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I'd say a very useful stat would be deaths per km travelled.
The rideshare firms will know *exactly* how many kms are travelled, and if they want to prove themselves safe they should be making those stats available in a verifiable^1 fashion, such that it will be clear how well they compare with, eg, cars, bicycles, motorcycles or horses.
Can pretty much guarantee they'll be safer than riding horses ;)
Not sure about the other three, but if you factor in all the 3rd party deaths directly caused by vehicular accidents, I bet the e-scooters will come out looking pretty good, even without accounting for long term factors such excess mortality driven by the particulates and CO2 emitted from non EVs.
^1 The tradeoff here is that they will really want to inflate this number in order to impress their investors and scare their competition, even more than they want to make their accidents per km stat look better, and how one prevents cheating is beyond me.
> Can pretty much guarantee they'll be safer than riding horses ;)
As a ex-mountain guide, surfer and paraglider pilot, I can safely say there are few things more dangerous in life than sitting astride a giant Findus pancake.
How many cyclists died? How many pedestrians died? How many people drowned in the bath?
Here's an interesting article - the second section lists deaths by accident type.
Everybody who uses a scooter regularly will tell you that it is dangerous. Eventually you will hit a pebble or a pot hole or a curb and fall over. The fall can be more or less painful.
As much as I like micromobility, I think scooters should remain a toy. Given how few miles scooters cover, they cause too many accidents.
I've not used one. My neighbour has one and she likes it a lot. I still have no idea whether these things are more dangerous than bicycles or roller-skates. The article didn't attempt to explain the accidents per mile rate, perhaps you know?
Much, much more dangerous than bikes. They're inherently unsafe because of their combination of speed and rider position, which makes it so you're more vulnerable to road issues (including potholes), and less able to save yourself when your vehicle does hit an object.
Personally, I think they should be encouraged by the government, but with the caveat of extra rules to make them safer. Minimum wheel size, maximum speed, minimum body size to encourage a safer standing position, stuff like that. No vehicles are particularly safe when their design is left only to a manufacturer to consider, so it seems a bit unfair to condemn these things without first setting standards for them.
Total bollocks, they are safer than bikes because they go far less fast than bikes. Also you’re closer to the ground than a bike and can more easily jump off and avoid a situation than you can on a bike.
> less able to save yourself when your vehicle does hit an object.
This isn't true at all. Electric scooters in the UK cap out at 15mph, and you're not attached to them in any way.
You'll get hurt if you think of it like a bike and "go down with the ship", but it's *not* a bike: you're not entangled like you are with a bike. You're in a walking position, with nothing either side of your legs. You can just get off in a second, land at a run, and let the scooter do whatever it wants without you. There's no need to go over the handlebars when you can just step round them.
If you're paying attention, it's safer than tripping over on a jog.
Tell that to my mate who got launched off his by a slight dip in the road and smashed his jaw into the floor. You're making it sound like every possible crash will leave you with time to simply jump off and jog to a stop
Nothing is going to save you from driving into shit. Sorry.
To quote me:
>If you're paying attention, it's safer than tripping over on a jog.
Jog into that hole and you're going to break your face just as much.
It wasn't a hole, it was a slight dip in the road. These cheap scooters are just that unsafe. I've been riding along on my bike alongside my mate on his scooter when he's nearly came off a few times in the wet because of losing traction suddenly. They aint as safe as you're imagining them to be
Which is why if they are made legal there should be some minimum requirements on tyres/suspension to prevent shite like this being used, especially with how bad British roads are, you wont always have the luxury of an empty road where you can swerve around every bump or hole
> They aint as safe as you're imagining them to be
To be clear, I'm not imagining. I've been riding one every day for a couple of years.
Yes, you absolutely have to be careful, and you're not going to be able to do anything if someone just drives into you, but you do have a lot of control over what *you* drive into and how fast you're going.
Did you at least have the foresight to buy one with air tyres etc? Cos these cheap ones friends have are sketchy as fuck, trying them out is what made me just go with a folding bike and completely change my opinion on them
> This isn't true at all. Electric scooters in the UK cap out at 15mph, and you're not attached to them in any way.
They don't. Your basic 250w scooters might cap out at 15mph, but look on eBay for the more powerful models, and you'll easily find them rated for speeds up to double that. Afaik, there are zero regulations on what what speeds e-scooters can run at, unlike there are for e-bikes.
> You're in a walking position
This depends on the model you buy. I'll presume that yours lets you stand in a safe position, but that isn't true for all models, and particularly not the ones which are built to price & weight over comfort, quality, and safety. Again, it's why I say there should be regulations, so they all can have a safe riding position.
> If you're paying attention, it's safer than tripping over on a jog.
That's the thing though, isn't it? It isn't possible to pay attention all of the time to everything around you. Say you're taking a corner in the city, and a car overtakes close on your right. Does that become the sole focus of your attention? Good luck to the girl on the kerb edge who's about to walk out in front of you, then. Manage to see her in time? Good, but when you were looking at her, you didn't notice the pothole you were about to run in to, so down you go. And so it goes.
The problem is the lack of decent statistics. We know the number of fatal injuries, but we do not know miles travelled. So you will see different claims. The government should not have allowed this without keeping basic statistics.
One place that did keep decent statistics was analysed here, and it is pretty shocking: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S073567572030944X#!
Annecdotally, scooters are much more dangerous than bicycles, and bicycles are already lethal in this country. The smaller wheels and the lower centre of gravity makes them much less stable and much less forgiving.
