Study: E-Scooter Riders Are Getting Hurt More Often Than Motorcycle Riders

[advrider]

Have you ever ridden one of those little electric scooters that are littering the streets of many major cities? Full disclosure: I have, and many times at that. They’re an eyesore until you’re running late and need to zip over to the store and the car is in use elsewhere. I’ve even ridden one from my home nearly to the local airport just to see if I could. Mission accomplished, and for $3.78 at that. Sheepish admission: It was kind of fun.

And judging by how many are around, and by how many young people I see buzzing around on them, they’re probably here to stay. But according to a study at UCLA, it appears the little scooters are also injury magnets. Researchers say the study, which used data from 2014 to 2019 and covers the period before and after the scooters were rolled out en masse in 2018, shows that rider injury rates on scooters in the Los Angeles area immediately spiked once the last-mile devices became available.

It seems common (and mathematical) sense that more people on more scooters means more people getting hurt on scooters, but Dr. Joann Elmore, senior author of the study and a professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, dove a bit deeper into the numbers. “There are millions of riders now using these scooters, so it’s more important than ever to understand their impact on public health,” Elmore said. “The finding that rates of injuries from e-scooters are similar to rates for motorcycle injuries is startling.”

“Prior to the widespread introduction of shareable e-scooters in 2018, there were at most 13 e-scooter injuries per year,” according to the authors of the study. “After [the] introduction of shareable e-scooter operators in our region [Los Angeles], e-scooter injuries increased to 595 and 672 in 2018 and 2019, respectively.” Clearly, a marked increase.

The new study shows that people are getting hurt on e-scooters at a high rate of 115 injuries per 1 million e-scooter trips. A study completed in 2007 (well before escoots were widely available) showed relative injury rates for other modes of transportation:

• 104 injuries per million motorcycle trips

• 15 injuries per million bicycle trips

• 8 injuries per million passenger car trips

• 2 injuries per million walking trips

Whether those numbers have drastically changed since 2007 is not known at this time.

Additionally, the researchers think the scooter injury rate they estimated is likely quite a bit higher since the scope of the study was small: Just in Los Angeles, and only at two UCLA hospital/health facilities in Los Angeles. Also, the injured includes people hit by the scooters, and those who tripped over them (not uncommon, most likely). Also: Very few scooter riders wear a helmet, because they’re typically an impulse decision to ride and not many people (as in: almost none) carry a helmet with them as a matter of course. As you might well imagine, head injuries were common for scooter victims. And while the slower speed of e-scooters meant most people survived, some deaths were also reported.

There are an unlimited number of ways you can be injured or killed in our modern world, from ladders to bathtubs to RTW adventure rides. People have been riding scooters of one type or another in American cities since… at least 1915, But only recently have we seen them deployed in such vast numbers throughout cities and made so easily available, so it’s not very surprising to see the injury toll spike with the usage rate. More study will be needed to determine just how many people are getting hurt on the scooters, as opposed to other forms of transportation, but judging how they often get ridden (as fast as possible, often two-up), the findings by UCLA are hardly surprising. You can read more about the study here.

What’s your take? Do you ride the e-scooters, either as needed and/or just for fun? Are they a legitimate part of the modern urban transportation matrix, or a plague of injuries unleashed by uncaring tech behemoths trying to steal kids’ lunch money? Comment below.

 

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