Opinion: E-Bike Charging Stations in Former Newstands Won’t Get it Done

Mayor Adams’s recent announcement that the city would repurpose an abandoned newsstand into an e-bike charging station (with more on the way) is a plan that’s fraught with liability, uses public space poorly, helps very few people and, worse, doesn’t solve the problem of charging and storing dangerous batteries in too many buildings.

Nobody knows how many e-bikes and e-scooters there are in New York City. Advocates say there are 65,000 delivery workers alone, most using electric bikes or mopeds, but that figure is dated; the actual number of e-bike users is likely much higher, given that e-bike growth in 2021 was 240 percent.