[ad_1]
New research indicates that people are injured with electric scooters – and most cyclists do not wear a helmet. The findings highlight the risks to safety when infrastructure and regulation fail to keep up with the controversial and popular transport trend.
Over the course of a year, at least 249 people visited two emergency rooms in Southern California with fractures, bumps, bruises and head injuries, including brain bleeding, resulting of scooter accidents, according to an article published today in the newspaper JAMA Network open now. Although most of the injuries came from horse riding On the scooters, pedestrians were injured when motorcyclists crashed on them and others stumbled on scooters while walking.
This is the first comprehensive study to report the range of injuries resulting from the new craze for sharing scooters. It could help scooter companies and cities find ways to prevent them. However, it can take time to implement security solutions – just look at how communities have managed to introduce bike lanes and even sidewalks.
The rise of motorized scooters began in 2017 when hundreds of two-wheeled vehicles began appearing on the streets of California. People responded by throwing the scooters into bodies of water, equipping them with seats and, of course, driving them. Frederick Rivara, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington and not involved in the study, says that these motorized scooters can reach a speed of 15 miles at the hour. "That's what I was hoping to see and it's a concern," says Rivara, who wrote an editorial on the study also published today. "The problem will only get worse."
The research began when Tarak Trivedi, an emergency physician at UCLA and a researcher at the National Clinician Scholars Program, began seeing scooters appear in Santa Monica. "They appear everywhere, they are controversial, people clench their fists against bikers as they pbad," he says. Trivedi is not one of the crazy, he rides himself on a scooter, always with a helmet. But, he adds, "it did not take long before I started seeing patients in the emergency department where I work at UCLA who had scooter injuries."
Trivedi wanted to know if there were trends common to injuries or the people who accompanied them. Thus, decision makers and scooter companies might be able to come up with strategies to prevent them. So, he and his colleagues searched the emergency room records at UCLA's Ronald Reagan Medical Center and UCLA's Santa Monica Medical Center.
They found 523 entries of medical records containing the words "scooter", "lime" or "bird" from September 2017. (Lime and Bird are scooter startups.) Of this number, 79 were discarded because " bird "or" lime "meant something else," like the name of a person or a street, or the animal or fruit, "says the study. D & # 39; others were discarded because it was the wrong type of scooter.A total of 249 recordings explicitly concerned injuries caused by an electric scooter.
The study does not examine the rate of injuries caused by a scooter compared to, say, the number of injuries by car accident or bicycle. They report finding records of 195 bicycle accidents and 181 pedestrian injuries in these same hospitals. "We do not know about the kilometers traveled, the number of trips made or the number of people driving scooters on a daily basis," says Trivedi. "At this point, it's not clear if their driving is more dangerous than riding a bicycle."
This is not the object of the study. Instead, the team looked at scooter injury trends and found that most patients were driving the scooter after being injured. (Study indicates that 27 people, or about 11%, were under the age of 18, which goes against the regulations of scooter manufacturers.) Most were injured by a fall, but about 11% struck something and 8.8% were injured. struck by a car or other moving object. And the team discovered that 21 other people were either hit by a scooter, fell on a parked scooter, or injured themselves while trying to lift it.
About 40% of the patients suffered head injuries, including several particularly serious ones, including five brain bleeds and one concussion. But the problem with the hospital records is that they did not give much details about the nature of the rides themselves. About 12 noted that patients had been drinking, for example. And the records of only 10 patients, 4.4%, explicitly indicated that the patient was wearing a helmet, for example.
So, to get a better idea of how people used scooters, Trivedi and his team parked at street corners to watch 193 people spinning. "We saw all kinds of things," says Trivedi: there were tandem riders, parent-child couples, sidewalk enthusiasts and traffic rules. And 94% did not wear a helmet. Although the Bird scooter company has supported California legislation to make helmet use optional for adult cyclists, CNET, which came into effect only on January 1 of this year. At the time, these barefoot runners were flouting local law.
That's why Rivara thinks that scooter manufacturers should start looking for ways to give people easy access to helmets. But he adds that, although bike helmets reduce the risk of injury, they may not be sufficient at higher speeds: "Since these devices are motorized, we do not really know if the bike helmets will be adequate or no, "he says. He hopes that the Federal Consumer Product Safety Commission will get involved in testing bike helmets at the speed of scooters. "I realize that there is no easy solution – if there were, we would have – but that does not mean you should ignore it," he says.
Trivedi think that poor maintenance of the scooter could contribute to injuries. Although the study did not examine the issue, he heard patients complaining of equipment failures, such as brake problems. He recommends that pilots test the brakes on their scooters before boarding, and that companies make it easier to report damaged scooters.
Paul Steely White, director of safety policies and advocacy for the startup of the Bird scooter, said in an email statement that he hoped to be able to collaborate with the authors of the study. "Bird has not had the opportunity to work with the authors of the study or to collaborate with them, and we find that the report is very limited," he says. Like Trivedi, he points out that the study does not consider the accident rate in relation to motorcycle or car accidents. "The number of reported injuries would represent only a fraction of 1% of the total number of e-scooter rides." (Since motorcycle trips are generally short, the number of injuries per kilometer may be better. comparison.)
Mary Caroline Pruitt, spokeswoman for Lime, said in an email that safety was the company's top priority. She listed the company's safety initiatives, including "250,000 free helmets distributed to cyclists around the world," she says. "We are also working with local governments around the world to support infrastructure for scooters and shared bikes."
After all, the responsibility for runner safety does not lie with the companies; Trivedi also wants cities to make roads safer for cyclists and scooter drivers by maintaining them and giving them room for vehicles other than cars, such as bicycles and scooters. "The scooters run at 15 km / h, so it's a disaster recipe if you do not spend space on the road," he says.
For Trivedi, the results did not deter him from driving electric scooters. But he will continue to wear his helmet, although it can be annoying to lug around in restaurants and cinemas. "If anything, I'd say I'm pro-scooter," he says. Apart from, of course, injuries. "We just have to use them safely."
Source link