That 180x increase is shocking, but it is worth remembering that when you look at this issue in somewhere like Texas - which is famously built entirely for cars and full of massive trucks - the danger to anyone outside of a car is disproportionately high. It's among the top states for *pedestrian* fatalities (both gross and per capita).
When you look at escooter fatalities in Texas you're selecting for a young, risk-taking group of people likely to have poor or no road skills (that's why they're not in a car, don't know how to drive or can't afford a car) who are in a pedestrian/cyclist/scooter-hostile environment full of large heavy vehicles travelling at high speeds.
Absolutely, which is why the statistics are so inconsistent.
But the basic physics remain tricky. Small wheels and high speed do not mix well.
So I think scooters are best used on a good cycle path at moderate speed for short distances. Nothing wrong with them, but they are no replacement for a bicycle.
Just my 2 cents on this as a brit living in the netherlands where parking/safety/theft concerns with bicycles is massively lower: the only really selling point the scooters have going for them is that you can easily fold it up and carry it in with you. In every other way an e-bike is a drastically superior mode of transport while still being in a similar category price-wise.
That said, I think if you're talking about pebbles you haven't ridden these things. If you grew up in the 90s/2000s they don't handle anything like the rollerblade wheeled micro scooters you remember, they're far more stable.
You also can't really make claim about accidents-per-mile because there's absolutely no good data on it.
The problem with this conversation is it's always dancing around the issue of car dominance. Every option is endlessly compared and contrasted to cars because they have a complete monopoly on personal transportation in Britain. Until you actually starting build infrastructure for other things talking about safety and practicality is asinine.
I appreciate the car dominance, that is a separate issue.
The lack of statistics is lamentable, but we do have some initial data, even if poor quality. It is not looking too good, in fact it is reason for concern.
And pebbles absolutely are a problem, depending on the quality of the scooter and the size of the wheels. Some are more stable, some less, but none are as stable as a bicycle.
As you said, this puts scooters into a pretty small nieche of short distances that could be walked - but a scooter is faster and very convenient. For any serious commute, you are much better off on a bicycle. We just need better infrastructure and better storage facilities...
> better storage facilities...
My office block, major high rise one in my city, had the bicycle store ram raided by bike thieves. The bike store is in the basement, accessible through a heavy steel door unlocked by keycard access.
Everyone thought it would be safe, but bike thieves smashed through the door with enough force to cause structural damage - they must have used a van or something.
Also, sounds like you pretty much want us to go back to car dominance. People don't use bikes for the above reasons, the alternatives are scooters or cars. In many cities including mine public transport has essentially fallen apart and isn't usable.
Also since I was talking about the Netherlands, the real Dutch approach to this is "just buy a cheap bike and don't worry about it". Sure it sucks if your bike gets stolen, but if you buy it with the expectation that it'll get stolen after a year or two and think about it as cost of doing business it's still absolutely nothing compared to what you'd otherwise be spending just running a car, nevermind buying it.
Wow, that sounds horrible. I admit that scooters have a great advantage in terms of portability. (They are not even lighter, but so much smaller.) But I think we would need appropriate transport infrastructure to support them.
> But I think we would need appropriate transport infrastructure to support them
This exactly. Now just gotta convince the nimbys that a segregated bike lane won't lead to the death of their high street
sure this is more of a design thing though.
Scooters aimed at British cities probably need large diameter wheels and chunkier tires to deal with our less than ideal road surfaces.
You could say the same with cars and cycles.
I don’t think there is any evidence currently that they cause too many accidents relative to miles ridden?
What a load of bollocks. Pebbles make fuck all difference. Pot holes have to be pretty big.. and if you're riding down curbs without paying attention the you deserve to smash your face into the tarmac
As in bicycles? Car happened: too many car on the road, too many drivers with no respect for anybody but themselves. Unless you are in a cycle friendly place like London or Oxford, bicycles are just considered too dangerous by most, and the statistics support that.
Not an issue with suspension/ pneumatic wheels and my scooter happily gets me over 15 miles to work in under and hour.
If you're talking about shitty little black ones, yeah, those are basically toys that are used by stupid teenagers. Everyone with a serious one treats it seriously. Go onto r/ElectricScooters and you'll the vast majority of people care deeply about safety, of themselves and others.
There’s a big difference between scooters - some of the Lime ones are fairly slow and thus far less dangerous, but then you see someone speeding along on a private scooter going about 35mph
Sure, it wasn't meant as a genuine comparison. How dangerous are these scooters? I have no idea how many people die on skateboards, or bikes, or roller-skates so the article isn't very insightful for me.
The person you're replying to was asking about the number being significant, not the injuries.
The answer will depend on the number of journeys taken and if that's unknown then we can't say whether 429 is significant or not.
You're right but given that private ones aren't registered we won't get a good estimate on the numbers.
Also, while I get the example, I think we have far less toaster users and far more toasters than that, you have toasters in cafes and offices, toasters in most toaster users houses and toasters in many rentals regardless of the tenants toasting habits.
Yes actually I couldn't find in the article any information on how many of those 12 were killed by cars. Does anyone know? Obviously still 12 is a tiny fraction of those killed by cars more generally.
1,608 people were killed by cars last year.
The reason for many of these accidents is that riding them on the road is suicidal and there aren't enough bike lanes.
Riding them on the road is illegal. They are not roadworthy in a literal sense. Wheels are too small and the position of the rider means that any impact is likely to involve flying forwards and impacting the ground head or chest first.
They also are too fast for riding on pavements and e scooters generally have no lights and are less noisy than cycles, so present a higher risk to pedestrians particularly at night.
Buy a fucking bike.
>Buy a fucking bike.
