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Andrew Hardy was crossing the street on an electric scooter in downtown Los Angeles when a car hit him at 50 km / h and threw him 15 feet into the air before banging his head on the sidewalk and lose consciousness.
The 26-year-old man broke two bones in each leg, broke his femur, broke his kneecap, broke a lung and fractured three vertebrae around his neck, in addition to to hurt your head.
"My brother thought I was dead," said Hardy, who was not wearing a helmet.
The doctors told Hardy he would probably be paralyzed for life. Five months later, he relearned to walk. But he says that he will never drive another scooter.
"These scooters should not be available to the public," Hardy said. "These things are like a death wish."
As electric scooters move into more than 100 cities around the world, many of their drivers end up in the emergency room with serious injuries. Others were killed. There are no comprehensive statistics, but the Associated Press has reported at least 11 motorcycle deaths in the United States since the beginning of 2018. Nine were rented scooters and two victim-owned vehicles.
With the summer fast approaching, the numbers will undoubtedly increase as more and more runners hit the streets. Despite the risks, the demand for two-wheeled scooters continues to skyrocket, popularized by companies like Lime and Bird. In the United States alone, motorcyclists have made 38.5 million trips on commendable scooters in 2018, according to the National Association of City Transportation Officials.
Runners love the free-flying sensation of scooters that have a skateboard-sized base and can spin up to 15 miles per hour. They are also inexpensive and convenient: they cost around $ 1 to unlock with a smartphone app and about 15 cents a minute to roll. And in many cities, they can be dropped pretty much anywhere after a rider has reached his destination.
But pedestrians and motorists disdain scooters as a nuisance at best and a danger at worst.
Cities, on the other hand, can hardly keep up. In many cases, scooter sharing companies dropped them off the sidewalks overnight.
The regulations vary from one place to another. In New York and the United Kingdom, electric scooters are illegal on public roads and sidewalks, although cyclists routinely flout the law. Last week in Helsingborg, Sweden, a rider was hit and killed by a car just a day after scooters were introduced into the city, which immediately led to a ban. And in Nashville, Tennessee, where another rider was killed, the mayor of the city warned scooter drivers that they had 30 days to repair their act or he would propose a ban.
Tired of thousands of scooters flooding the streets of Paris, the mayor Anne Hidalgo announced Thursday new regulations limiting the number of scooter drivers and imposing a speed limit of 5 km / hour in busy areas. The city has already fined 135 euros ($ 150) to anyone driving a scooter on a sidewalk.
Isabelle Albertin, pianist of the famous Opéra Garnier in Paris, suffered a double fracture of her right arm after being crushed by an electric scooter on May 17th. She sued the city and launched an organization to lobby for a ban.
"On the sidewalks of Paris, it is a house of total madness. We pedestrians are totally insecure, "she told Le Parisien newspaper.
It is difficult to obtain data on injuries or deaths related to scooters, because the sector is so new. In Austin, Texas, public health officials working with the Centers for Disease Control accounted for 192 scooter-related injuries in 2018. Nearly half were head injuries, 15% of which were traumatic brain injuries. concussions and bleeding from the brain. Less than 1% of injured runners wore a helmet.
Bird, one of the largest scooter sharing companies, dropped off its scooters on the streets of Santa Monica, California, in September 2017. A few months later, bikers showed up in the emergency room, according to Dr. Tarak Trivedi, an emergency room. Los Angeles doctor and co-author of one of the first peer-reviewed studies on injuries caused by a scooter. The following year, Trivedi and his colleagues counted 249 scooter injuries, of which more than 40% were at the helm. Only 4% wore a helmet.
"I do not think our roads are ready for that," Trivedi said.
Bird and Lime recommend that riders wear a helmet and have distributed tens of thousands for free. But last year Bird managed to fight a California proposal that would impose adult helmets, saying scooters had to follow the same laws as e-bikes, but did not need adult helmets.
According to Bird, the helmet wearing requirements discourage cyclists and could reduce the number of scooters on the road. Almost counter-intuitively, the company says it's better to have more runners than less because it forces drivers to pay attention.
"Motorists know there are people on the street and they act accordingly," said Paul Steely White, Bird's Director of Safety and Advocacy Policy.
Getting people to wear a helmet is a challenge. Cyclists do not want to be exposed to lice or germs that could be found in shared helmets, and many make the spontaneous decision to scoot while on the road.
That was the case when Drew Howerton, 19, jumped on a Lime scooter on a whim last October in Austin. He recalls signing a waiver stating that he should wear a helmet, but he did not have one.
"I did not go to Austin thinking that I'm going to drive a scooter today, it's better to bring my helmet," Howerton said.
Scooter-sharing companies generally limit driving to those 18 years and older, but some children, or their parents, have found solutions to this problem. A 5 year old boy died in Oklahoma after falling from a scooter on which he was driving with his mother and was hit by a car.
Bird and Lime are taking steps to improve the safety of scooters. After noting that scooter accidents often occurred after midnight, when the bikers may be drinking, Bird ceased operations after midnight. Lime stops renting overnight in some markets, but in most scooters, it is available all night long.
Lime has also updated the design of its scooters, with a wider wheelbase and better suspension and braking; Bird incorporates more durable brakes and reinforced hardware to prevent breakdowns.
The two companies are pushing cities to create more bike lanes and improve infrastructure, as their bikers navigate the roads and traffic in conditions designed for cars and trucks.
"The reality is that cars continue to kill more people every year than any other mode of transportation," Lime said in a statement. "We have to deal with this problem with cities, get people out of their vehicles and build cities that put people first, with smarter infrastructure to protect passengers."
For Howerton, his first experience with a scooter left him scarred. Even though he read the warning not to go downhill, he still did, because the hills are hard to avoid in Austin. When he tried to brake, he stole a scooter and banged his head against the sidewalk, the blood dripping in his eyes.
"These companies, for the most part, are coming into cities and somehow abandoning these carpools," said Howerton. "They tout them as a truly cool and innovative way of transportation that is cheap and affordable, but it's dangerous, but they're dangerous and they do not think about the possible health consequences."
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Bussewitz reported from New York and Morris from Raleigh, North Carolina. Associate Press Editor Lori Hinnant in Paris and AP researcher Jennifer Farrar in New York contributed to this report.
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