If anyone looked it would not be difficult to detect that there are many more e-scooters being ridden in London, Ontario in the past couple of years. With their presence new safety problems emerge.
Recently local news media have reported that staff at the City of London believes it is “very important that as we gear up for the holiday season, that we advise these (scooters) are not suitable for children”. It was not made clear why it was so important to place an emphasis on parents and children. No data was revealed that children are the source of safety issues with respect to e-scooters.
Gorski Consulting has been monitoring the numbers of cyclists in London for a number of years and during that process riders of e-scooters have been observed but not necessarily documented. The rather small numbers of observations of e-scooters made by Gorski Consulting has not raised an alarm that many young children are riding e-scooters. Since it would be against the law for persons under the age of 16 to be riding an e-scooter, one needs to ponder if the City has a different definition of a child. By the time a “child” is 16, they are a teenager and they may have resources that could allow them to buy an e-scooter independent of their parent. So does it mean that there are substantial numbers of children below 16 years who are riding e-scooters? If so is that an enforcement problem?
It was reported that the City of London was preparing a flyer to be given out to school boards so the flyers could be sent to parents about the rules governing London’s e-scooter pilot project. As reported by CTV News those rules for riders are as follows:
- be at least 16 years old
- wear a helmet if they are 16 or 17 years old
- obey a speed limit of 24 km/h
- travel streets with a speed limit at or below 50 km/h, multi-use pathways, and bike lanes
- avoid sidewalks, hiking trails, Environmentally Significant Areas (ESAs)
Again, it is not clear why this flyer is focused on, and being delivered, to parents. It would seem that the City has data in their possession that a problem exists with respect to parents buying e-scooters for their children and that this is leading to important safety issues with e-scooters. But no data has been provided by the City.
The problem with this issue is much like the problem with cyclists. There is no publicly accessible data that can educate any member of the public about the numbers of injuries and how those injuries are occurring. The only information about cyclist collisions occurs when a cyclist is killed and an acknowledgement is made of the tragedy and then no further information is provided. How many cyclists are injured and how they sustained their injuries is a very dark, black hole in the London universe.
The Canadian Institute For Health Information (CIHI)
There is an agency that might have data about both cyclist and e-scooter injuries and that is the Canadian Institute For Health Information (CIHI). CIHI is reportedly funded by Health Canada as well as provincial governments, yet access to its information is restricted to select institutions. If a member of the public wanted to review the CIHI data a profile would need to be created and then access would be denied as noted in the CIHI text below:
“Creating a CIHI profile as an individual means that you are not affiliated with an organization and will not be authorized to access CIHI’s restricted products and services.”
The public’s ability to gain access to important information about cyclist and e-scooter injuries is haphazard at best and it depends on whether the CIHI is willing to publicly share it. Overall, CIHI appears to be using health information in their possession as a commodity that is restricted to paying users. Little effort is expended in truly informing the general public about issues essential to their protection from transportation hazards.
The CIHI has created new codes to be used to document incidents involving e-scooters. “U50.0” and “U51.0” are codes to be used to identify e-scooters although why two codes were necessary has not been explained. Views of the units referring to these codes have been copyrighted so these cannot be shown here.
Codes identifying e-bikes are “U50.3” and “U51.3”. Again no explanation is available why two codes have been necessary to reference the same type of unit. And again, because a view of this e-bike is copyright, it cannot be shown here.
CIHI Podcast on E-Scooters
However a recent podcast hosted by CIHI has provided some important information. On July 22, 2025 a podcast entitled “Deadly Impact: The Rise of E-scooter Injuries” was presented. It included an interview with a father, Chet Walker, whose 25-year-old son was killed in an e-scooter collision in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in 2023. The podcast also involved two physicians, Dr. Brian Rowe from Edmonton and Dr. Daniel Rosenfield, from Toronto.
At the top of the broadcast the following was announced:
“Data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information is showing a 22% increase in hospitalizations from e-scooter injuries across Canada.”
Some further reported findings are as follows.
Dr. Rowe indicated that about 17% of his cases involved a head injury.
Dr. Rosenfield indicated that 80% of the e-scooter riders were not wearing a helmet.
Dr. Rosenfield indicated that in his pediatric unit at Sickkids Hospital they saw 1 e-scooter injury in 2020, then 46 in 2024, and finally in the month of May, 2025 there was 16.
Dr, Rowe provided an example of case that he handled at his hospital in Edmonton:
“I was working a late evening, and a patient came in by ambulance from a crash scene. And he was accompanied by his colleague, friend, who was e-scootering with him. And they were riding along, and he hit a pothole. And I don’t know if you’ve ever driven in Edmonton, but we are the world’s capital of potholes. And he got launched off his e-scooter, riding at about 15 to 20 kilometres an hour down a slight incline. And he landed on the cement. And so he had a head and neck injury.“
Dr. Rowe also talked about rider inexperience:
“We don’t know the role of inexperience. Daniel, I don’t know if SickKids does interviews on the people that get injured, but we don’t get that opportunity. So we don’t know if it’s expert riders or inexperienced. But my own anecdotal evidence is that people just don’t have experience with that kind of power.
And the private e-scooters, the ones that are personally owned, they go much faster than the rentals. The rentals have a gauge on them; they can’t go over a certain kilometre-per-hour speed. But the private ones pass you on the road in your car. So these are like motorcycles, quite frankly.”
