“Just look at this craziness,” said Gaia Cecchetti, as tourists on e-scooters wobbled through crowds on uneven cobblestones past the restaurant in Rome where she works.
But a new study suggests that e-scooters may have been prematurely maligned.
The study, published last month in the Journal of Safety Research, examined crash and usage data in a handful of European cities and came to an unexpected conclusion.
The injury risk for e-scooters is actually 2.5 to 10 times lower than for electric bikes.
In other words, the dangers are real - just not as extreme as their reputation implies.
“I was very surprised,” said Marco Dozza, the study’s co-author, a specialist in road safety and behaviour at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden.
“I thought we’d find the opposite, just because of everything you read about e-scooters.”
The study, with a limited sample size, is far from the final word on e-scooter risks.
It at least opens the door to rethinking the image of a cheap, pollution-free transport option - one that could make urban life more convenient if managed correctly.
“I see the potential. I also understand the problems,” said Karen Vancluysen, the secretary general of Polis, a network of cities and regions that advocates for improving local transport.
Vancluysen said that cities were initially unprepared for the swift e-scooter uptake and have “gone through a lot of trial-and-error”.
The e-scooters had boomed across Europe starting during the coronavirus pandemic, when people were reluctant to use public transportation, and private app-based rental services sensed an opportunity.
They deployed scooters by the thousands in European cities.
It was seemingly a perfect fit: nimble for the narrow streets, and able to spare users the hassle of fighting for parking or hustling to flag down a taxi.
In practice, it was messy. Rides ended with scooters abandoned - whether blocking a museum entrance, obstructing a footpath, or discarded in a piazza.
And beyond the clutter, real risks emerged.
Injury risk
Last year, Germany recorded 11,900 e-scooter injuries, double the total from three years earlier, and 27 deaths, many involving young people.
Though scooters make up only a tiny fraction of European road incidents, injuries can be severe.
In Italy, one surgeon led a grim study of 411 scooter-related cases in a single emergency room.
This included 93 upper-body bone breaks, six spine fractures, 10 skull fractures and 115 cases of head trauma.
Only 0.7% of the people had been wearing a helmet.
“There isn’t even a path for scooters here,” said Andrea Cherubini, a commuter who uses an e-scooter but only on smaller streets.
“In a big city like Rome, it would have to be completely overhauled” to make way for scooters.
Other research has indicated that bikes are safer than scooters.
A recent study from Finland found that e-scooters led to emergency-room-level injuries at three times the rate of bicycles.
A 2020 study from Oslo put the accident risk at 10 times higher.
Dozza said his study differs because it compares bikes and e-scooters in similar urban settings.
He said previous studies gave bikes an inherent advantage by including rides outside of city centres - say, on empty country roads, where accidents are less likely.
His analysis drew on data provided by the Swedish company Voi, which rents e-bikes and e-scooters across Europe.
“So we could make a comparison that was fair,” he said.
Of course, just because one transportation mode is safer than the other doesn’t exclude the possibility that both might be dangerous - especially when not wearing helmets.
Many riders using the mobility apps lack experience, are unfamiliar with the brakes or roads.
Dozza’s advice: Practice a bit before navigating crowded places.
Safety measures
Cities have taken steps to reduce the risks, shy of an outright ban.
Many cities impose mandatory speed limits on the e-scooters. A few have taken to shutting down rentals on weekend nights, when people are likelier to have been drinking alcohol.
The most obvious safety improvement - obliging helmet usage - has been the hardest to impose.
If operators are forced to provide helmets along with the scooter, where could they store it? How could they prevent theft? And what about hygiene?
And if users had to come with their own helmets, wouldn’t that cut against the improvised nature of how these devices are used?
Many riders are tourists, who aren’t likely to put helmets in their carry-on bags.
Last November, Italy’s Parliament approved a Bill requiring riders to wear helmets, as Transportation Minister Matteo Salvini declared, “No more wild scooters”.
Almost a year later, Italy still hasn’t issued the decree needed to enforce it, one Rome city official said.
So the rules aren’t yet in effect.
And almost every rider zips along as they always have.
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