CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » Cycling News
“TfL bans most e-bikes on trains amid concern over igniting batteries”
(20 posts)-
Posted 6 days ago #
-
Cars keep "falling on" rail tracks and "exploding" into flames!
Cars* keep crashing through walls and railings and "ending up" on the tracks
Are they going to ban cars next**?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq5gpqz6406o
*Drivers
**Yeah, no, thought not, perfectly acceptable to let this keep happeningPosted 6 days ago # -
Aslef, which had called for action, said they would prefer a full ban
Aye, Aslef and the unions keeping the nation unfit, unhealthy and addicted to fossil fuels and cars...
Cos we gotta keep those factories busy (even if it's killing people, nature and planet)
Posted 6 days ago # -
Only yesterday:
Gatwick Airport train chaos as vehicle crashes into railway bridge and blocks lines.
Gatwick Express said in a statement shared to social media that a road vehicle has collided with a railway bridge between London Victoria and Gatwick Airport
Posted 6 days ago # -
Public and private corporations being asked by insurers to pay higher premiums if they permit e-bikes. Hitherto this was only around charging them.
Whilst of. Course the fleet of e cars in the basement must get charged.
Appearing everywhere but I think root cause is reluctance to pay higher premiums for a few e-bikes. Etc.
Posted 5 days ago # -
Bl**dy insurance cos.
If we let them dictate what people can reasonably do, no one will be getting out of bed
Posted 5 days ago # -
How many instances of OEM batteries spontaneously combusting have there been?
Posted 5 days ago # -
Worth a FOI request perhaps. That said, TfL responded to a related request in August last year, with a rather defensive set of excuses:
We do not hold a central record of the requested information and would need to manually review around 700 incidents from our safety reporting systems reported as fire incidents since 1 January 2022. Our safety incident records are a report of the incident as recorded at the time and further investigation may determine the original information was recorded incorrectly.
Please note that the information we hold may not include the type of vehicle causing the fire and is unlikely to go into the detail requested around the ultimate cause of the fire. The person creating the original report is also unlikely to have been able to identify whether the model of a vehicle was legal or illegal.
It sounds like TfL is being especially cautious with regard to likelihood.
A battery fire on a train might be classed as low likelihood but high impact, and the resulting risk profile score would usually be on the lower end of the scale, or a lower value within the amber category. If instead the train carried mostly e-bikes and only a few passengers, then the likelihood might be medium, and if the impact was still high the resulting score would be at the upper end of medium.
However if TfL assessed the impact from a single e-bike fire as low likelihood but very high impact because of high passenger numbers and proximity and poor fire containment, then it would elevate the risk profile score to red/high, albeit still at the lower end of the red category.
Risk profile matrices tend to be somewhat exponential in terms of increasing likelihood vs impact and the overall scoring of each combination.
Posted 5 days ago # -
So if you take battery off bike, it is no longer an E-bike.
"Just carrying this de-commisioned analog (heavy) bike back to seller returns"
Put battery in rucksack & take on board separately so only risk is suicide by self-immolation.
Same risk as jumping on the tracks.No insurance against suicide.
I bet this explanation would still not wash with a jobsworth!
Posted 5 days ago # -
The incidence of electrical fault fires in battery/hybrid cars is an issue that surely has some data
A crash with a Tesla basically cremated its occupants with the intensive fire resulting, fiercely delivering molten aluminium plus a hot Group 1 metal which reacts with water, like Sodium/Potassium &c
Molten aluminium also reacts explosively with water to produce stupendous volumes of hydrogen 2 x Al + 3 x H2O >> Al2O3 + 6 x H
Remember that water is not always the best way to extinguish firePosted 5 days ago # -
One only has to watch a few Battlebots competitions to see how high current, high power lithium batteries respond when damaged. If it's punctured or shorted, that's no bueno.
Bad charging of otherwise fairly safe lithium-ion batteries, or charging of poor quality batteries, can lead to electrolysis of the lithium electrolyte, and that is what leads to reactive free lithium metal and flammable gases.
Note the difference between lithium-ion (and essentially similar lithium-polymer) and lithium-metal batteries:
Firefighters should use water to fight a lithium-ion battery fire. Water works just fine as a fire extinguishing medium since the lithium inside of these batteries are a lithium salt electrolyte and not pure lithium metal. Confusion on this topic stems from the fact that pure lithium (like what you see in the table of elements) is highly reactive with water, while lithium salts are non-reactive with water.
- https://www.nfpa.org/education-and-research/home-fire-safety/lithium-ion-batteries
But note too:
For best results [with a lithium-ion fire] use a foam extinguisher, CO2, ABC dry chemical, powdered graphite, copper powder or soda (sodium carbonate).
A readily-available and effective fire retardant is sand kept in a fire-proof bucked. In case of fire, the flaming battery is moved into the bucket and covered with sand to allow a controlled burn-out. The sand can also be heaved over the hot battery to prevent the fire from spreading. Sand is about three-times heavier than Extover® made from post-consumer glass.
A large Li-ion fire, such as in an EV, may need to burn out. Water with copper material can be used, but this may not be available and is costly for fire halls. Increasingly, experts advise using water even with large Li-ion fires. Water lowers combustion temperature but is not recommended for battery fires containing lithium-metal.