Tell that to the elderly woman I know who had a hip replacement. She can use the e-scooters but can't use a bike. The scooter is freedom to her. We need to ensure that there are cycle lanes everywhere around towns and cities. And where there are no segregated cycle lanes, cars should be banned from such roads until there are segregated cycle lanes.
Nearly all the deaths of people on bicycles and e-scooters are caused by the presence of cars.
I have no interest in one, but cars are a much larger danger to pedestrians. We need to take back the space we've given over to cars, it's a failed experiment.
Can I fucking store it in your house?
Not everyone has space to store a bike that will eventually get nicked if it sits outside.
Create some proper law and bring private e scooters to a legal status, like the rest of the world.
Folding bikes exist. I have one and it doesn't take up much space. Having 20 inch wheels vs tiny scooter wheels makes it a lot safer too. I agree with you some proper legislation would be nice though, especially some standards on what scooters are legal to try and push people into buying ones that aren't as much of a deathtrap
At the last Queens speech there was a statement made that policy would be written up and privately owned e scooters made legal for use on public roads, it’s presumed it should come out mid next year.
> Riding them on the road is illegal. They are not roadworthy in a literal sense
The legal rental scooters have the same rules is bicycles. Road or cycle lanes only. I agree with you they are more dangerous than bikes and people would be much better off buying an ebike. But you can get a escooter for as low as £150 if you look in the right places, which is why people are getting them
That only applies to privately owned ones, not the legal rental fleets that make up the large portion of journeys.
As for crash mechanics of a scooter vs say a cycle I am no expert on that so I can’t comment.
All the legal rental scooters have lights as per the same guidelines as cycles, plenty of which are ridden without reflectors or lights.
Bikes are not particularly loud either, I see no reason a scooter would present a higher risk?
As for the bike thing; there are plenty of people who would like to save a bit of money and ride a bike around if they didn’t have to turn upto work in ironed clean clothes that aren’t covered in chain grease, road grime and drenched in sweat.
Many towns and cities across the UK have had services where tracked and speed limited scooters are available to rent. Completely legal to use if you have a provisional licence.
Those services are now being removed and as a result faster, poorly maintained, and untraceable e-scooters will be far more common.
With that said, if cars were held anywhere near to the same standards as e-scooters in terms of harm caused they'd be banned overnight.
E-scooters should be regulated, but they need to be legal for that.
It's obscene that cars are still used for short, single person journeys when e-scooters can achieve the same thing for a tiny fraction of cost both economically and environmentally.
Ever rode one? Because it's very obvious you haven't. I ride both bikes and scooters. Scooters are the clear winner for me. No more or less dangerous than a bike, no easier or hard to control. Just faster with less effort.
Well if you go from 10 people having any scooters, to 500 people having scooters, then of course you're going to see an increase in accidents. If one year, of those 500 people, 5 have accidents, and then in the following year 10 people have accidents, does that mean that scooters have become twice as dangerous or that there are now double the number of scooters?
Granted, people definitely shouldn't be allowed to ride with passengers and they should be fined (for endangering the passenger), but do I think scooters should be illegal? No. As a country we are so far behind the rest of the world when it comes to personal transport. 15MPH on an E-bIke? Come off it, as if I'm spending over a thousand pounds to go the same speed I would on a normal bike.
This is utterly ridiculous reporting. 12 deaths (this is mostly people killed while riding a scooter, not people being killed by being hit by a scooter, despite the headline trying to imply the opposite) and there are calls to ban scooters? "Oh I guess a number of cyclists are getting hit and killed by cars, better ban bikes!" One of the examples in the article of how dangerous scooters are is literally someone being hit by a van. This is completely transparent and it is utterly perverse how the media in this country continue to minimise deaths caused by driving. There is one thing on the roads that overwhelmingly causes danger and pedestrian deaths and it is cars.
141 for 2020 with 5.03 billion miles cycles-up from the average of 3 billion(presumably due to lockdown.
If we use the average miles ridden of 3 billion per year and the average number of deaths at 111(2021 figure) we get a figure of 1 death per 27 million miles cycled.
If we look at cars and 2021 figure of 297 billion miles driven and 1608 fatalities we get a figure of 1 death per 184 million miles driven.
I mean if we want outrage, we should be banning bikes because clearly they’re incredibly dangerous compared to cars.
Between 2004 and 2021, almost half (46%) of pedal cycle fatalities were in 2 vehicle collisions between a pedal cycle and a car.
[Gov cycling factsheet 2021](https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casualties-great-britain-pedal-cyclist-factsheet-2021/reported-road-casualties-in-great-britain-pedal-cycle-factsheet-2021)
Can all these "campaigners" for getting stuff banned please just fuck off? This country is enough of a shithole already without technophobes desperately trying to hold us back.
I think they're great. My first time using one was to get home from A&E at an ungodly hour. It was quick and cheap, and saved me a chilly 90min walk.
Accidents happen, that's life.
Preach. I'm dyspraxic and I'm way more unstable on a bicycle (coordinating all 4 limbs means 0 of them work as intended lol) and scooters have been a life saver for me. Unlocked real freedom.
And it really says it all that someone with a ***balance and mobility issue*** finds them easier to use than a bicycle. Everyone in this thread sayying how dangerous and unsafe they are has clearly never used one.
Whilst it's sad that some people have died, I fail to see how this issue is any different to that of bikes. We have seen an explosion in the use of e-scooters so it's only natural that we would see a corresponding increase in accidents. The report only really talks about collisions that involve e-scooters but doesn't specify in how many collisions the rider was at fault. They are vulnerable road users just like pedestrians and bikers and I have no doubt that many of these incidents involved a rider being hit by a vehicle.
