Podcast transcript: Public health benefit or community danger? Making electronic scooters safer
Interview with Jeff Taylor, an epidemiologist at Austin Public Health
Interview conducted by Aaron Warnick, a reporter with The Nation’s Health newspaper.
Listen to this interview as a recording on our podcast page.
This is The Nation’s Health Podcast, part of APHA podcast network. I’m Aaron Warnick, your host and a reporter with The Nation’s Health.
In addition to producing award-winning news stories, The Nation’s Health lets you hear directly from the people we’re talking to. In this episode, I’m talking with Jeff Taylor. Jeff is an epidemiologist at Austin Public Health.
In May, APH released a study on e-scooter related injuries. He’s going to call in and tell us about the study and how we might make this new popular mode of transportation a little more safe. But before the call, here’s what you should know.
Shareable electronic scooters, commonly referred to simply as e-scooters, are incredibly popular in cities across the world right now. They’re the latest trend in micromobility. Micromobility refers to using a vehicle that typically weighs less than rider. So we’re talking scooters and bikes, not planes, trains and automobiles. And while those who haven’t used e-scooters may not understand the hype and see them as a passing fad, they do serve a purpose.
Companies that deploy dockless scooters say that they solve “the last-mile problem.” What they mean is that e-scooters can fill in the gaps where public transportation doesn’t connect efficiently — if at all. An example — if you take the bus or subway home from work and you’re still a 20-minute walk from home — that’s ideally where an e-scooter would come in.
And companies like Lime and Bird have made accessing this segment of transportation easier than ever. Users download an app, find a scooter, scan a QR code and then zip right off. And that convenience is part of why e-scooters have gained so much traction.
While scooters can connect you between your bus stop and home, they’re extremely popular for people moving between two points across busy districts, like downtowns, campuses and shopping areas. And the high concentration of e-scooters in these areas means that some get parked incorrectly, even cluttering sidewalks and blocking accessibility ramps.
And riders are definitely at risk — especially in these high traffic areas. Emerging research, like the study from Austin Public Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, finds that riders can get seriously injured on these vehicles that are relatively low speed. Most shareable scooters are capped at 15 miles per hour.
To talk about the risks, Austin Public Health’s Jeff Taylor has called in.
Jeff, to get us started, how did e-scooters come to your attention?
The Epidemiology and Disease Surveillance Unit of the Austin Public Health office — our office is located in a building near downtown. So I think the staff, our unit and other units in the same building as Austin Public Health started noticing them right away. We were close to downtown, about a mile from the city hall. A lot of the scooters were deployed in the downtown area and also in south Austin and the University of Texas campus. So within a matter of days, we noticed the dockless scooters being used on the streets of Austin.
So, e-scooters are zipping around your office. Why decide to research them?
Well, in the summer, we were hearing reports from our medical partners, particularly those in emergency departments at the hospital, but also from emergency medical services of Austin-Travis County. Our EMS is also located in the same building as we were. So we were hearing from the medics at EMS — some of the commanders — and also from the physicians at emergency departments about scooter injuries that they were seeing and sometime the severity of the injuries.
And how did the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention get involved?
We had colleagues at the state health department who we knew are in injury prevention, we had discussed with them about electric scooter-related injuries and they were not doing any study. And then we called staff we knew at the Centers for Disease Control (and Prevention) and their injury prevention program and asked them if they were doing studies in any other states or other cities. Well, the CDC, at the time, said “no.” They were not doing any studies, and so we looked at it as an opportunity to partner with CDC to do a study Austin on injuries related to dockless electric scooters.
And what were your findings?
Well, we found that people were getting injured using scooters. We had a number of reports. Our final number was 192 persons injured during that time frame where we had evidence from either an interview or from a medical chart review that they were on a dockless electric scooter or electric scooter. We saw a high percentage, about 50% — I think it was 48% — where people had a head injury. Seven percent of those people actually had a traumatic brain injury. So they had a very severe head injury.
With such high percentage of head of injuries, does that mean you did not find a lot of helmet use?
Yes, there was very, very limited use of a helmet. There was only one of the 192 people we included in the study that was actually wearing a helmet when they were injured. So, 99% of our injured riders were not wearing a helmet.
We’re getting a sense of the types of injuries, but what about how people are getting injured? Are they crashing into cars or cars crashing into them? Or is it more like riders losing balance and falling off?
Yeah, that’s a good question and that’s why we did the study. We couldn’t put any percentages or any data to those questions. For example, learning that 48% of people would have a head injury — no one would have been able to predict that accurately. So our study actually helped put numbers and good data behind some of those questions you’re asking. A lot of people had a perception that injuries occur when people collide with a car or truck or some moving vehicle and that is not what we found at all. We found a very small percentage of our injured riders had collided with a car.
If car crashes aren’t the typical cause of some of these sometimes severe injuries, how are riders getting hurt?
I think in our report, we noted it was 10% reported a collision with a motor vehicle. And 50% reported a road or sidewalk surface condition contributed to their injury. But there may have been multiple factors involved with the injury. One, they may have run into a street pole or light pole or stop sign. One, they may have run into a curb or they may have hit a pothole and then run into a curb, so there may be multiple factors involved. What we did learn is that the vast majority of persons injured on these scooters were not injured because they collided with a car. It was only 10%.
So, while the reasons for injury might be subject to a wide-degree of variation, were there any common threads between the types of injuries you were seeing?
One thing we did learn was that about a third, 33%, of our injured riders, didn’t live in Austin. They were visitors of Austin. And that was something that we didn’t realize that we would see. Another 33% were first-time riders. This was the very first time that they were on a scooter and they got injured. Which, again, was another finding we hadn’t expected. But we didn’t have a knowledge from which to base expectations on.
What is it about being new in town or being new to scooters that might result in more injuries?
My personal belief is that people were injured riding a scooter because they lacked experience. If you’ve ever ridden a scooter, it takes awhile to judge the balance, to learn the breaks. They’re limited to 15 miles per hour, but many of our riders reported, no, when they’re going down a hill, they’re going more than 15 miles per hour. Some of it’s getting used to the speed, particularly when you’re going downhill, getting used to how to manage the scooter when you hit a pothole, learning how to balance when you’re turning or stopping. All of those things you educate yourself on, and some of those things new riders may not have had that contributed to their injury.
Are there any safety recommendations you would like to offer for those who may want to ride an e-scooter?
Well, we looked at injuries related to bicycles or motorcycles. We know that helmet use prevents severe head injuries. So, intuitively, we also feel that wearing a helmet would help prevent the head injuries that someone might experience. We also learned that there’s also some education about how to use a scooter when a person first unlocks it through the app, but most of our people we interviewed just perused it really quickly for a couple seconds — they may not have actually read it thoroughly. We felt that part of our education about preventing scooter (injury) was that they need to be more familiar with the safety — reviewing those safety messages from the company.
And with that, we thank Jeff for his time and expertise.
For more information on the e-scooter study, visit www.austintexas.gov/department/health.
To read more on e-scooters, check out my news story in the September 2019 issue of The Nation’s Health, online now at thenationshealth.org.
Thank you for listening to The Nation’s Health Podcast.