Electric scooters are causing injuries and accidents
I&#x27;d like to know some estimate of the rate of disabling or deadly accidents per mile ridden to appreciate the scale of the problem.<p>The lack of gear and training probably makes accidents worse than they would be. But how frequently and how severe?<p>&gt; &quot;Some of these injuries have been life-threatening; others have left people permanently disabled.&quot;<p>How many does &quot;some&quot; represent here? Definitely some fraction of the total injuries, which &quot;could be as high as 1,000 per month.&quot;<p>Why &quot;could be?&quot; How uncertain is that figure and what other reasonable estimates of injury rates are there??<p>On the one hand, the &quot;vast majority end up getting discharged with cuts and scrapes,&quot; but on the other hand, &quot;some people may need lifelong care.&quot;<p>How many? And why are you hedging with &quot;may?&quot;<p>There are some specific numbers in the article-- but they are for individual emergency rooms, without the additional context necessary to extrapolate from that ER over any large regions. And then the information from different ERs ranges so widely as to appear to contradict each other.<p>I left the article with two takeaways:<p>1) I assume this is a very real problem.<p>2) I hate how we reward nonspecificity and anecdotal evidence in journalism. The problem&#x27;s serious enough to at least take a shot at metrics that would help us to compare it to other social problems, like motorcycle or car or pedestrian injuries.