From the article:
“There may be the perception that a lot of the scooter riders were involved with collisions with motor vehicles. We didn’t find that,” Jeff Taylor, an epidemiologist who worked on the study, told Smart Cities Dive. Most of the injuries came from falls. Riders, Taylor said, “were losing their balance or hitting a curb or hitting a structure like a light pole.”
The CDC found that more than a third of the injuries happened to people on their very first ride, and it also confirmed the impression that scooters are a bro thing: Most of the injured riders were dudes. More than a third of the injured riders broke a bone, and 15 percent of them incurred a traumatic brain injury—a potentially huge hidden cost of e-scooters that’s likely to be borne by the taxpayers, not Bird and Lime, the biggest scooter companies.
Traumatic brain injuries are catastrophic and expensive. They can lead to permanent disability in the survivors. The CDC study didn’t address the health care costs, or who paid for them, in the injured scooter riders.
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