Dr. Rosenfield also expressed his experience about privately owned e-scooters:
“…the Ontario legislation across the province says they all have to be maxed at 24 kilometres an hour. And we absolutely know that’s objectively not the case. If you just go on Google and, like, buy e-scooter, they’ll proudly advertise that they go to 40 to 50 kilometres an hour with nothing kind of standing in that way.
Some of the companies who are more responsible put a speed limiter, but those can be easily jailbroken by going on ChatGPT and asking, how do I jailbreak an e-scooter speed limiter.“
Dr. Rosenfield also provided some information about child injuries involving e-scooter, that there are two peaks of injury with respect to age:
“We’ve seen a bimodal, so 2 spikes of injuries. There’s a spike at the main one at age 10 to 12, and then there’s also one in the 4 to 6 range. And those aren’t kids who are scooting themselves, those are passengers.”
Dr. Rosenfield also commented about passengers riding on e-scooters:
“And I can’t harp enough on passengers and e-scooters are a bad combination in both kids and adults, and Brian can speak to adults. But when you see the little kid riding with their parent, what I will tell you that these scooters are not designed for passengers. It totally throws off their weighting, and it makes it a much, much, much higher risk to crash, irrespective of engaging with traffic and other things like that.”
Dr. Rowe provided his comments on e-scooter passengers:
“We did observations last summer and this summer, and about 5% of all of the devices that we saw had passengers. And it’s children and it’s women. So sometimes, an adult woman holds on to their partner from behind but, most of the time, they’re functioning as an airbag. Right? They’re in front of the partner.”
The fact that helmets could help in a number of injury incidents with e-scooters was confirmed by Dr. Rowe:
“I think there’s robust evidence to indicate that helmets prevent serious face and head injuries. I mean, that’s — if you get run over by a truck, the helmet’s probably not going to help you. But if you’ve — it’s infrequent.
What more commonly happens is you get launched off these things and you, as you’re landing, even if you don’t hit your head directly, the momentum is going to cause your head to be injured.
So those kinds of injuries, if you have a helmet, that’s going to prevent a lot of injuries to the brain. And we’ve seen this time and time again with bicycles. The helmet is cracked in half. It’s actually split in half, and the person walks out.
Another person who slips on some gravel doing tricks, not even going fast, hits their head, no helmet, they’re admitted to hospital, they need a blood clot evacuated from their head. A helmet would have completely eliminated that risk.
So helmets work. There’s no question of that.“
Dr. Rosenfield then talked more generally about a lack of reliable data regarding e-scooters:
“So we were used to being a complete vacuum of data where you just, you would know what happened when you talked to them, but that didn’t get documented in the chart. It didn’t get coded. It didn’t get all the way up to CIHI.
Now people are writing it in the electronic medical record. The electronic medical record is reviewed by either a computer or a person or both, and we’re able to actually pull out that data. So we are able to get a little bit of a better picture.
The vast majority of our collisions are falls from the scooter themselves, so about three-quarters. But almost a quarter, actually, collisions are with a vehicle, and about 8 to 10% were kids struck by scooters, by people on scooters. And we actually have that level of granularity because our surveillance system actually gets a little bit of what we call a narrative around what happened. So people are now documenting in their notes e-scooters much more diligently than they used to.
I certainly support the addition of e-scooters to all existing injury prevention databases, surveillance networks, et cetera, and should be explicitly looked at, especially given what we’re seeing. I think this is a very hot-topic issue right now, and I think it will be for the foreseeable future. I’ll be curious what the next 5 years look like, given this was not on the radar 5 years ago.“
Gorski Consulting Data & Viewpoint
Gorski Consulting has been involved in documenting the characteristics of cyclists riding adjacent to roadways in London Ontario. Studies have also been carried out at specific locations for various traffic studies and along pathways such as the Thames Valley Parkway. As a result many observations have been made of e-bikes. Although some e-scooters have been observed, and some have been photographed, no official study of them has been engaged. A greater focus on documenting e-scooters has begun starting in the fall of 2025.
As examples the following images show riders of e-scooters documented in the fall of 2025 along the roadways of London Ontario.
In this very small sample of 21 images we observed that 7 riders were wearing helmets while one rider was wearing a hoodie and the view from the back could not distinguish if a helmet was worn. Regardless, at least 33% of the riders were wearing helmets. This is a lower rate compared to the much larger sample of cyclist observations, but again, this is a very small sample. Three of the riders were observed to be wearing full-face helmets.
We also note that 7 of the riders were observed either riding, or stopped, on a sidewalk. Again, this is a smaller percentage compared to cyclists, but then this is a very small sample.
In many of the views riders were not observed to be wearing high-visibility clothing nor any lighting. This is an important safety observation. On occasions both cyclists and riders of e-scooters have been observed in night-time conditions with essentially no lighting and wearing black clothing. Photos of such persons are difficult to create for obvious reasons. At the same time there is a sizeable percentage of these riders who scoff at the suggestion that they should be forced to be visible. Instead some riders argue that maybe motor vehicles should be painted with “high viz” colours insisting that motor vehicle drivers are at fault for rider injuries. There is no broad brush that can encapsulate every person and every scenario. However it is our belief that many riders are unaware of the safe issues and implications because official agencies keep information about rider injuries and collisions an illogical secret.
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