c/o Department of Transportation
Free Upper West Side News, Delivered To Your Inbox
A new kind of curbside fixture may be arriving on several Upper West Side corners in the coming years — one that city officials are betting will save lives.
Advertisement
Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the city’s Department of Transportation last week opened a public comment period on roughly 50 preliminary locations across the five boroughs where e-bike battery swapping cabinets could be installed. Several of them are on the Upper West Side.The cabinets are essentially secure outdoor lockers that let e-bike riders drop off a drained battery and pick up a fully charged one, or plug in and charge on site. For the city’s tens of thousands of delivery workers, who often log full shifts on e-bikes, the infrastructure is meant to replace a daily workaround that has proven deadly: hauling multiple spare batteries between jobs and charging them inside apartments, where cheap or damaged lithium-ion cells have repeatedly ignited and caused fatal fires.
The DOT is asking New Yorkers to weigh in on the proposed sites through an online portal before finalizing a shorter list of around 25 locations. Comments are being accepted through July 31.
The Upper West Side sites under consideration:
- West 110th Street and Amsterdam Avenue
- West 106th Street and Amsterdam Avenue
- West 94th Street and Columbus Avenue
Each cabinet is being designed to meet FDNY fire safety standards and will include weather-resistant and theft-resistant housing, battery health monitoring, and built-in fire suppression. Only batteries certified to the highest applicable UL standards will be stocked. The FDNY has also extended its filing deadline for grandfathered outdoor charging cabinets under the Letters of No Objection program through September 2026, giving more certified testing labs time to come online.
Advertisement
The cabinets themselves will be owned and operated by a private vendor — or vendors — chosen through an RFP process later this year, with users accessing them through a membership program. Funding for the electrical hookups is coming from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority’s Clean Mobility Program.A six-month DOT pilot conducted in 2024 found the cabinets were safe, well-used, and helped delivery workers complete more runs per shift. The agency is aiming to have power delivered to the finalized sites and cabinets available for public use starting in 2028.
More information on the program, including the feedback portal, is available on the DOT’s project page.
Have a news tip? Send it to us here!