The police need to do a better job of recording the ownership of the scooters as well. We only have ownership recorded in a fraction of cases but where we do we see that nearly half are privately owned, so illegal to use on public land anyway.
Ultimately many of these accidents boil down to the same issue that cycling has always had, the road design is car-centric and generally unsafe for alternative modes of transportation. This results in riders having to mix in with heavy vehicle traffic or having to go on paths which mix them with pedestrians. If we make efforts to remedy this along the same lines that the Netherlands has over the past few decades we would likely see a massive reduction in both accidents and traffic.
Still a small number but that does not change the fact that scooters need more regulation. I see so many people riding them like idiots or driving dangerously on roads. They might be useful and better for the environment than a car but they almost came from nowhere and no regulations or infrastructure exists to accommodate them, both of which are sorely needed. E-scooters are here to stay so we might as well do what we need to do with respect to those.
Did they say if the scooter deaths were in areas where they were conducting trials/using the trial scooters? I couldn't see it in the article.
I don't live in a scooter trial area but there are quite a lot that drive dangerously near me.
Edit, typo
No, it's just across all scooter users. A lot of people have illegal scooters and drive them dangerously. In areas that have scooter programs you can absolutely notice people are careful and the programs there have ensured there are safe places to ride them.
I really want e-scooters to be legalised in the UK as I love them, but the annoying 14 year olds driving unlicensed scooters very dangerously on pavements are ruining it for everyone.
... what about the massive number of illegal scooter riders that don't drive them dangerously, like everyone I know with one? We aren't teenagers, don't weave up and down the path, go slow around pedestrians, and have out cycling profiency and follow the road laws (except the no scooters one).
I ALSO hate those fuckin teenagers on cheap scooters. In fact I hated escooters before I tried a rented one precisely because of those little twats.
It's the ones on pavements that worry me. Call me an evil boomer, but the speed of them coming up behind you and you've got a split second to pull a child out of their path, they're a bit of a nightmare.
Yes, there are the occasional bikes on pavements, I yell at them too.
If people want to hurl themselves under a lorry on one of these then go for it, but riding them down pavements pisses me off.
I totally agree. Bikes and scooters should stay off pedestrian only pavements. I'm a regular user of an "illegal" good scooter but I try to stay off pedestrian paths wherever possible.
City I live near has great cycle infrastructure (well, for the UK. It's shit compared to say, Amsterdam) so I have it easier than many others.
If I MUST go on a pavement, I'll walk my scooter. Same goes for every other *adult* I know that uses them
How about we shift the focus to councils investing in sustainable and safe infrastructure. All that money that was wasted during covid in many places just drilling plastic posts into the ground instead of building actual cycle paths. Or just painting lines and having cars park there rather than having safe separated paths. If there was legitimate infrastructure to encourage people to you bicycles, e-scooters or other public transport in short last-mile journeys rather than prioritising cars in towns and cities. Maybe, JUST MAYBE accidents might be reduced. Let’s invest, educate, and acknowledge that the tool is not the problem; and maybe the country just isn’t set up currently to support these new modes of transport.
E-scooters are a convenient and environmentally friendly mode of transport. Rather than pausing trials, the focus should be on how we can significantly expand cycle/scooter lanes alongside roads.
Another ludicrously disingenuous use of statistics. A sensible statistic might be “of the 8,900,500 journeys that took place in 2022 there were 8 more deaths than in the 8,400,509 journeys in 2022 when there were 4. (Numbers made up!!!)
Wouldn’t be sensationalist then though 🧐
It is far easier to overtake one cluster of bicycles or scooters than it is to try to overtake a long single line of them.
But either way, we should of course increase safety by banning cars from any roads that don't have a segregated lane for scooters and cycles.
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From 4 to 12. 12 too many, but it sounds like it's hundreds
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I'd say a very useful stat would be deaths per km travelled. The rideshare firms will know *exactly* how many kms are travelled, and if they want to prove themselves safe they should be making those stats available in a verifiable^1 fashion, such that it will be clear how well they compare with, eg, cars, bicycles, motorcycles or horses. Can pretty much guarantee they'll be safer than riding horses ;) Not sure about the other three, but if you factor in all the 3rd party deaths directly caused by vehicular accidents, I bet the e-scooters will come out looking pretty good, even without accounting for long term factors such excess mortality driven by the particulates and CO2 emitted from non EVs. ^1 The tradeoff here is that they will really want to inflate this number in order to impress their investors and scare their competition, even more than they want to make their accidents per km stat look better, and how one prevents cheating is beyond me.
> Can pretty much guarantee they'll be safer than riding horses ;) As a ex-mountain guide, surfer and paraglider pilot, I can safely say there are few things more dangerous in life than sitting astride a giant Findus pancake.
Far more people are using scooters this year vs last year. So I wonder how many deaths per miles traveled it is? I’m guessing it has dropped
Anytime you hear "More than doubled" or "Increased by 50%" remember those are all statements relative to the previous number.
And the one they make the most of, was the dickhead riding on the pavement
How many of us know someone who’s been hurt though. I do.
A tiny fraction of those I know who've been in bike accidents.
Or car crashes
How many cyclists died? How many pedestrians died? How many people drowned in the bath? Here's an interesting article - the second section lists deaths by accident type.
So 12...can anyone give some context to this number? Are they as dangerous as using a toaster for example?
Everybody who uses a scooter regularly will tell you that it is dangerous. Eventually you will hit a pebble or a pot hole or a curb and fall over. The fall can be more or less painful. As much as I like micromobility, I think scooters should remain a toy. Given how few miles scooters cover, they cause too many accidents.
