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E-scooter riders who are drunk and not wearing helmets are contributing to what senior doctors say is an unacceptable number of injuries clogging up Melbourne hospital emergency wards.
A study at the Royal Melbourne Hospital identified 247 riders and nine pedestrians who attended the hospital with scooter crash injuries in 2022, including 21 with major trauma and one who later died from a brain injury.
Two-thirds of scooter riders injured last year weren’t wearing helmets, the study found. Credit: Eddie Jim
Injuries at the hospital jumped from five in February – when Victoria started a controversial inner-Melbourne trial with e-scooter hire companies Lime and Neuron – to 40 in December that year.
Thirty-four per cent said they had been drinking and two-thirds were not wearing a helmet when they crashed, the study found, with half suffering injuries to their head, face or neck. Most patients were young (average age 29) and male (68 per cent), and the estimated cost of treating them was $1.9 million.
Australian Medical Association Victoria councillor Dr Sarah Whitelaw said the “shocking” number of injuries and the cost to the health system should prompt renewed efforts to improve scooter safety.
“This study explains to us that we can’t afford to ignore the impact of e-scooter injuries on our health system, as well as individuals, any more,” she said. “We’ve got this huge elective surgery backlog at the movement, and the idea we would further worsen that … is not something we think is acceptable”.
Whitelaw, an emergency medicine specialist, said measures such as late-night e-scooter curfews to stop partygoers riding home drunk, and intoxication tests on users’ smartphones should be considered.
Lime and Neuron dispatched 1500 scooters across the Melbourne, Port Phillip and Yarra council areas in February 2022 and have since deployed another 1000 scooters to city streets.
While they are promoted as a climate-friendly alternative to driving, advocates for the disabled, vision impaired and elderly have criticised the trial because of illegal footpath riding and other dangerous rule breaking.
Victoria legalised the use of privately owned e-scooters on public roads in March, and extended its hire scheme trial for a third time in October.
The Royal Melbourne study, published last week, did not identify whether injured riders were using hire scooters in Melbourne or one of the estimated 100,000 privately owned scooters in the state.
The study found that most injuries (79 per cent) came from riders falling off their scooter, rather than collisions. Whitelaw said e-scooters presented different safety risks to bicycles, with riders more likely to be thrown over the handle bars and unable to stop themselves with their arms.
“People are hitting the ground with their face first some of the time, which is causing really significant cosmetic injuries, but also functional injuries for young people like losing all their teeth,” she said.
Dr Anand Ramakrishnan, the Royal Melbourne’s head of plastic and reconstructive surgery, and one of the paper’s authors, suggested there could be high rates of drink-riding because people might leave their car at home but then pick up a scooter on the street after a night out.
“You may come out of the bar or your function, be intoxicated and not be in the best position to make a decision on getting home, and then use [the scooter],” he said.
While just over one-third (34 per cent) of patients reported having had alcohol before the crash, only 13 per cent reported no alcohol consumption and data was not recorded for 53 per cent of patients, meaning “it is feasible that the rate of alcohol use is even higher”, the study found.
The Royal Melbourne is just one of the hospitals in Victoria treating trauma patients. St Vincent’s Hospital reported in October it had treated 500 people injured in scooter crashes since February 2022.
Ramakrishnan called for better state and national data to be collected on scooter crashes to evaluate how many people were being injured, and the risk scooters posed relative to how many rides were being taken.
“I’m sure [scooters have] benefits to us as a society, but the regulation needs to be carefully looked at,” he said. “And given there is a significant cost to the taxpayer, I would suggest those costs should be recouped in some way. ”
The RMH study proposes “an additional levy imposed on e-scooter companies” to help cover the cost of injuries.
E-scooter riders are not covered by the Transport Accident Commission’s no-fault insurance scheme, unless they are hit by a registered motor vehicle. Hire companies have insurance policies in place for their riders, however.
A Department of Transport and Planning spokesperson said the department had extended its scooter trial over summer so it had “the most comprehensive dataset available” to decide the future of e-scooters in Victoria.
“The data that we’ve been monitoring … has shown that while there has been an increase in injury, this is primarily due to the significant growth in e-scooter use, and injury rates are similar to those for bikes,” the spokesperson said.
A spokesperson for Lime said hire schemes were the safest way to introduce and regulate e-scooters and “99.99 per cent of trips taken on the Lime platform end without incident”.
Lime occasionally shuts off its scooters late at night or makes riders complete an impaired riding reaction time test on their phones when there are large events on in Melbourne.
Neuron also said the vast majority of rides ended safely, and it had introduced safety features such as geofencing to restrict where users could ride and park.
“We have a robust rider education program focused on ensuring riders know the rules and how to ride and park responsibly,” a spokesperson said.
Under Victoria’s trial, e-scooters are limited to 20km/h, and all riders must wear a helmet and be aged 16 or over. Users are banned from riding on footpaths, carrying passengers, using mobile phones or being under the influence of alcohol or drugs.
The state Transport Department said that more than a million people had signed up to ride e-scooters in the first 20 months of its trial, taking a combined 5 million trips. A third company, Beam Mobility, is now operating in Melton and Hobsons Bay.
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