Research by IdTechEx reveals that 17% of EV fires occur during regular driving; 25% when charging; 20% in a crash; and 4% when unduly exposes the battery to air or water.
When encountering a fire with a lithium-metal battery, only use a Class D fire extinguisher. Lithium-metal contains plenty of lithium that reacts with water and makes the fire worse. As the number of EVs grows, so must the methods to extinguish such fires.
- https://batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-304a-safety-concerns-with-li-ion
Posted 5 days ago # -
A lot of the modern e-bikes don't even look like e-bikes, with the battery and motor hidden in the frame.
How would a TfL operator even be able to tell? And the "folding bike requirement" doesn't stop the user adding a 3rd party hub motor.
Better to be on the safe side and ban bikes altogether
Oh no wait, don't give them ideas...
Posted 5 days ago # -
Well that's the $64,000 question. Can someone reasonably tell, without specialist equipment?
You can still take your phone, tablet and laptop on an aircraft, but only as carry-on baggage, so that you and (probably more qualified) staff can react to a fire. If it's in the baggage hold, it can quietly burn until something like an aerosol of hairspray explodes.
On a train, the best approach is probably to have buckets of sand on standby, and perhaps require all batteries to be removed from the bike and held where people can reasonably access them.
Posted 5 days ago # -
I'd find it surprising if the insurers thought the risk was mitigated by the mere existence of a rule saying "don't bring those things on board" in the event where a train really does burn down due to a battery fire. They'd likely turn around and say "well, you clearly didn't enforce your rule so the policy is void".
I guess nobody wants to be the one to spend on a bunch of sand buckets or specialist fire extinguishers for every train and that is dominating the thinking.
Then there's what Network Rail is "thinking" about the ebike parking ban at Waverley. With the current location of the cycle parking, even if the whole lot somehow went up in flames it would hardly be more than annoying.
Posted 4 days ago # -
It's not that long ago, really, that Waverley was full of steam locomotives, each with several tonnes of specifically-mined flammable material sitting in full view of the world, exhausts that could quite happily throw sparks, and the trackwork covered in layers of solidified grease and oil and cinders. And they hardly ever accidentally went on fire or exploded.
It's not that long ago at all that train seats had things called "ashtrays", for all the people that used naked flames to set light to small amounts of flammable material that they then put near their faces.
It's not that long ago either that Kings Cross underground station turned into a conflagration caused by a dropped cigarette setting light to accumulated dust, grease, and a wooden escalator...
Posted 4 days ago # -
The folding bike exemption seems really random too. Plenty of legal non-folding e-bikes which are made by established manufacturers like Specialized, Giant, Gazelle etc. and plenty of folding-frame e-bikes which are your shoddily-made illegal death trap landfill fodder.
If we were actually serious about safety and banning the sales of illegal e-bikes/e-motorcycles this would be a non-issue.Posted 4 days ago # -
@arellcat I remember those wooden escalators
31 dead terrible
@Medium Dave yu wont believe the short termism- it isn’t about payout it is about Reduced Premium [neither side imagines an e-bike fire will cause 31 deaths]
Posted 4 days ago # -
TfL quote two instances of e-bike fires in railway stations, but none on trains or tubes. Their justification for the ban is summarised in this quote from the linked press release:
TfL's analysis suggests that cycles that have been adapted using electronic conversion kits pose a greater fire risk than purpose-built e-bikes, however, it can be hard to differentiate between modified and un-modified e-bikes. Until improved product safety measures are in place for converted cycles, batteries and chargers, a ban is necessary for all non-folded e-bikes. TfL and LFB continue to work with Government to seek improved product safety for electronic cycles. TfL is not aware of any reports of foldable e-bike fires in London, and there are fewer opportunities for foldable cycles to be converted into e-bikes using conversion kits, due to their specific shape, size and mechanical constraints.
Not saying I agree with the ban, but the justification is more nuanced than the media reporting suggests.Posted 4 days ago # -
Regardless of how nuanced it is, the issue is the reasoning doesn't really change except in the scenario that the UK government legislates for, implements, and effectively enforces a total ban on ebike conversion kits that don't have an intentionally obvious element to them to signal their presence. A scenario that is, in practice, not going to happen(since even if there was the will to try, it will fail at the final hurdle of enforcement) and so the ban will remain in place and likely spread, now that such a major transport authority has implemented it and provided an example smaller ones can point to as justification.
Transit authorities don't want to pay to train their staff to recognize the real danger, they don't want to pay for the mitigations necessary to handle the risks small as they are, and so they're taking the lazy option of a blanket ban. If that ban existed in the context of a civilized country with substantial secure monitored bike parking at basically every station and high availability of electric hire bikes at destinations it would be tolerable, but UK transit authorities are too cheap to pay for any of that either, so the end result is less people riding bikes, less people riding trains, and more people in cars.
Posted 2 days ago # -
Just ridden with a guy whose road-e-bike had the battery in the bottle holder. Slightly larger rear hub, but no different to a hub gear.
So, again, how would a TfL employee even tell that this is an e-bike?
Posted 2 hours ago #
Reply
You must log in to post.
posts
