An ecological, practical and economical alternative for getting around town… riding an electric scooter can also be very dangerous. A French study published on June 30 in JAMA Network Open reveals that electric scooter accidents can cause injuries as severe as those involving motorcycles or bicycles.
This mode of so-called “soft” mobility has been very successful in recent years. According to the Federation of Micromobility Professionals (FPMM), the number of regular users is estimated at 2.5 million in France. In 2022, more than 750,000 electric scooters were sold, after a record 900,000 sales the previous year. And the arrival of self-service operators in several cities in France has boosted this enthusiasm.
Until now, there has been no large-scale photography of the severity of injuries following an accident with a motorized personal transport device (PMPD), in particular the scooter. It’s done now. A team of researchers from AP-HP, Sorbonne Universities and Inserm relied on data from the French major trauma observatory (Traumabase), created in 2011, which brings together twenty-six trauma centers distributed throughout France. The work was coordinated by Doctor Arthur James and Professor Mathieu Raux, both intensive care anesthesiologists at Pitié-Salpêtrière (AP-HP).
All patients admitted to one of these centers for a road accident involving a scooter, bicycle or motorcycle between 1er January 2019 and December 20, 2022, i.e. 5,283 people were included in the study. Those hospitalized after a scooter accident (229) are certainly much less numerous than those riding a motorcycle (4,094) or bicycle (910), but their number has increased considerably. Between 2019 and 2022, serious scooter accidents jumped by 184%, from 31 to 88, while those on bicycles increased by 24% and those on motorcycles decreased by 12%.
“But what surprised us was the severity of the lesions”recognizes Mathieu Raux: 45.5% of scooter accident patients had serious trauma (defined by an injury severity score – ISS, for injury severity score – greater than or equal to 16), more than motorbike drivers (39.7%) and equivalent to cyclists (47.3%).
More worryingly, they were twice as likely (25.9%) as motorcyclists to have severe traumatic brain injury (assessed by the Glasgow Coma Scale, which consists of testing three parameters: eye opening, verbal response and motor response). “It’s totally counter-intuitive, because we say to ourselves that, on a scooter, the speed is rather moderate. In reality, at 20 km/h, we are already driving very fast. And it is a mode of transport that does not protect”, insists Arthur James. In 9% of cases, scooter patients died, mostly due to severe head trauma (10% for cyclists and 5.2% for motorcyclists).
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