On a sunny day back in June, Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand stood alongside Mayor Eric Adams and a gaggle of government officials outside the Baruch Houses on the Lower East Side to announce $25 million in federal funds to build e-bike charging stations at dozens of New York City Housing Authority developments.
Action was urgent, speaker after speaker said, following a deadly fire caused by an exploding lithium-ion battery at an e-bike shop in Chinatown days earlier, which killed four tenants.
“I am announcing right now that we have procured a grant that NYCHA will get $25 million in emergency money to prevent this,” Schumer proclaimed, adding that he had personally called both the White House and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg to ask for the funds.
“NYCHA residents will start seeing evidence of this early next year,” Deputy Mayor for Operations Meera Joshi promised that day.
The need for safe charging sites for e-bikes came into tragic focus again on Friday with a Harlem fire that killed young journalist Fazil Khan and injured 22 others.
Yet eight months after officials vowed action to prevent more needless e-bike fire fatalities, not a dime of the grant promised by the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) has been spent, and there’s no sign that a single charging station will see the light of day at any NYCHA development anytime soon.
The $25 million grant designated to pay for 173 safe storage and charging stations at 53 NYCHA developments is still undergoing a required environmental review. Plans for another four stations developed in partnership with the utility Con Ed are also crawling along, with contractors to build the stations not expected to be hired until May.
In response to THE CITY’s questions, NYCHA spokesperson Michael Horgan explained that because the Housing Authority is a new recipient of DOT funds, the agency “must undergo a New Recipient Onboarding process with the Federal Transit Administration before the grant can be executed. The environmental review is part of this process.”
The authority has a list of the 53 developments where it plans to install these stations but does not yet have an estimated timeline for when construction of any of these stations could begin.
Meanwhile, Horgan noted, the agency “is working with tenant leaders at each of these 53 developments to develop a procurement plan and understand siting and usage recommendations residents may have.”
Joshi on Tuesday said more progress would be evident in “probably six months from now.”
“The initial groundwork has already begun,” she said. “It’ll be safe charging and secure bike locking so people aren’t bringing them into their residence.”
The Con Ed pilot program to build stations in four NYCHA developments — Queensbridge North and Queensbridge South in Queens, De Hostos in Manhattan and Van Dyke in Brooklyn — is farther along than the DOT project, officials say.
NYCHA and Con Ed solicited bids for contractors two days after the June 25 press conference. Bidding closed in August, and NYCHA expects to execute a contract with the winning vendor to do the work by the end of May, with the first stations projected to go on line by the end of the year.
Providing safe, secure places to charge e-bikes and e-scooters, officials hope, will prevent battery fires, which have proliferated in the last several years. The lithium-ion batteries are found in everyday devices — from cell phones to toys — but can explode when damaged or improperly charged.
In a statement, Schumer pointed to the deadly Harlem fire, which the Fire Department found was started by an e-bike battery, and emphasized the need to take action.
“We are executing an all of the above strategy including working hard to build on bipartisan cooperation to move critical legislation to set standards for batteries,” Schumer said, “and to urgently site the much needed charging infrastructure for micro-mobility devices we secured massive federal funding for last year.”
Additional reporting by Samantha Maldonado and Katie Honan.