Researchers at the University of California Los Angeles examined data from two emergency departments from Sept. 1, 2017, to Aug. 31, 2018, and found that 249 people required medical care from scooter accidents. One-third of those patients arrived at the hospital in an ambulance.
"These injuries can be severe," Dr. Tarak Trivedi, emergency physician at UCLA and the study's lead author, said in a phone interview. "These aren't just minor cuts and scrapes. These are legit fractures."
Electric scooter company Bird first rolled out these vehicles in September 2017 in Santa Monica, California. Now there are nearly a dozen companies that have scooters for rent in roughly 100 cities across the US.
Because the rentable vehicles are so new, federal and local officials haven't started tracking accidents, and the companies have declined to release any statistics. But emergency rooms in various cities, such as Austin, San Diego and San Francisco, have begun to tally injuries.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are also conducting a nationwide study on scooter accident rates.
UCLA's researchers found that the most common injuries were from falls (74 percent), while 10 percent of accidents happened because of collisions with objects.
The vast majority of people injured were scooter riders, but about 8 percent of those injured were pedestrians who either were hit by a scooter or tripped over one.
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