This special higher education newsletter comes to you from The Hechinger Report’s executive editor, Nirvi Shah.
Robert Fitzer was watching news footage of New York City firefighters rescuing people from a Manhattan apartment building on fire, a fire started by a lithium-ion battery in an electric bike.
Fitzer, the associate vice president for public safety at Fordham University in New York, looked at the calendar. It was late 2022. With winter holidays — and the year’s biggest gift-giving season — around the corner, it was possible students would return to campus in January with their own battery-powered transit devices in tow. Fearing that the same kind of fire could occur in a campus residence hall, Fitzer crafted a policy to ban the bikes not only from buildings on Fordham’s Bronx campus but even from the university grounds — an option made possible by gates walling off its perimeter.
Since the entire length of the Bronx campus takes a mere 10 minutes to cross on foot, he said, there was little justification for needing an electricity-powered bicycle to traverse it.
The kind of fire that spurred Fitzer to act has happened hundreds of times across the country, and especially in New York City – including on Feb. 23, in a Harlem apartment building where The Hechinger Report’s data reporter Fazil Khan lived.
It cost Khan his life.
Fordham, some other universities and some cities, including New York and San Francisco, are creating policies to regulateor ban e-bikes and their siblings, e-scooters and hoverboards powered by similar batteries, in the absence of federal or state legislation.
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Talk of setting standards for the bikes, or more precisely for the batteries that power them, is the goal of stalled legislation in Congress. Lithium-ion batteries in e-bikes can catch fire if damaged, overcharged or overheated, according to the nonprofit National Fire Protection Association, which provides training and standards on fire safety. The fires the bikes start can produce toxic gases and burn so hot that extinguishing them can be difficult.
The federal agency that could regulate e-bikes, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, is instead pushing companies to adhere to voluntary standards for e-bikes and their batteries, such as those set by UL Standards & Engagement. “CPSC staff believes that products designed, manufactured, and third-party-certified to this standard, or other applicable voluntary standards, reduce the risk of fire and shock,” a spokesperson, Thaddeus Harrington, said, adding that the agency had no plans to mandate these standards.
At the University of Connecticut, a rule took effect at the start of the fall term about what it calls motorized personal transportation vehicles – they cannot enter any campus building.
The risk of a fire from an electric bike or scooter is “a clock that’s constantly ticking,” the university’s deputy fire chief Christopher Renshaw said.
That risk is acute when the vehicles aren’t maintained correctly, Renshaw said, or the wrong kind of battery is slipped in, or a charging cord is swapped. A plug may not meet the rating needed for the battery to charge. Students, however, “they see an outlet, and they think, always, the two are compatible,” he said. “They might not be.”
In New York City, where the fire department said the batteries have become the area’s primary cause of fires, a law that took effect last September requires any mobility device sold or rented that uses lithium-ion batteries to be certified as complying with UL standards. The city also got a $25-million grant from the federal Department of Transportation to set up nearly 200 outdoor charging stations for e-bikes and more than 50 e-bike storage sites.
“Most lithium-ion batteries and chargers are safe, and we need to encourage the use of more sustainable transportation alternatives moving forward,” New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said at a press conference last year about the grant. “But we also need to make sure that these micromobility vehicles are stored and charged safely, so that faulty or improperly manufactured batteries don’t put people in harm’s way.”
Related: Remembering our friend and colleague Fazil Khan
Storage and charging, especially in residences, cause many of the fire hazards. In San Francisco, where 58 fires were started by lithium-ion batteries last year, a new law sets limits on how many scooters and bikes powered by these batteries can be charged in apartments and also requires them to have certified batteries.
It’s in this landscape that some universities are forging their own paths.
Yale and Boston College restrict the bikes, as well as how and where they are charged. Some items, including e-scooters, are banned altogether. Quinnipiac University in Connecticut bans them from its dorms, Mark DeVilbiss, the director of housing, said.
“We definitely restrict any kind of item that’s got a lithium-ion battery,” DeVilbiss said. With 4,500 students living in university housing, his institution’s safety committee speaks often with its insurance and risk management company, United Educators, about adjustments to what’s allowed, and not allowed, in the dorms.
When air fryers, for instance, became a popular new appliance, the committee consulted with the company and determined they are only permitted in apartment-style housing with kitchens wired for appliances.
With the e-bike restrictions, students didn’t protest much, DeVilbiss recalled, except one who insisted their e-bike was essential for traveling between the university’s two campuses, which are about a half-mile apart. Since shuttles are available for students to get back and forth, the university declined to make an exception.
“Sure enough, they had brought it inside, plugged it in and left for spring break,” DeVilbiss said. It was confiscated and returned to the student to take home.
United Educators, which works exclusively with education institutions, including K-12 schools, colleges and universities, advises some of its 1,600 clients how to lower risks, so that they won’t need to invoke their insurance policies. In 2020, it offered suggestions about issues institutions should consider when setting policies about e-scooters. Back then, the primary concern was accidents. United Educators suggested that schools adopt rules about helmets, parking and operating the vehicles under the influence.
“Indoor charging was not an issue,” said Christine McHugh, senior risk management counsel for United Educators.
Accidents remain a worry, but now the batteries and the fires they can cause are the primary concern for some college administrators.
The liability insurance company doesn’t track college policies on the issue, however. “Every year we’re seeing new things, from drones to maker spaces to tech toys,” McHugh said. “Then schools have to wrestle with ‘What do we do with these on our campuses?’”
This story about e-bikes on college campuses was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.