Gone are the days of getting your ankle broken by a razor scooter, and in come the days of the electric scooter. These new e-scooters have become the newest method of transport in the United States, and especially amongst teenagers, with about 65 million scooter riders in 2023. There’s no surprise that they’ve become so popular, with how convenient, fun, and relatively inexpensive they are, but with their rise in popularity, there has also been a rise in accidents involving e-scooters. From 2021 to 2023, there were over 360,000 visits to the ER due to both electric scooter and electric bike accidents, with a significant portion of them, 36% to be exact, involving kids and teens 15 and younger. In a report by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, it was recorded that from  2017 to 2022, there had been 111 deaths from these electric scooter accidents.  How can something that is seen as such low risk not only be dangerous for the e-scooter rider but also for pedestrians and even drivers in their cars?

One reason why electric scooters are so dangerous for all the people on the road is that many of the drivers behind them are people with no license or permit. While many students at Enochs make their way to school by riding the bus or driving themselves, there is still a large number of students, with a majority of them not having a license, who arrive by either bike or scooter. With the recent popularity of electric vehicles, a lot of these students have begun to opt for either electric bikes or the even more popular e-scooters without knowing that in California, it is illegal to operate them without a license or instruction permit. This lack of driver experience leaves e-scooter drivers at risk of being involved in an accident. Regular scooters and bikes may not require a license or permit, but only because they are a lot less dangerous for not only for the one handling them, but everybody on the road, compared to a motorized version of them that is a lot more unpredictable and harder to control. On a less serious note, drivers can also get hefty fines if they are found to have no license or permit. This is a rare outcome and hardly enforced, but if it were to be, it’d definitely lead to fewer accidents among inexperienced drivers.

 Another of the reasons scooters are so dangerous is also from how recklessly they’re used. Some of the dangers of e-scooters can be attributed to driver inexperience, but a large part of these dangers are from how reckless people are with them. Going up to a speed of 15 MPH in a car is immensely different from going that same speed on a scooter and can cause injury from collisions, falls, and a lack of protection if something goes wrong. Although 15 mph may be the recommended speed, many scooters can go up to 3,0, which gives you less reaction time if something were to happen, such as an oncoming pedestrian who may not see the scooter coming. Collisions between the driver and a pedestrian always cause injurie,s and in cases with small children and the elderly, they can become deadly. 

 These are all very valid concerns, but despite this, e-bike riders who have the same or similar dangers as people who drive e-scooters don’t experience as many injuries, and when they do, they aren’t as severe in comparison. This is due to the fact that e-bike riders are more likely to wear helmets than e-bike riders. When involved in an accident, the helmet absorbs and spreads out the force of impacts, which prevents up to 85% of head injuries. With the majority of e-scooter riders not wearing a helmet, it’s clear why so many accidents are so severe or even fatal for riders. Small things, such as wearing a helmet, have a large impact when it comes to preventing accidents and overall safety. It’s becoming clearer and clearer what seems to be the common denominator in why scooters seem so dangerous. 

The thing is that scooters themselves aren’t dangerous, and in the majority of cases, the danger comes from the people handling them. Very few accidents have to do with issues with the scooter itself malfunctioning, but because of the lack of experience, reckless driving, and not taking safety precautions. All these factors are not specific to scooters and can lead to unsafe driving in any type of vehicle. E-scooters aren’t “killing machines” and are only dangerous when intentionally or unintentionally misused, and laws that are meant to prevent them from being a danger are disregarded.