Rolling Trouble: How Dangerous Are E-Scooters, Exactly?

This story was featured in the May issue of Vancouver magazine. Get your free print subscription here to have future editions delivered right to your door.

The e-scooter rider glides through Vancouver’s streets on a platform little wider than a balance beam, standing bolt upright with the same distribution of mass as a bowling pin. They navigate roadways meant for vehicles that weigh two hundred times as much as theirs. They are also, often, drunk.

Defiant, the e-scooter rider arches their back into the wind as if to deny any fear of oncoming traffic. That traffic, as it turns out, is the far more anxious side of the equation.

“The increased risk arises from the pure physics of the e-scooter itself,” says Brandon Yau, medical health officer for Vancouver Coastal Health. “As a clinician, and as a person moving through the city, I’ve definitely seen the reasons to be concerned.”

So have most Canadians. As reported by the Canadian Institute for Health Information, Canada saw a 32 percent increase in e-scooter related injuries between the 2023 and 2024 reporting periods, reaching almost 1,000 total injuries. For riders five to 17 years old, that increase in injuries was 61 percent.

Yes, that’s riders as young as five years old—while technically against B.C. regulations, it’s still relatively easy for a person under 16 to acquire and ride an e-scooter through Vancouver streets. Shared e-scooters may require a credit card, but privately owned scooters respond to anyone who boards them.

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It’s all putting drivers, more than e-scooter riders themselves, ill at ease. One recent study from the University of Illinois shows that e-scooter riders can have incredibly relaxed attitudes about their own safety on the road—and that’s especially true of those who have little experience with driving an automobile themselves. Drivers, meanwhile, are increasingly white-knuckling their way down small or even main roads, actively worried about the increasing number of stiff, vulnerable bodies vertical-planking their way through the streets.

“The upright stance is sort of an awkward position,” says Yau. “There is some evidence that because of their smaller wheel size, e-scooters are inherently less stable than vehicles with larger wheels.”

In terms of pure injuries, the global data is conflicted. There’s one high-profile paper from the Journal of Safety  Research showing that e-scooters are as much as 10 times less likely to cause hospitalization than similarly powered e-bikes. On the other hand, there’s an even more recent paper from Scientific Reports showing fewer, lesser injuries for bikes and concluding that riding an e-scooter “very likely poses a higher risk for injuries than cycling.”

Still, the research is clear on one issue. No matter where you look, it’s apparent that the easy step-on nature of an e-scooter is perfect for one quintessentially Canadian demographic: the drunk. Virtually all research that has looked for an association between alcohol and e-scooters has found one; according to one study from 2024, powered scooter injuries had the highest association with alcohol use out of all methods of transportation.

Another study from 2022 found that “compared with patients in bicycle accidents, facial fracture patients injured in e-scooter accidents are younger, are more likely under the influence of alcohol, and sustain more severe craniofacial skeleton fractures.”

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Kelowna was the first B.C. municipality to introduce e-scooter rental services, where UBC Okanagan professor of civil engineering and Kelowna city councillor Gordon Lovegrove saw the problems firsthand. “People were using them for partying, stunting, doubling- or tripling-up,” Lovegrove says. “People were using them in ways that we never saw coming. And then, the emergency room doctors started screaming.

“It was an absolute gong show, initially… Blindsided is probably not too strong a word.”

It’s not all doom and gloom, though. Beyond the surface level, both global and local examples can actually provide some hope that the situation can be, and will be, improved.

For one thing, it’s notable that the worrying 32 percent increase in injuries was Canada-wide, while in B.C. alone that figure was a comparatively low 5 percent.

Why would B.C. see such a better outcome? “My hypothesis,” says Yau, “is that B.C. is a bit lower because we were earlier to adopt this technology than other places. B.C. is just ahead of the curve.”

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In that way of thinking, B.C. passed through its own e-scooter growing pains before there was much detailed record-keeping. A wave of increased injuries could be unavoidable as more e-scooters hit the roads, but it could also be finite in magnitude as experience rises among riders and riding infrastructure expands in communities.

If true, we would expect to see that as evident in areas with early adoption. Indeed, while Kelowna doctors did sound the alarm initially,  Lovegrove says that fever pitch then died down as e-scooters got wider and more diverse adoption. “It’s amazing what happened, overnight,” he says. “I’ve seen people in suits riding scooters, kids, parents… even my church pastor uses one.”

The key, Lovegrove believes, has been the simple impact of continued familiarity over time, and the adaptation of municipal regulations to the new normal. “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” he says.

“We have to come to grips with this, to reduce the risk.”

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Thankfully, the often-dour body of transportation injury research does seem to agree, even suggesting some paths forward. On the one hand, Canadians have absolutely no appetite for enforcement of e-scooter regulations via the police—but, on the other, research shows that regulation can play an important role.

Restrictions on minimum ages, maximum speeds or maximum e-scooter weights can have a big impact, but only if they can be enforced; the majority of methods of control apply to the scooter itself, making privately owned scooters much harder to restrict than rented ones. Beyond fraudulent direct shipping from countries like China, most Vancouverites are aware of how easily a single drive down to Seattle can circumnavigate an import tariff or mild restriction.

Given the proliferation of privately owned scooters, the more impactful regulations could likely be those focused on the sort of community infrastructure that naturally applies to all e-scooters, all the time.

One major study tried to correlate rider attitudes with injuries, finding that city riding infrastructure, in particular separated bike lanes, can have a major impact on awareness of the road. This finding was mirrored in the experiences of Kelowna and Vancouver; both Yau and Lovegrove note that keeping e-scooters in bike lanes would reduce conflict with motor vehicles, one of the primary determinants of serious injury for scooter riders.

“Ensuring these devices are only capable of travelling at the speeds outlined in the provincial guidelines—a maximum speed capability of 25 kilometres per hour—is critically important,” Yau says.

Wave of injuries or no, e-scooters and all other so-called “micromobility” vehicles are here to stay— especially since B.C. seems to have crested its own wave already. In all likelihood, the only way for drivers to limit their anxieties about e-scooters is to resign themselves to the simple flow of time. It takes time for drivers to adjust to e-scooter riders, just as it takes time for those e-scooter riders themselves to adjust to the road.

That makes the real question not whether e-scooters will ever become safe but when, and how many scooting church pastors might take a tumble along the way.