For starters, these aren’t the scooters you rode as a kid; powered only by whichever leg you decided to push with until you were fortunate enough to come to a nice, exciting downhill street. These scooters have small but fairly powerful electric motors on the rear wheel, capable of driving a scooter at 30 miles per hour or more. That said, most scooter companies limit the speed of their scooters to 12 to 15 miles per hour, which apparently is plenty of speed to get scooter renters in trouble.
Numerous studies show that scooter-related injuries skyrocketed between 2014 and 2018. It is worth noting that there were no scooter rental operations before 2017, and the dramatic increase in accidents and injuries occurred mostly from 2017 to 2018. One study found that scooter injuries went from just over 8,000 in 2017 to 14,651 in 2018, an 83 percent increase.
Last year, in an attempt to gather local data, the city asked local hospitals to provide information on scooter injuries. While no formal data compilations are available yet, Grady Memorial Hospital, the largest in Georgia, has estimated that it sees from 80 to 100 injuries from scooter accidents every month. Those injuries have included serious head injuries and broken bones.
In fewer than four months, Atlanta saw four fatalities of scooter riders, apparently the only city with that many fatalities. The fourth death came just as the city imposed the nighttime ban on scooter-riding. It is not clear whether drivers had difficulty seeing the scooter riders, or if the scooter riders weren’t paying enough attention to vehicular traffic. What is clear, on the other hand, is that the negligence of drivers is capable of causing extremely serious crashes that often leave victims with severe injuries.