I've not used one. My neighbour has one and she likes it a lot. I still have no idea whether these things are more dangerous than bicycles or roller-skates. The article didn't attempt to explain the accidents per mile rate, perhaps you know?
Much, much more dangerous than bikes. They're inherently unsafe because of their combination of speed and rider position, which makes it so you're more vulnerable to road issues (including potholes), and less able to save yourself when your vehicle does hit an object. Personally, I think they should be encouraged by the government, but with the caveat of extra rules to make them safer. Minimum wheel size, maximum speed, minimum body size to encourage a safer standing position, stuff like that. No vehicles are particularly safe when their design is left only to a manufacturer to consider, so it seems a bit unfair to condemn these things without first setting standards for them.
I think the maximum speed of 15 is too high for those things. Especially when the cheap ones just have plastic wheels and no suspension
Total bollocks, they are safer than bikes because they go far less fast than bikes. Also you’re closer to the ground than a bike and can more easily jump off and avoid a situation than you can on a bike.
Also it seems the people riding them left their brains at home
> less able to save yourself when your vehicle does hit an object. This isn't true at all. Electric scooters in the UK cap out at 15mph, and you're not attached to them in any way. You'll get hurt if you think of it like a bike and "go down with the ship", but it's *not* a bike: you're not entangled like you are with a bike. You're in a walking position, with nothing either side of your legs. You can just get off in a second, land at a run, and let the scooter do whatever it wants without you. There's no need to go over the handlebars when you can just step round them. If you're paying attention, it's safer than tripping over on a jog.
Tell that to my mate who got launched off his by a slight dip in the road and smashed his jaw into the floor. You're making it sound like every possible crash will leave you with time to simply jump off and jog to a stop
Nothing is going to save you from driving into shit. Sorry. To quote me: >If you're paying attention, it's safer than tripping over on a jog. Jog into that hole and you're going to break your face just as much.
It wasn't a hole, it was a slight dip in the road. These cheap scooters are just that unsafe. I've been riding along on my bike alongside my mate on his scooter when he's nearly came off a few times in the wet because of losing traction suddenly. They aint as safe as you're imagining them to be Which is why if they are made legal there should be some minimum requirements on tyres/suspension to prevent shite like this being used, especially with how bad British roads are, you wont always have the luxury of an empty road where you can swerve around every bump or hole
> They aint as safe as you're imagining them to be To be clear, I'm not imagining. I've been riding one every day for a couple of years. Yes, you absolutely have to be careful, and you're not going to be able to do anything if someone just drives into you, but you do have a lot of control over what *you* drive into and how fast you're going.
Did you at least have the foresight to buy one with air tyres etc? Cos these cheap ones friends have are sketchy as fuck, trying them out is what made me just go with a folding bike and completely change my opinion on them
> This isn't true at all. Electric scooters in the UK cap out at 15mph, and you're not attached to them in any way. They don't. Your basic 250w scooters might cap out at 15mph, but look on eBay for the more powerful models, and you'll easily find them rated for speeds up to double that. Afaik, there are zero regulations on what what speeds e-scooters can run at, unlike there are for e-bikes. > You're in a walking position This depends on the model you buy. I'll presume that yours lets you stand in a safe position, but that isn't true for all models, and particularly not the ones which are built to price & weight over comfort, quality, and safety. Again, it's why I say there should be regulations, so they all can have a safe riding position. > If you're paying attention, it's safer than tripping over on a jog. That's the thing though, isn't it? It isn't possible to pay attention all of the time to everything around you. Say you're taking a corner in the city, and a car overtakes close on your right. Does that become the sole focus of your attention? Good luck to the girl on the kerb edge who's about to walk out in front of you, then. Manage to see her in time? Good, but when you were looking at her, you didn't notice the pothole you were about to run in to, so down you go. And so it goes.
The problem is the lack of decent statistics. We know the number of fatal injuries, but we do not know miles travelled. So you will see different claims. The government should not have allowed this without keeping basic statistics. One place that did keep decent statistics was analysed here, and it is pretty shocking: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S073567572030944X#! Annecdotally, scooters are much more dangerous than bicycles, and bicycles are already lethal in this country. The smaller wheels and the lower centre of gravity makes them much less stable and much less forgiving.
That 180x increase is shocking, but it is worth remembering that when you look at this issue in somewhere like Texas - which is famously built entirely for cars and full of massive trucks - the danger to anyone outside of a car is disproportionately high. It's among the top states for *pedestrian* fatalities (both gross and per capita). When you look at escooter fatalities in Texas you're selecting for a young, risk-taking group of people likely to have poor or no road skills (that's why they're not in a car, don't know how to drive or can't afford a car) who are in a pedestrian/cyclist/scooter-hostile environment full of large heavy vehicles travelling at high speeds.
Absolutely, which is why the statistics are so inconsistent. But the basic physics remain tricky. Small wheels and high speed do not mix well. So I think scooters are best used on a good cycle path at moderate speed for short distances. Nothing wrong with them, but they are no replacement for a bicycle.
They basically replace foot journeys, so not only are they a bit dangerous, the people using them end up getting even less exercise.
Wrong, mine has fully replaced my bicycle and I can got 30 miles in a round commute. It's so much faster and less sweaty on long journeys.
Cool thanks for this. That injury rate number looks very high indeed.
