E-Bike and E-Scooter Accidents Are Skyrocketing Among Children
Time · Veronique Greenwood ·
Doctors are seeing an exponential rise in pediatric injuries from e-bikes and scooters.
Recently, Dr. Alan Schroeder was walking on the street in New York City when he felt a breeze out of nowhere. “I literally was about four inches away from someone on an e-bike, probably going 30 miles an hour, that I didn't see,” he recalls.
If he’d been hit, the injuries could have been severe, as Schroeder, who is a pediatrician and research scientist at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford, well knows. More children are getting hurt or even dying in crashes involving electric devices like e-bikes and e-scooters.
On Nov. 2, Schroeder and his colleagues published a paper in JAMA looking at kids who ended up in a subset of emergency rooms, hospitals, and urgent care centers across the U.S. after accidents on e-bikes, e-scooters, skateboards, and traditional, non-motorized bicycles and scooters. They drew on data from 2023 to 2026.