Tag: infrastructure

Why Is It So Hard to Fix an Electric Bike? (2026)

Posted on by faz_business


If you Ask any bike shop owner or manager if they fix electric bikes, you get an interesting array of stories.

“I know a guy who has lost a finger working on ebikes,” says MacKenzie Hardt, owner of Hardt Family Cyclery in Aurora, Colorado, and the former executive director of the nonprofit bike shop and community hub Bikes Together. Hardt has torn tendons in his own hand after accidentally triggering a cadence sensor that caused the wheel to spin out of control on the stand, even when the motor and battery were disconnected.

He now has a message on the company voicemail that informs customers the shop will not repair any ebike without third-party UL 2849 certification, the gold standard that certifies that an ebike’s entire package, from electrical drive train to battery to charger system, has been thoroughly tested. (Check out our guide to How to Buy an Electric Bike for more info.)

The Wild, Wild West

A lot of the problem in fixing ebikes is related to the fact that a surprising number of electric vehicles that are sold as ebikes are not, in fact, ebikes. According to PeopleForBikes, the third-party advocacy group, an ebike is a low-speed electric vehicle that “closely resembles traditional bicycles in their equipment, handling characteristic, size, and speed.”

Image may contain Machine Spoke Wheel Adult Person Accessories Bag Handbag and Tire

A mechanic works on a bicycle.Photograph: Dikushin/Getty Images

In 46 states, all ebikes fall under a Class 1, 2, or 3 distinction. The distinction depends on the bike’s maximum motor-assisted speed and how it’s powered. However, many ebikes sold online are way more powerful than the maximum 28 mph speed allowed on a Class 3 ebike, and they operate more like a moped or even a motorcycle.

“That’s really the heart and soul of the service problem,” says Cory Oseland, manager of the Ski Hut, a high-end bike shop in Duluth, Minnesota. “Once you slide out of the three classes, you run into a lot of parts and equipment that aren’t part of the bike industry.”

Repairing an ebike can also land the shop in a quagmire of liability issues. As bike shops are part of the product liability chain, they can be held responsible if they so much as inflate a tire on an electric vehicle and the rider later injures themselves or another person. Ebike-related injuries have jumped more than 1,020 percent nationwide from 2020 to 2024, according to hospital data, so this is not an unforeseen occurrence. “I have known people who have lost their shirt,” says Hardt.

In most states, if the bike doesn’t fit the Class 1-3 classification system, the shop’s insurance will likely be null and void. The problem, says Hardt, is that “we don’t regulate nationally what an ebike is. What is legal here may not be legal somewhere else.” Working on an unregulated bike, he adds, “is like if somebody brought in a Tesla to fix.”

Is Congestion Pricing Working? The MTA’s Revamped Data Team Is Figuring It Out

Posted on by faz_business


For the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s data and analytics team, January 5, 2025, felt a lot like kismet.

Three and a half years earlier, New York state legislators had passed a law requiring the MTA to release “easily accessible, understandable, and usable” data to the public; by January 2022, MTA chair and CEO Janno Lieber officially announced the new team’s formation. Meanwhile, New York City’s controversial congestion pricing program, which tolls cars entering Manhattan’s busiest streets, officially kicked off in 2019 but was chugging through a lengthy setup process, with the transit agency and state fighting lawsuits, politicians, and vocal naysayers along the way.

So when the program finally started in January, the MTA’s data and analytics team had prepared. They could see the moment the tolling started right in the spreadsheets. “The day that it turned on, one field changed from ‘no revenue collection’ to ‘revenue,’” says Andy Kuziemko, the deputy chief of the data and analytics team.

A few days later, the team was pumping out data on vehicle entries into the zone in 10-minute increments, and posting the data on its website, so that New Yorkers themselves could decide whether the congestion program was actually reducing traffic on city streets. The agency has been doing it since. You—yes, you—can view and download the MTA’s data right here.

The online web pages aren’t flashy, but they represent a rare and comprehensive public transit win for open-data advocates, who argue that access to well-maintained public datasets is crucial to government transparency and efficiency.

Since 2022, the MTA’s data and analytics team has grown to 26 full-time employees, who spend their workdays centralizing information that was once scattered through the entire MTA. The agency, to be clear, is big. The nation’s largest, it carries some 5.9 million riders on subways, buses, commuter railways, and through tunnels and bridges every day. That’s a lot of numbers to track.

Really a lot; MTA now publishes more than 180 datasets. Recent additions include more than a decade’s worth of data on the time MTA employees spend on “productive tasks,” a new dataset on subway-delay-causing incidents; and bus speeds on Manhattan’s most crowded downtown roads. Kuziemko says 30 more datasets are becoming publicly available “in the near future.”

Counter Intelligence

In an interview, Kuziemko and MTA chief of strategic initiatives Jon Kaufman credited a new culture of intra-agency data sharing for the renewed program. In 2023, leadership encouraged managers across the agency to allow their data to be ingested into the MTA’s “data lake,” which can be refined, stripped of identifying information, and eventually published openly. (Some of the MTA’s data contains the personally identifiable information of commuters; the agency says this specific data is not published for the public.) The agency has also started using new in-house software and tools, which give them technical capabilities they didn’t have before. “We have paid for zero hours of consulting time, which is a thing we’re really proud of—that we actually built in-house expertise in the public sector,” says Kuziemko. “It’s really cool.”

“It’s rare for a government agency to share this level of data granularity,” says Sarah Kaufman, who directs the NYU Rudin Center for Transportation and once led the agency’s open-data program. In fact, it’s something like an about-face for the MTA, which before 2009 made a habit of legally pursuing developers who scraped system timetable and route data to build rider-friendly apps.