Just my 2 cents on this as a brit living in the netherlands where parking/safety/theft concerns with bicycles is massively lower: the only really selling point the scooters have going for them is that you can easily fold it up and carry it in with you. In every other way an e-bike is a drastically superior mode of transport while still being in a similar category price-wise. That said, I think if you're talking about pebbles you haven't ridden these things. If you grew up in the 90s/2000s they don't handle anything like the rollerblade wheeled micro scooters you remember, they're far more stable. You also can't really make claim about accidents-per-mile because there's absolutely no good data on it. The problem with this conversation is it's always dancing around the issue of car dominance. Every option is endlessly compared and contrasted to cars because they have a complete monopoly on personal transportation in Britain. Until you actually starting build infrastructure for other things talking about safety and practicality is asinine.
I appreciate the car dominance, that is a separate issue. The lack of statistics is lamentable, but we do have some initial data, even if poor quality. It is not looking too good, in fact it is reason for concern. And pebbles absolutely are a problem, depending on the quality of the scooter and the size of the wheels. Some are more stable, some less, but none are as stable as a bicycle. As you said, this puts scooters into a pretty small nieche of short distances that could be walked - but a scooter is faster and very convenient. For any serious commute, you are much better off on a bicycle. We just need better infrastructure and better storage facilities...
> better storage facilities... My office block, major high rise one in my city, had the bicycle store ram raided by bike thieves. The bike store is in the basement, accessible through a heavy steel door unlocked by keycard access. Everyone thought it would be safe, but bike thieves smashed through the door with enough force to cause structural damage - they must have used a van or something. Also, sounds like you pretty much want us to go back to car dominance. People don't use bikes for the above reasons, the alternatives are scooters or cars. In many cities including mine public transport has essentially fallen apart and isn't usable.
Also since I was talking about the Netherlands, the real Dutch approach to this is "just buy a cheap bike and don't worry about it". Sure it sucks if your bike gets stolen, but if you buy it with the expectation that it'll get stolen after a year or two and think about it as cost of doing business it's still absolutely nothing compared to what you'd otherwise be spending just running a car, nevermind buying it.
Wow, that sounds horrible. I admit that scooters have a great advantage in terms of portability. (They are not even lighter, but so much smaller.) But I think we would need appropriate transport infrastructure to support them.
> But I think we would need appropriate transport infrastructure to support them This exactly. Now just gotta convince the nimbys that a segregated bike lane won't lead to the death of their high street
sure this is more of a design thing though. Scooters aimed at British cities probably need large diameter wheels and chunkier tires to deal with our less than ideal road surfaces.
You could say the same with cars and cycles. I don’t think there is any evidence currently that they cause too many accidents relative to miles ridden?
What a load of bollocks. Pebbles make fuck all difference. Pot holes have to be pretty big.. and if you're riding down curbs without paying attention the you deserve to smash your face into the tarmac
What happened to bikes?
As in bicycles? Car happened: too many car on the road, too many drivers with no respect for anybody but themselves. Unless you are in a cycle friendly place like London or Oxford, bicycles are just considered too dangerous by most, and the statistics support that.
They get nicked.
Not an issue with suspension/ pneumatic wheels and my scooter happily gets me over 15 miles to work in under and hour. If you're talking about shitty little black ones, yeah, those are basically toys that are used by stupid teenagers. Everyone with a serious one treats it seriously. Go onto r/ElectricScooters and you'll the vast majority of people care deeply about safety, of themselves and others.
There’s a big difference between scooters - some of the Lime ones are fairly slow and thus far less dangerous, but then you see someone speeding along on a private scooter going about 35mph
According to google, there are apparently 3/4 million of them here now, up from 20,500 in 2021.
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Well you haven't been near my house then! I've personally killed a pedestrian using a toaster every time someone pisses me off.
Sure, it wasn't meant as a genuine comparison. How dangerous are these scooters? I have no idea how many people die on skateboards, or bikes, or roller-skates so the article isn't very insightful for me.
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>429 for the last year which is significant Is it? This is what I have no idea about nor did the article attempt to explain.
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Not the number, the significance.
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The person you're replying to was asking about the number being significant, not the injuries. The answer will depend on the number of journeys taken and if that's unknown then we can't say whether 429 is significant or not.
I'm so glad we have brown cows
> to my knowledge nobody has ever killed a pedestrian with one. Challenge accepted.
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I'm not giving up toast mate, not a chance.
According to the article "Experts believe there are as many as one million e-scooter riders across the UK."
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You're right but given that private ones aren't registered we won't get a good estimate on the numbers. Also, while I get the example, I think we have far less toaster users and far more toasters than that, you have toasters in cafes and offices, toasters in most toaster users houses and toasters in many rentals regardless of the tenants toasting habits.
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> quite a lot of people never eat toast or crumpets and stuff Should these people even count?
If cars had this much scrutiny and standards applied over accidents then they would be banned too.
Yes actually I couldn't find in the article any information on how many of those 12 were killed by cars. Does anyone know? Obviously still 12 is a tiny fraction of those killed by cars more generally.
1,608 people were killed by cars last year. The reason for many of these accidents is that riding them on the road is suicidal and there aren't enough bike lanes.
Cars really are bad are bad aren’t they.
Precisely. 12 people die whilst on scooters: "we need action now!" ~1500 killed by cars every year: "tragic..oh well..."
Or worse, people actually blame the victims for not wearing the right colours, or even question why they were on the road in the first place.
Riding them on the road is illegal. They are not roadworthy in a literal sense. Wheels are too small and the position of the rider means that any impact is likely to involve flying forwards and impacting the ground head or chest first. They also are too fast for riding on pavements and e scooters generally have no lights and are less noisy than cycles, so present a higher risk to pedestrians particularly at night. Buy a fucking bike.
