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Scooter Use is Rising in Major Cities. So Are Trips To the Emergency Room. (washingtonpost.com)
They have been pouring into emergency rooms around the nation all summer, their bodies bearing a blend of injuries that doctors normally associate with victims of car wrecks -- broken noses, wrists and shoulders, facial lacerations and fractures, as well as the kind of blunt head trauma that can leave brains permanently damaged. The Washington Post reports: When doctors began asking patients to explain their injuries, many were surprised to learn that the surge of broken body parts stemmed from the latest urban transportation trend: shared electric scooters. In Santa Monica, Calif. -- where one of the biggest electric-scooter companies is based -- the city's fire department has responded to 34 serious accidents involving the devices this summer. The director of an emergency department there said his team treated 18 patients who were seriously injured in electric-scooter accidents during the final two weeks of July. And in San Francisco, the doctor who runs the emergency room at a major hospital said he is seeing as many as 10 severe injuries a week.
[...] As the injuries pile up in cities across the country, the three largest scooter companies -- operating under the names Bird, Lime and Skip -- have seen their values soar as they attempt to transform urban transit, following the successes of ride-hailing and bike-sharing companies. The scooter start-ups have attracted massive investments from Uber, the prominent technology venture capital firm Sequoia Capital and Alphabet, Google's parent company, with some analysts estimating that some of the privately held companies might be worth more than $1 billion. Responding to The Post, all these companies said safety is a priority to them, but at least Bird is also lobbying against legislation in California that would require users to wear helmets, the paper reported.
[...] As the injuries pile up in cities across the country, the three largest scooter companies -- operating under the names Bird, Lime and Skip -- have seen their values soar as they attempt to transform urban transit, following the successes of ride-hailing and bike-sharing companies. The scooter start-ups have attracted massive investments from Uber, the prominent technology venture capital firm Sequoia Capital and Alphabet, Google's parent company, with some analysts estimating that some of the privately held companies might be worth more than $1 billion. Responding to The Post, all these companies said safety is a priority to them, but at least Bird is also lobbying against legislation in California that would require users to wear helmets, the paper reported.
They must WANT their customers to be brain damaged if they're actively lobbying against requiring the most basic of safety gear for a scooter.
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I keep seeing claims that most of these cities already have laws on the books mandating helmet use for these things, yet I've NEVER seen a helmet on any riders in my area, or on the riders in any of the news reports about their rollout. Perhaps if the companies were liable for the injuries suffered they would find a way to enforce helmet usage. Sadly that would only be possible if their app was running on a platform that had access to a camera, oh wait...
I started seeing rental scooters in the area a few years ago, but they've really taken off here in the last year or so.
And most of the time I see people on these things, they're not wearing the provided helmets. Or they're riding double on them (occasionally triple). I've even seen some scooter riders flat out ignore stop signs and stop lights, and a couple who were driving on the sidewalk.
I saw one guy who clearly didn't know how to operate the scooter cut a wide turn, and sideswipe a concrete barricade. The helmet popped out of the wire cage on the back of the scooter (of course he wasn't wearing it), and he kept going down the street. I called after him, but either he didn't hear me, or he ignored me. And then he turned onto a much busier street.
Honestly, I'd feel bad for them, but instead I feel bad for the people who are going to be in accidents with these thundering idiots.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
When someone says, "Any fool can see
One's not wearing a helmet only endangers the non-wearer. There is simply no standing for the government to mandate it.
Of course, these companies are doing it for a different reason — they want (more) people to use their services, helmet or not.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
So your saying women are as bad at driving scooters as cars?
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is the cause of accidents. They talk about people injured by mechanical failures, and undoubtedly those occur.
But no mention of what percentage is caused by that, what percentage caused by rider error (which is likely rather higher) and what percentage is caused by other drivers (since it's illegal to ride these things on the sidewalk, which means you're in a bicycle lane or on the street). Most motorcycle accidents are cause by drivers of cars who never saw the bike. I suspect the same is true on these toys.
But let's not let facts get in the way of any propaganda! There's money to be made, selling advertising to outrage monkeys.
Where I live, scooter riders almost always ride on the sidewalks, which are already very narrow. They almost never wear helmets. I have seen several instances of two people squeezing onto a single scooter. I have seen falls and accidents. I've seen pedestrians get hit. Almost every day I walk around in my neighborhood, some scooter rider whizzes by me, unannounced--I can't hear them coming, and they get within inches of me.
Whether or not a law is passed to regulate the use of these motor vehicles--and they ARE, by construction, motor vehicles--is irrelevant, because the users have already become accustomed to riding them on sidewalks, leaving them wherever they want--often obstructing doorways and walkways, wearing them without helmets, and so forth. The only way this will change is if the police start handing out $5000 tickets and court appearances for violations. Just having a law isn't enough--it is the enforcement of existing laws, with penalties steep enough to make users painfully aware to change their behavior, that will have an effect.
On the flip side, requiring that these scooters be on the roadway is also problematic because now the drivers have to watch out for what amounts to a 15 mph pedestrian sized object weaving in and out of traffic, making illegal turns, not having signals or mirrors, and so forth. They're smaller than a bike rider, and because scooter riders are casual users who do not have to expend energy to power themselves, they are less likely to obey traffic laws. But at least if someone gets injured, it'll be the idiot on the scooter.
