Shared e-scooter rider safety behaviour and injury outcomes: a review of studies in the United States

Abstract

Electric scooters (e-scooters) have proliferated throughout North American cities in the past five years, with about 60 million shared e-scooter trips taken in 2021. That growth has resulted in safety and injury prevention challenges, and much of the regulatory approach has been to limit e-scooter use through technological or behavioural interventions. The past few years have yielded a patchwork of regulations based on a diversity of published safety and injury studies, including work on injury burden (e.g. hospitalisation studies), direct observation, rider surveys, or traffic crash (e.g. police-reported crash) analysis. This review draws from disparate studies to develop systematic policy conclusions related primarily to rider safety behaviour and associated injury outcomes, particularly severe injuries. This work focuses on perceived safety, demographics of scooter riders, injury trends of riders, temporal and spatial correlates of shared e-scooter rider injuries and contributing factors like roadway design, impairment, and helmets. While this review focuses on studies that occurred in the United States, some findings transfer elsewhere. The sum of the literature points to the importance of enhanced and maintained infrastructure to improve rider behaviour, predictability, and perceived safety, and increases in driver and e-scooter user education and enforcement to reduce violations and impairment.