I've seen them in various US cities and people just toss them and leaving them all over the place like garbage. Also never seen a single person wear a helmet as required.
Boom in electric scooters leads to more injuries, fatalities
“These scooters should not be available to the public,” Hardy said. “Those things are like a death wish.”
As stand-up electric scooters have rolled into more than 100 cities worldwide, many of the people riding them are ending up in the emergency room with serious injuries. Others have been killed.
“On the sidewalks of Paris, it’s a total madhouse. We pedestrians are totally insecure,” she told Le Parisien newspaper.
Bird, one of the largest scooter-sharing companies, dropped its scooters on the streets of Santa Monica, California, in September 2017 and within a few months riders were showing up at the emergency room, according to Dr. Tarak Trivedi, an emergency room physician in Los Angeles and co-author of one of the first peer-reviewed studies of scooter injuries. The following year, Trivedi and his colleagues counted 249 scooter injuries, and more than 40% were head injuries. Just 4% were wearing a helmet.
Nearly half of e-scooter injuries involve head trauma, CDC study says
The researchers identified 271 people with potential e-scooter-related injuries during the study. Further analysis of the report combined the number of confirmed injuries (160) with other probable injuries (32). Of those 190 injured riders, 48 percent experienced injuries to the head.
Furthermore, 70 percent of these riders suffered injuries to their upper limbs such as their hands, wrists, arms, and shoulders. Fifty-five percent experienced injuries to their lower limbs.
The study also found that about half of the injured riders suffered a severe injury, meaning bone fractures, severe bleeding, long hospital stays, or organ damage. Broken bones were slightly more common on riders' arms (11 percent) than their legs (6 percent), according to the study.
But what really stands out: less than one percent of riders were wearing a helmet when they were injured.
^ yeah I've used them a bunch of times and didn't have a helmet. I realise that's not particularly smart, but to be honest I barely gave it a second thought.
That said, I sort of keep track of people riding bikes on the pathway without a helmet and depending on when, it's shockingly close to 50-50. Let's face it...humans aren't that bright.
Probably won't be long until we get moped sharing too. Has just started in New York and they're having huge concerns over driver safety as it's not just get on an go like a bike for first time riders. They do provide helmets though, but I'm not sure I want to throw on a helmet someone else's sweaty head was just in.
Riders aren't the only people getting injured, pedestrians getting bowled over like pins of course. Nevermind the requirement for them to not be used on sidewalks.
Might put more traffic in the bike lanes which should further justify the need for cycle/alternative transportation infrastructure. Unfortunately, I'm picturing the bike lanes choked full of abandoned scooters in short order.
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Originally Posted by snipetype
k im just not going to respond to your #### anymore because i have better things to do like #### my model girlfriend rather then try to convince people like you of commonly held hockey knowledge.
^ yeah I've used them a bunch of times and didn't have a helmet. I realise that's not particularly smart, but to be honest I barely gave it a second thought.
That said, I sort of keep track of people riding bikes on the pathway without a helmet and depending on when, it's shockingly close to 50-50. Let's face it...humans aren't that bright.
Biking on a MUP around the river with no helmet is probably far less dangerous than riding a scooter on sidewalks without one.
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Biking on a MUP around the river with no helmet is probably far less dangerous than riding a scooter on sidewalks without one.
Oh I agree, and I've gone and just plain forgotten my helmet so I'm not being hypocritical. But the reality is that we know so much more about head injuries and those issues, so I would figure the vast majority would wear a helmet. It's not what I see though.
The main reason I hate going to Austin TX is because of the E-Scooters. They are everywhere, and when you're trying to drive and someone on an E-Scooter is in front of you, it's pretty frustrating. Safety is a big factor of course, but since I don't ride one I just find them annoying.
A study finds that 160 riders were injured in a three-month period
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The study, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the city of Austin's health department, adds to the growing research about e-scooters, which arrived in cities in late 2017 and have spread rapidly ever since. Research so far has found that a majority of riders don't wear helmets, and many of those who are injured face significant injuries.
The biggest issue are not the scooters, it's that people suck and are dumb. Like this morning, I'm on the path going down the bluff and some moron left a Lime bike blocking half the pathway right at the top at a narrow section. It could have gone anywhere else, but no, dummy was done with it, so left it there. I've seen lots of them left in the most careless places. We don't deserve these things.
I think that bike in your way was probably an attempt at marketing by the Lime company.
I see a lot of those bikes left in the middle of the path. It doesn't make sense for someone to ride the bike halfway to their destination, leave it in the middle of the path, and walk the rest of the way.
I know that Lime picks lot so bikes up at night with a truck to move them to different parts of the city. I have no data to back this up, but I think that Lime is putting some of them in prominent locations for 'guerilla marketing'. it's so flipping annoying.
The biggest issue are not the scooters, it's that people suck and are dumb. Like this morning, I'm on the path going down the bluff and some moron left a Lime bike blocking half the pathway right at the top at a narrow section.
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Originally Posted by BigBrodieFan
The main reason I hate going to Austin TX is because of the E-Scooters. They are everywhere
I can't believe you guys are annoyed by them. A company dumping a toy for you to use that'll cost a few bucks and can move you from A to B in the most fun way possible? That's awesome.
leaving aside injuries and everything else, I think their CEO is full of it. "customers will be able to use the machines at a cost of $1.15 to start and 35 cents a minute after, a rate which he says makes the service competitive with public transit."
how is that competitive with transit? if you have the scooter more than 6 minutes, you're paying more than you would to take the bus. how long is a transfer good for on a bus? at least 2 hours, isn't it?
might be a good idea if you're short trip bar hopping, maybe.
leaving aside injuries and everything else, I think their CEO is full of it. "customers will be able to use the machines at a cost of $1.15 to start and 35 cents a minute after, a rate which he says makes the service competitive with public transit."
how is that competitive with transit? if you have the scooter more than 6 minutes, you're paying more than you would to take the bus. how long is a transfer good for on a bus? at least 2 hours, isn't it?
might be a good idea if you're short trip bar hopping, maybe.
They are almost as expensive as car2go.
Also I have to laugh at people who are annoyed by them. Have never even noticed them in the cities they are unless I’m actively looking for them.
leaving aside injuries and everything else, I think their CEO is full of it. "customers will be able to use the machines at a cost of $1.15 to start and 35 cents a minute after, a rate which he says makes the service competitive with public transit."
how is that competitive with transit? if you have the scooter more than 6 minutes, you're paying more than you would to take the bus. how long is a transfer good for on a bus? at least 2 hours, isn't it?
might be a good idea if you're short trip bar hopping, maybe.
Funny you say that, because it's actually causing quite the controversy in Austin.
A new study suggests another reason pedestrians perceive them as such a menace: Nearly 30 percent of the people injured riding electric scooters had been drinking alcohol, according to the Centers for Disease Control’s first-ever study of scooter-related injuries.
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The study covered 87 days last fall in Austin, where the number of scooters in the city went from zero to 15,000 last year. The CDC study reported that just in that short time frame, nearly 200 people were injured in scooter crashes, and many of the injuries were severe—in large part because virtually no one wears helmets while riding the things.
My guess is the state of Texas will soon impose some 'no-drinking and scooting' law with DUI-like punishments. Also, they will begin making parking places for scooters and charge them just like cars.
“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.
My guess is the state of Texas will soon impose some 'no-drinking and scooting' law with DUI-like punishments. Also, they will begin making parking places for scooters and charge them just like cars.