The Economic Commute Project, an initiative co-founded by Invest NYC SDG, was featured in a New York Times piece as an innovative solution to dangerous e-bike batteries disproportionately impacting low-income deliver workers.  The trade in program is live now!

 

"After a spate of deadly lithium battery fires in New York City, an e-bike trade-in program began to offer brand-new e-bikes certified to industry safety standards at discounted prices to delivery workers who brought in their old ones...

 

Marianna Koval, another co-founder of the Equitable Commute Project and a project director at the Center for Sustainable Business at New York University’s Stern School of Business, said that the pilot program was just a start, and that elected officials, restaurants, and delivery customers would all have to work together to get safer e-bikes to the city’s delivery workers.

 

“We’re trying to show how it could be done,” she said. “But we don’t have the money to do it on a scale that’s necessary to ensure the safety of our delivery worker community.”

 

Read the full piece here.