from Christian Lutz am 09.04.2022
PixabayInjuries when driving an e-scooter: study comes to a frightening conclusion.
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A professor and his team from the University of California analyzed the injuries from 1,354 e-scooter accidents between 2014 and 2020. Together with the e-scooter usage data from city administrations, the researchers came up with a high injury rate. With 115 injuries per million trips, this is even higher than that of motorcycles with 104.
The use of e-scooters as a convenient means of short-distance and urban transportation has been increasing around the world. However, simply renting via smartphone apps and driving without any driver’s license or helmet requirement led to an increase in injuries, hospitalizations and costs to the public health system. A study by Dr. Joann Elmore, Professor of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Already in 2019 she examined in another study the nature of injuries from e-scooter accidents at the UCLA Clinic emergency room. She found that most of the patients had broken bones and head injuries.
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E-scooters are statistically more dangerous than motorcycles
For the study Elmore and her UCLA team evaluated 1,354 injuries from e-scooter accidents between 2014 and 2020 in the greater Los Angeles area. Also included are pedestrians involved in e-scooter accidents. Together with the evaluation of e-scooter usage data from various city administrations, the researchers estimated the accident rate with e-scooters at 115 cases per million trips. Measured against the US accident rate for other modes of transport, the value is alarmingly high. The accident rate for cars is 8, for bicycles 15 and for motorcycles, which are otherwise considered dangerous, 104. All of these values relate to one million journeys.
Frequent head injuries, only a few e-scooter riders wear a helmet
A more recent 2020 study published in the Journal JAMA Surgery published, put the annual number of e-scooter accidents in the United States in 2014 at 4,582 cases. Four years later, and after the advent of e-scooter ride-sharing services, the number of injuries almost tripled to 14,651. In addition, a third of the patients had head injuries, twice the number of cyclists. The number of inpatients treated in the hospital rose from 313 to 1,374. the scientific one article “Electric Scooter-Related Injuries: A New Epidemic in Orthopedics” found that of 397 e-scooter riders treated in the ER, only 13 wore a helmet. A quarter of the 397 cases had to be treated surgically.
