orders per hour to a wider delivery radius...

https://gothamist.com/news/another-fire-chinatown-ebike-shop-where-blaze-killed-four-this-week?fbclid=IwAR3JkfRp81BkWDptQHMoqUveZxEFKHg-tbZzhsOysUSoBON0X6Ty75auG6w

@steve123: "... or power plant emissions in a low population area.."

Car for me, pollution for thee... Nothing like exporting your problems to others.

The upstate NY electric grid is scrambling to implement major capacity upgrades so they can hook up large scale solar farms, which are going to make a lot of pleasant countryside look pretty *ing ugly. This is not because upstate needs the power -- it's all coming into NYC. Perhaps instead of vying over whether to put a casino over Penn Station, a a small nuclear power plant might be a much better option. "Electricity that is too cheap to meter!"

Eh, a rather dark interpretation of the simple assertion that tailpipe emissions in high density urban areas are bad, actually.

I don't really understand some of the anti-renewable posturing to be honest. A lot of it feels like status quo bias and weird partisanship.

What is your actual preference here, more fossil fuel energy generation within the 5 boros? City buildings continuing to puff soot from fuel oil into high density residences? Or brownouts? Or degrowth? Some sort of "they had it coming" bs? Etc.

Anyway - completely agree we need a mix of power generation, and the idiot anti-nuke environmentalists have directly contributed to increases in coal burning / extended dependence on fossil fuels generally. Further, instead of continuing to build newer, safer designs of nuclear plants, we are left running older designs past their planned lifespans because it's impossible to build anything. Process over progress. There's a guy on twitter who half jokes we should rename it "Elemental power" to remove the scaremongered "nuclear" association.

Solar is a lot easier to scale in the burbs since freestanding homes have enough roof space to host panels to power themselves, and land is cheap enough for freestanding solar farms. Solar doesn't really scale in urban areas so well as you can cover your rooftop in it and basically power 5% of your building, given the roof-to-residence ratio. Of course freestanding solar scales even worse in urban areas because the land value is too high for it to remotely make sense.

Wind generally gets less attention but probably makes more sense in our region given hours of sunlight available. This of course makes people mad as well, some combination of "my views" or that it's killing birds, or maybe it's killing whales, or complaints about the high power transmission lines, or some trolling about the lifespan of the turbine blades, etc.

I'm not a climate change denier and I'm not against energy from non-fossil fuel sources. I probably should have been more clear in my earlier postings. What I'm against is some of the "environmentalist" BS (like I mentioned with recycling supra). I could give tons of examples like protesting against both nuclear power and the trunk line bringing clean energy from Canada to NYC. And don't get me started about Leonardo DiCaprio flying private to collect his awards for saving the environment.

Right now one of biggest threats we have is the continued growth of electricity usage. And I'm not talking about the conversion of former fossil fuels, I'm talking about new/increased uses. I personally find e-bikes to be threats on many levels, but as far as I can see the vast majority didn't replace any ICE vehicles. They largely replaced human powered vehicles.

And as far as electric cars go, I think they are largely getting a pass environment wise when the production and disposal actually have some pretty significant issues environmentally. I know Papa Elon doesn't think the mining issues are a problem because we will just Coup whoever we want. And we can trust him, right? Like with the promises about self driving cars?

And when we caused Congestion On Purpose the cars just went away, right? Just like they are going to disappear when Congestion Pricing is implemented. And there will be studies to prove it from the usual suspects. Like the studies showing the 14th Street Busway didn't cause any increased traffic on the surrounding streets. Despite the videos I keep posting on social media ranting like a lunatic that 13th Street is gridlocked and congested like never before. And we are going on 2,000 miles of bike lanes which carry way fewer people. They are a waste of assets.

30 - I'm with you that the congestion pricing has about a 0% chance of being implemented in a way that actually reduces traffic OR funds improved transit. we're just going to pay more money for worse things, as ever in NYC.

My view on bike lanes (as a non-biker!) is that we have taken a quantity over quality approach, where painting some lines is easy, but installing protected bike lines is work so we don't do a lot of it. I'd ride more than 2x/year if the protected bike lanes didn't dump me into commingled cross town traffic for 2/3 of my ride.

I live in North BK and it drives me crazy that we have a pretty good network of completely protected bike lanes & fully closed streets, yet bikers will instead use the street 1 block away to ride commingled with cars, against traffic, running lights, and then scream at cars that are in their way, lol. So I don't think anything will make the bicycle mafia happy.

@steve -- I will certainly admit to being a cynic.

My complaint is that people are happy to implement solutions with significant external costs - this is the crowd that walk their dog a couple of blocks - not for exercise, but so the poop they don't clean up isn't on their block. But, I also watched the upstate anti-frackers then go after wind farms (because "views"), and are now going after solar (ditto). I have some sympathy, as upstate these days mostly only has tourism, and the visual costs of acres of solar and power lines won't be borne in any material way by city dwellers. But there's a real imbalance in the distribution of costs and benefits.

My actual preference is "less and more expensive". People need to consume less (of everything), and it has to be priced with more of the external costs included. This is why, despite being a car owner in the zone, I support congestion pricing (but yeah, it's not going to make a dent). I'd also like to see charges for currently 'free' on-street parking, and some sort of cost for the delivery trucks blocking lanes of traffic so they can offload stuff to the delivery guys, who then e-bike it to you. Want a $2.50 padlock? Walk to your local hardware store and buy one.

Aaron2,
I have no problem with me to parking. Have you noticed how much of that has disappeared? And small businesses along with that?

Metered parking.

https://www.westsiderag.com/2023/06/26/the-menace-of-e-vehicles-and-whats-being-done-about-it?fbclid=IwAR2I5YdQjbD5fFOTgBxiZmFWWK7v7AX8oIHbItM4kOwKlSWVyqihJYUTuuA

Metered parking at a rate that is in line with garages.

That article pretty much sums up so many elements of what's wrong:
Unenforceability: "a bill to increase penalties for e-vehicle hit and runs" -- how many h&r are actually caught?
Rules for thee, not for me: "Someone suggested licensing all bicycles, but Hoylman-Sigal, a cyclist himself, said that would be going too far." -- why, exactly?
And the general lack of enforcement by police.

This is the reality of what most "environmental" projects end up being (and led by the Charlatan In Chief)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-tesla-buffalo-new-york-solar-plant-1b634b9e?st=zcqd1cfae0ihn7a&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

BTW everyone who yelled "socialists!" when the Amazon Long Island City deal fell apart should pay fucking close attention.

Isn't there a policy against e-bikes in buildings after all of these fires ?
I see them on subways too ? Is that allowed ?

A disaster waiting to happen

https://www.firehouse.com/leadership/news/53065829/suit-fdny-commissioner-dragged-feet-on-ebike-battery-danger