E-scooters leave a wake of broken bones and fractured skulls | Fred Grimm

Nothing quite violates my reverie like a sudden encounter with a fast-coming e-scooter on a busy sidewalk.

The damn scooters wend around pedestrians like stunt drivers on an obstacle course. Can’t hear’em coming. Just the faint hum of an electric motor. Only the wake of angry curses in the scooter’s wake warns pedestrians ahead that they’re about to be slammed by a burgeoning mode of transportation.

Electric scooters — unless you own one — have become one of the ubiquitous irritants of urban life, racing along streets, sidewalks, the Riverwalk (despite a city prohibition), zipping in and out of traffic, barging through red lights.

Admittedly, life in a tourist town probably has skewed my perception, given that the most noticeable scooter jockeys hereabouts are giddy out-of-towners on their first-ever e-adventure.

Meanwhile, prudent riders who depend on personal e-scooters for everyday transportation don’t attract much attention. Only the incautious get noticed.

Granted, I’m at an age when an exaggerated sense of danger looms over all sorts of mundane pursuits. But death-and-injury statistics associated with e-scooters, electric hoverboards, electric skateboards and other nifty devices categorized as “micromobility transport” support my timidity.

Researchers with the University of California at San Francisco reported in 2019 that the number of e-scooter injuries treated in U.S. hospital emergency rooms increased by 222% from 2014 to 2018, when nearly 40,000 riders showed up at ERs with broken bones, fractured skulls, neck injuries, lost teeth, scrapes, lacerations and bruises.

The mayhem hasn’t ebbed. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission reported last fall that micromobility crashes accounted for at least 360,800 emergency room visits from 2017 through 2022. An estimated 169,300 of those injuries were attributed to scooter mishaps.

A similar study in the medical journal JAMA Surgery found that over that same five-year span, hospital admissions due to e-scooter accidents increased 365%.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission counted 233 fatalities associated with micromobility over that period, about half involving electric scooters. And that was surely an undercount. A number of police departments and hospitals don’t separate reports of scooter mishaps from other traffic injuries.

Fort Lauderdale residents hardly need statistical studies to know the risks associated with e-scooters. The Sun Sentinel reported that in 2019 Fort Lauderdale Fire Rescue attended to 25 serious e-scooter injuries along a six-block stretch of East Las Olas Boulevard. (The city has since banned e-scooters from Las Olas, the central beach area and the Riverwalk, though I can personally attest that they’re still scooting full-throttle down the Riverwalk.)

Last week, South Florida suffered a grim reminder that these aren’t meaningless statistics. On Monday morning, Anthony Malec, a 16-year-old student heading to Cooper City High School on his electric scooter, collided with a Tesla. He died from his injuries a day later.

A photo of his mangled, bent and broken scooter on the road attested to a rider’s utter vulnerability when scooter meets car.

Expect more such tragedies. Electric scooter sales rose 13% in 2023 compared to 2022, which translates into an inevitable increase in human casualties. The League of American Bicyclists predicts U.S. hospitals will treat 60,000 scooter injuries in 2024.

Cities everywhere struggle with trying to manage their scooter fleets. A study conducted by researchers in Barcelona and published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine in 2021 warned that  scooter injuries amounted to “a new epidemic in orthopedics.” New Orleans and Las Vegas have outright banned e-scooter rentals. After three deaths and 459 injuries in 2022, so did Paris.

In February, 60-year-old Megan Andrews was killed in a head-on collision between two e-bikes on Key Biscayne. The other bike was piloted by a 12-year-old boy.

The death of the life-long island resident prompted the Key Biscayne Village Council to ban both e-bikes and e-scooters from their streets and sidewalks for 60 days. But village officials worried that extending the ban might violate a vaguely written state preemption law that severely limits local government’s regulatory power over e-bikes and perhaps even e-scooters. (The Florida Legislature adjourned two weeks ago without voting on a measure that would have allowed cities and counties to at least institute age restrictions for e-rentals. The Tallahassee gang delights in savaging home rule.)

But e-scooters are more than toys. They’ve become a crucial, eco-friendly travel alternative in traffic-choked cities and an affordable mode of transportation for low-income commuters.  Electron, a micromobility information clearinghouse, reports that 36% of electric scooter owners in the U.S. earn less than $25,000 a year.

Affordable e-transportation seems critical in a town like Fort Lauderdale with an economy dependent on low-paid service workers. Any afternoon, you can spot restaurant servers scooting along city streets in their snazzy work outfits.

Safety experts say the best fix would be mandatory helmets. The UC San Francisco study found that less than 4% of seriously injured scooter riders were wearing helmets when they crashed. But Florida’s conservative lawmakers consider mandatory protective headgear to be liberalism gone wild.

Safe bike lanes on busy streets would help, along with fines for automobile drivers who block bicycle lanes, forcing bikes and scooters to veer into traffic.

But who knows how to slow down an ever-changing cast of wild-eyed spring breakers on scooters? Maybe Darwin can sort’em out.

Fred Grimm, a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a journalist in South Florida since 1976. Reach him by email at leogrimm@gmail.com or on Twitter: @grimm_fred.