The Dark Side of E-Scooters and E-Bikes
Serious injuries soar among kids without helmets and drunken adults in a nation ill-suited for the surge in micro-mobility
On a gorgeous fall day more than two years ago, my wife hopped on an electric scooter to zip breezily along busy suburban streets and across an overpass from our community to a strip mall to get her hair done. She didn’t don a helmet, for reasons you might guess. She smiled at me as she headed off, her hair flowing behind her in what I should have recognized as an omen.
About 30 minutes later, I got a call from a good samaritan, who was at the scene and was wondering if I was the husband. My wife was on her way to the ER, oblivious to what had happened to her but somehow able to give the bystander my phone number. That’s all the caller knew. At first, I thought it was a prank call. Then I had to guess which hospital the ambulance might’ve taken a trauma patient to. I finally found her a couple hours later, on a bloodied hospital bed, just after her CT scan. She was a mess, her face all bruised and puffy, her undone black hair matted red, her mind all goofy from the concussion.
Her accident was part of an explosion in debilitating and deadly crashes among US children and adults involving electric micro-mobility vehicles —…
