“With great power comes great responsibility.” I never imagined I’d be able to tie in a quote from the amazing Spider-Man to an issue around road safety. But the startling rise in collisions and injuries in relation to electric scooters on our roads make those words of advice from Uncle Ben to fledgling superhero Peter Parker, aka Spider-Man, ring true.
The responsibility concept, or actually the lack of it, around e-scooter use was shown in spades last week via dashcam footage capturing a man riding one of these contraptions in the middle of Highway 1 through Burnaby.
I can’t actually decide what was the worst part of those few unbelievable moments. It would have been bad enough if the rider was zipping along on the shoulder of this five-lane stretch of overcrowded highway. No, this guy was negotiating his way on the white line between the left-hand fast lane and HOV lane — clearly proving that Darwin’s theory of natural selection is still very much in play in modern society.
These types of moments are not making our emergency room doctors very happy, understandably.
Montreal health authorities issued a public alert in early July, warning about the rise of e-scooter injuries showing up at emergency rooms.
Media nationwide are also reporting a significant rise in e-scooter-related injuries — and it’s way more than skinned knees or elbows. Toronto doctors cited the need to activate specialized trauma teams to deal with severe injuries like “destroyed ankles,” rib fractures and internal brain bleeds. Some of these emergency room visits have involved children as young as 5.
Last May, in response, the City of Toronto moved to extend a ban on e-scooters citing a need for better, more comprehensive, provincial legislation.
This June a youth in Kelowna was rushed to hospital in critical condition after falling from her e-scooter. It’s unknown if she was wearing a helmet but they are mandatory for e-scooter riding in B.C. Regrettably, the culture around their use seems more focused on “riding free” and having fun, ignoring the fact that these devices are capable of moving as quickly as cars in urban environments.
According to Toronto media sources, emergency room doctor Blair Bigham warned that: “[e-scooter] users really need to pause and think about how fast they’re travelling in just pure concrete environments and how, you know, the human body [is] against concrete at a high speed. It’s just a disaster.”
In B.C., Kelowna authorities have also found troubling trends in the amount of alcohol use by e-scooter riders at the same time the legal requirement to use helmets is often ignored. Kelowna Mounties have issued 109 citations for e-bike and e-scooter violations since July 1st.
Echoing those concerns at a wider level is a recent study by the University of California San Francisco, showing e-scooter and e-bike injuries are soaring, nearly doubling each year from 2017 to 2022. In 2022 in the U.S., 56,847 people were injured using e-scooters, 6,317 of those incidents requiring hospitalization.
The legal processes throughout the country are unfortunately just not able to move beyond their glacial pace in dealing with these rapid changes in urban commuting. This, coupled with already overburdened law enforcement capacity doesn’t bode well for changing the trends.
Hospital space is one of the most precious commodities for our communities these days. Filling beds with severe injuries which could well have been prevented by taking simple precautions, like wearing helmets, protective padding and staying sober while zipping around on these gadgets seems like basic common sense to me.
Unfortunately there’s a real gap right now in exactly what Uncle Ben warned Peter Parker about: E-commuters have more power than they’ve ever had on our roads. It’s time to take more responsibility.
Glove Box: I imagine that the job of reviewing traffic camera images can be tedious at times. But I wonder what went through the mind of the tech who processed a video of a vehicle with a dog behind the wheel — yet a highway speed camera in Slovakia showed exactly that. Police tracked the owner down who claimed that his canine pal had suddenly jumped into his lap. Unfortunately for him, because police use video, rather than still image photo technology in their speed capturing process, they were able to show there were no sudden movements by “Havino” the dog as the car passed by. The driver was fined for speeding and failing to secure his pet. There may be some mitigation in this case though. Havino was apparently “staring intently” at the road ahead. Thank goodness.