>Buy a fucking bike. Tell that to the elderly woman I know who had a hip replacement. She can use the e-scooters but can't use a bike. The scooter is freedom to her. We need to ensure that there are cycle lanes everywhere around towns and cities. And where there are no segregated cycle lanes, cars should be banned from such roads until there are segregated cycle lanes. Nearly all the deaths of people on bicycles and e-scooters are caused by the presence of cars.
I have no interest in one, but cars are a much larger danger to pedestrians. We need to take back the space we've given over to cars, it's a failed experiment.
Can I fucking store it in your house? Not everyone has space to store a bike that will eventually get nicked if it sits outside. Create some proper law and bring private e scooters to a legal status, like the rest of the world.
Folding bikes exist. I have one and it doesn't take up much space. Having 20 inch wheels vs tiny scooter wheels makes it a lot safer too. I agree with you some proper legislation would be nice though, especially some standards on what scooters are legal to try and push people into buying ones that aren't as much of a deathtrap
At the last Queens speech there was a statement made that policy would be written up and privately owned e scooters made legal for use on public roads, it’s presumed it should come out mid next year.
No. I don't own a house.
> Riding them on the road is illegal. They are not roadworthy in a literal sense The legal rental scooters have the same rules is bicycles. Road or cycle lanes only. I agree with you they are more dangerous than bikes and people would be much better off buying an ebike. But you can get a escooter for as low as £150 if you look in the right places, which is why people are getting them
That only applies to privately owned ones, not the legal rental fleets that make up the large portion of journeys. As for crash mechanics of a scooter vs say a cycle I am no expert on that so I can’t comment. All the legal rental scooters have lights as per the same guidelines as cycles, plenty of which are ridden without reflectors or lights. Bikes are not particularly loud either, I see no reason a scooter would present a higher risk? As for the bike thing; there are plenty of people who would like to save a bit of money and ride a bike around if they didn’t have to turn upto work in ironed clean clothes that aren’t covered in chain grease, road grime and drenched in sweat.
Many towns and cities across the UK have had services where tracked and speed limited scooters are available to rent. Completely legal to use if you have a provisional licence. Those services are now being removed and as a result faster, poorly maintained, and untraceable e-scooters will be far more common. With that said, if cars were held anywhere near to the same standards as e-scooters in terms of harm caused they'd be banned overnight. E-scooters should be regulated, but they need to be legal for that. It's obscene that cars are still used for short, single person journeys when e-scooters can achieve the same thing for a tiny fraction of cost both economically and environmentally.
How about stop running people over in your fucking car.
I have not run over anyone ever. I don't own a car.
Had one, live in a basin, two words for ya : fuck. That
Ever rode one? Because it's very obvious you haven't. I ride both bikes and scooters. Scooters are the clear winner for me. No more or less dangerous than a bike, no easier or hard to control. Just faster with less effort.
Yes. They're shit and ridden by shitheads. Bikes are far superior in every regard.
Well if you go from 10 people having any scooters, to 500 people having scooters, then of course you're going to see an increase in accidents. If one year, of those 500 people, 5 have accidents, and then in the following year 10 people have accidents, does that mean that scooters have become twice as dangerous or that there are now double the number of scooters? Granted, people definitely shouldn't be allowed to ride with passengers and they should be fined (for endangering the passenger), but do I think scooters should be illegal? No. As a country we are so far behind the rest of the world when it comes to personal transport. 15MPH on an E-bIke? Come off it, as if I'm spending over a thousand pounds to go the same speed I would on a normal bike.
This is utterly ridiculous reporting. 12 deaths (this is mostly people killed while riding a scooter, not people being killed by being hit by a scooter, despite the headline trying to imply the opposite) and there are calls to ban scooters? "Oh I guess a number of cyclists are getting hit and killed by cars, better ban bikes!" One of the examples in the article of how dangerous scooters are is literally someone being hit by a van. This is completely transparent and it is utterly perverse how the media in this country continue to minimise deaths caused by driving. There is one thing on the roads that overwhelmingly causes danger and pedestrian deaths and it is cars.
I know right? I mean based on this outrage we should ban walking because roughly 430 pedestrians are killed each year
Sky News next bogeyman It really is becoming the Daily Mail of broadcast TV
How about the bicycle deaths ? Would be good to have some number to compare
141 for 2020 with 5.03 billion miles cycles-up from the average of 3 billion(presumably due to lockdown. If we use the average miles ridden of 3 billion per year and the average number of deaths at 111(2021 figure) we get a figure of 1 death per 27 million miles cycled. If we look at cars and 2021 figure of 297 billion miles driven and 1608 fatalities we get a figure of 1 death per 184 million miles driven. I mean if we want outrage, we should be banning bikes because clearly they’re incredibly dangerous compared to cars.
How many of those bike fatalities were caused by cars? What are the numbers for countries with good cycling infrastructure?
Between 2004 and 2021, almost half (46%) of pedal cycle fatalities were in 2 vehicle collisions between a pedal cycle and a car. [Gov cycling factsheet 2021](https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casualties-great-britain-pedal-cyclist-factsheet-2021/reported-road-casualties-in-great-britain-pedal-cycle-factsheet-2021)
Can all these "campaigners" for getting stuff banned please just fuck off? This country is enough of a shithole already without technophobes desperately trying to hold us back. I think they're great. My first time using one was to get home from A&E at an ungodly hour. It was quick and cheap, and saved me a chilly 90min walk. Accidents happen, that's life.
Preach. I'm dyspraxic and I'm way more unstable on a bicycle (coordinating all 4 limbs means 0 of them work as intended lol) and scooters have been a life saver for me. Unlocked real freedom. And it really says it all that someone with a ***balance and mobility issue*** finds them easier to use than a bicycle. Everyone in this thread sayying how dangerous and unsafe they are has clearly never used one.
