New York Apartment Buildings Ban E-Bikes After a Record Year for Battery Fires
New York's delivery workers charge their batteries at home because there's nowhere else to do it. Now their buildings say they can't.
New York City recorded a record number of fires caused by lithium-ion batteries in 2023 — the FDNY logged more than 250 such fires that year, several of them fatal, many starting with e-bike or scooter batteries charging inside apartments.
Most of the batteries involved belonged to food delivery workers, who often own multiple bikes and charge them overnight to cover long shifts, sometimes using cheap aftermarket or reconditioned batteries not certified to safety standards.
The City Council responded with Local Law 39, requiring UL-certified batteries and banning the sale of uncertified ones. Separately, and more bluntly, a wave of individual co-op and condo boards banned e-bikes and their batteries from building interiors entirely — hallways, storage rooms, elevators, apartments — regardless of certification.
For delivery workers who charge at home because there is nowhere else to do it, the building-by-building bans didn't solve the fire risk. They just moved it outside.
Filed from public reporting:
