Though so-called “micromobility” transportation like electric bikes and scooters have become more popular than ever, their ascendance has not come without a cost. The scientific journal JAMA Network Open, published by the American Medical Association, released a paper this week that says e-bike injuries doubled every year between 2017 and 2022. Electric scooter injuries were up 45% in the same span.
“There are benefits—health, environment, traffic—to widespread electric micromobility use, yet there are concerns regarding injury risk to riders as well,” the paper says. E-bike injuries went from an observed 751 in 2017 to an observed 23,493 five years later; e-scooter injuries went from 8,566 to 56,847. (Far more common traditional bike injuries went from 456,466 to 403,565; traditional scooter injuries went from 48,598 to 67,497.)
E-bike sales have been surging for a few years now ahead of traditional bike sales, and short-term rental companies like Lime are stepping up their investments in the sector. People like them because they can sometimes get you where you need to faster than a car in dense cities. The paper’s authors noted that e-mobility devices made bike and scooter travel more accessible to older users. Unfortunately, that shift in turn helped explain why the median age of an injured e-bike and e-scooter user was higher.
“As the popularity of micromobility vehicles increases, the findings of this cross-sectional study suggest that injuries and hospitalizations are increasing among US riders of small EVs,” the paper concludes, adding that, “As US cities work to adapt to innovations in a rapidly changing transportation sector, there is an opportunity to institute national change in educational policies, infrastructure, and law to recenter on safety.”