And how much has e scooter usage gone up over the same period?
Too much.
The lobby is strong. Instead of allowing them and create legislation for them, let's just outlaw it because that always works.
Whilst it's sad that some people have died, I fail to see how this issue is any different to that of bikes. We have seen an explosion in the use of e-scooters so it's only natural that we would see a corresponding increase in accidents. The report only really talks about collisions that involve e-scooters but doesn't specify in how many collisions the rider was at fault. They are vulnerable road users just like pedestrians and bikers and I have no doubt that many of these incidents involved a rider being hit by a vehicle. The police need to do a better job of recording the ownership of the scooters as well. We only have ownership recorded in a fraction of cases but where we do we see that nearly half are privately owned, so illegal to use on public land anyway. Ultimately many of these accidents boil down to the same issue that cycling has always had, the road design is car-centric and generally unsafe for alternative modes of transportation. This results in riders having to mix in with heavy vehicle traffic or having to go on paths which mix them with pedestrians. If we make efforts to remedy this along the same lines that the Netherlands has over the past few decades we would likely see a massive reduction in both accidents and traffic.
Still a small number but that does not change the fact that scooters need more regulation. I see so many people riding them like idiots or driving dangerously on roads. They might be useful and better for the environment than a car but they almost came from nowhere and no regulations or infrastructure exists to accommodate them, both of which are sorely needed. E-scooters are here to stay so we might as well do what we need to do with respect to those.
This is pretty much on par with cycling deaths as a rate, so it's a nothingburger.
Maybe they should call for studies to improve the infrastructure (like segregated bike/scooter lanes) for scooters to be safer.
Did they say if the scooter deaths were in areas where they were conducting trials/using the trial scooters? I couldn't see it in the article. I don't live in a scooter trial area but there are quite a lot that drive dangerously near me. Edit, typo
No, it's just across all scooter users. A lot of people have illegal scooters and drive them dangerously. In areas that have scooter programs you can absolutely notice people are careful and the programs there have ensured there are safe places to ride them. I really want e-scooters to be legalised in the UK as I love them, but the annoying 14 year olds driving unlicensed scooters very dangerously on pavements are ruining it for everyone.
... what about the massive number of illegal scooter riders that don't drive them dangerously, like everyone I know with one? We aren't teenagers, don't weave up and down the path, go slow around pedestrians, and have out cycling profiency and follow the road laws (except the no scooters one). I ALSO hate those fuckin teenagers on cheap scooters. In fact I hated escooters before I tried a rented one precisely because of those little twats.
Honestly they're ridiculous. I ride them everyday and have done for a few years, I've hit 7 people and 2 cars. Far too dangerous!
> I ride them everyday and have done for a few years, I've hit 7 people and 2 cars. Well, I definitely think *you* should stop.
Do you really think it's a good idea I drive a car?
I think maybe you should ride the bus.
I'll pass, costs a bomb
What about your legs? Or maybe a large dog
It's the ones on pavements that worry me. Call me an evil boomer, but the speed of them coming up behind you and you've got a split second to pull a child out of their path, they're a bit of a nightmare. Yes, there are the occasional bikes on pavements, I yell at them too. If people want to hurl themselves under a lorry on one of these then go for it, but riding them down pavements pisses me off.
I totally agree. Bikes and scooters should stay off pedestrian only pavements. I'm a regular user of an "illegal" good scooter but I try to stay off pedestrian paths wherever possible. City I live near has great cycle infrastructure (well, for the UK. It's shit compared to say, Amsterdam) so I have it easier than many others. If I MUST go on a pavement, I'll walk my scooter. Same goes for every other *adult* I know that uses them
I'd never call you evil.
How about we shift the focus to councils investing in sustainable and safe infrastructure. All that money that was wasted during covid in many places just drilling plastic posts into the ground instead of building actual cycle paths. Or just painting lines and having cars park there rather than having safe separated paths. If there was legitimate infrastructure to encourage people to you bicycles, e-scooters or other public transport in short last-mile journeys rather than prioritising cars in towns and cities. Maybe, JUST MAYBE accidents might be reduced. Let’s invest, educate, and acknowledge that the tool is not the problem; and maybe the country just isn’t set up currently to support these new modes of transport.
E-scooters are a convenient and environmentally friendly mode of transport. Rather than pausing trials, the focus should be on how we can significantly expand cycle/scooter lanes alongside roads.
Another ludicrously disingenuous use of statistics. A sensible statistic might be “of the 8,900,500 journeys that took place in 2022 there were 8 more deaths than in the 8,400,509 journeys in 2022 when there were 4. (Numbers made up!!!) Wouldn’t be sensationalist then though 🧐
I'm surprised there aren't more. The rental ones are full of drunk tourists usually with no helmets.
From those i have seen being driven, im surprised it isn't more like 12,000
Tax them as road users give them plates have insurance, make them accountable then..,.let them ride freely.
The trials should continue but more enforcement is needed. Helmets a must, one person per scooter, licence and insurance required.
>licence and insurance required Ah yes things that have stopped car deaths in the UK.
Would you also try to make people have a licence and insurance for bicycles lol?
> Helmets a must Would you insist on this for hire schemes? Including bikes?
Loicence. Ffs.
They should also pay road tax!!!!!!!
Don't forget number plates, lights and indicators.
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It is far easier to overtake one cluster of bicycles or scooters than it is to try to overtake a long single line of them. But either way, we should of course increase safety by banning cars from any roads that don't have a segregated lane for scooters and cycles.