I don't want to become a statistic. These things are so quiet and move so fast, that I can't possibly react in time to avoid them while walking around my neighborhood. Moreover, my neighborhood is filled with bars, so consider the combination of public intoxication with electric scooters. The bottom line is that sidewalks are for pedestrians ONLY. You are a pedestrian if you are walking, or you are in a wheelchair. It is only a matter of time before a child gets mowed down by one of these.
and it's not a scooter problem, it's a cultural problem. There are countries that have literally a hundred times more cyclists and scooterists than you, and still fewer accidents.
Riding or driving like a massive asshole and refusing to wear a helmet because it's not cool is the problem, and it's wholly a problem of American culture, not a problem of scooters.
It's one thing if it's the people riding the scooters are the ones getting injured.
It's another thing if it's people they run into, or someone trips on a scooter that some idiot just dumped on the ground (because none of these things have stations to park them, like rental bikes)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I wasn't wearing protective equipment a few years back when I got tripped up inline skating, ended up landing on my right patella (kneecap) and broke it into 3 pieces. Prior to this incident I hadn't fallen in over 20 years of skating and was over-confident and stupidly not wearing protective padding. Painful lesson learned...
Needless to say I wear full protective gear after two surgeries, months of physio for my extremely tight and shrunken quads, etc. Mandating a helmet for these type of activities where you are moving on concrete should be a no-brainer. I see dumb people with very small children in my area with no helmets, wobbling on bikes and scooters, makes me cringe.
...what percentage is caused by other drivers (since it's illegal to ride these things on the sidewalk...)
In Denver it's illegal to ride the scooters in Bicycle lanes, you are expressly told to ride them on the sidewalk.
Of course you are also told to ride with a helmet and I've not ever seen that...
The best option would be to speed limit scooters to about 2x walking speed, so that people could not get up enough speed to really hurt themselves or others.
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My god, have you been living in a cave for the last 15 months? Don't you know about SpatulasForRentOnTheStreetCorner.com?
#DeleteFacebook
Byrd,,
its a shame that your choosing to collect profits versus considering the safety of your riders, customers, and the public @ large...
Layme,,
perhaps everyone should give you the "Bird"
... in fact, I'd rather they didn't. I want them as soft as possible if they crash into me.
No helments and FASTER scooters.
We need all the fresh young organs we can get from volunteers.
I don't ride the scooters here, but I do make frequent use of a bike share membership and imagine that the rationale behind why people ride scooters is pretty similar.
Here's a sample use case where I see the scooters making sense -- going to lunch 1.5 miles away in a crowded city:
Cost-wise, the scooter rental is likely the cheapest (other than walking).
Seeing people on scooters in my city, I'm not surprised they're in the hospital. Nearly all of them just zoom around, don't adhere to road rules. Then if you do hit one, media blames car driver with titles that read "car hits scooter". I actually almost hit one today, driving south, put my blinker on to turn right onto a street. I get to where I'm about to turn the wheel, Scooter driving on my lane towards me and tries to left turn onto the road I'm on. I see them also driving down very busy streets middle of the road. Cyclist attitude
So, the problem is just that we aren't using the streets and roads for their original purpose of bikes, horses, and the odd delivery truck.
In the 50s everyone warned of lawless youth on scooters, the kind you pushed by hand.
You see the problem only from the perspective of the group you're not part of, not the group you are part of.
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Jesus Christ, FINALLY something in my favor.
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-Styopa
Scooters need to be limited to 12-15mph, tops. This is a trivial fix. Anyone arguing against helmets and other safety gear at speeds exceeding 12mph is ignorant of what can happen to a human body crashing at speed. Anyone who cries out "nanny state" - just because that state wants to protect people from hurting themselves - should not be permitted to have children. /s
The wheels on a scooter are too small to make the ride stable. And some scooters go too fast. Being able to go 25mph on little wheels is a recipe for disaster. Even small obstacles can cause your path to alter. Compare the rate of accidents of bicycles to the rate for scooters. Are the ER's reporting large numbers of biking accidents also? Maybe the gyroscopic characteristics of larger wheels is what makes bicycles more stable? Maybe bikers tend to follow the rules of the road more than scooter riders do, as well, which could be solved with laws.
No one wears helmets on those because doing so is stupid.
Whereas in other parts of the world (lots of countries in Europe), you'll see lots of people wearing helmets.
Mostly because there are numbers showing that it helps reducing some injuries and reduce risks of death (sorry the only english language source I found. But this seems corroborated by our swiss nationnal accident statistics, too - this one is done by the national accident insurance fund, they have a strong financial interest into promoting anything that might reduce injuries).
You don't wear a helmet driving your car do you?
I don't wear a helmet driving my car, mostly because a have a whole car around me which is available to shield me from injury or cushion me before impact.
This includes simple things like the car's own body, or more advanced accessories like airbags, safebelts with pre-tensionning, etc.
There's ton of numbers supporting this, and the main reason why most of these accessories have became mandatory over time.
And that is if a collision actually happens to begin with. (Features like FCAS might cause the car to autonomously hit the brakes and perform an emergency stop if it sense a risk of collision. This kind of feature is common in lots of high-range vehicle (e.g.: Volvo) and with some manufacturer (e.g.: VW) is a standard feature which is installed on even the shittiest cars (e.g.:VW Up!) )
Meanwhile if anything wrong happens while you're biking, your head will be hitting the hard-ground mostly at whatever speed you were biking at during this moment (which can be anywhere between 15km/h and 45km/h depending on the presence and type of electric motorization)
This type of impact is of sufficiently high energy to be potentially lethal and surely leading to injury. Helmet have shown to be helping in reducing these risks.
You're more likely to get a TBI doing that than bicycling.
Nope. Incidence of accident seem more or less in the same ball park according to national accident statics (e.g.: in Switzerland).
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