Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children has produced a news release on their website warning of the recent increase in children’s injuries from riding E-scooters and E-bikes. They report that their emergency department has seen 16 injuries in June and July of 2024 compared with only five incidents in the same period in 2023. While these numbers do not appear to be staggering they demonstrate the concern that hospital medical personnel possess since they are the only ones to see what is happening. Data from sources such as police reports grossly underestimate the number of such incidents since, very often, a police report is not filed unless the incident involves a collision with a motor vehicle.
Similar warnings were presented in the spring of 2024 by Toronto researchers in a study entitled “Comparison of the number of pedestrian and cyclist injuries captured in police data compared with health service utilisation data in Toronto, Canada 2016– 2021”. This study reported that, while 2,362 cyclist incidents were reported in Toronto’s police data, there were 30,101 cyclist visits to hospital emergency departments and 2,299 resulted in hospitalizations. The research also noted that 26,083 of those cyclist incidents, or 87%, did not result from cyclist involvement with a motor vehicle.
Solutions aimed at reducing injuries to vulnerable persons fail to recognize that a thorough documentation and understanding of how collisions occur are a fundamental ingredient in developing a proper plan. Many express the opinion that the problem is obvious while not explaining the basis for those opinions. In London, Ontario there is essentially no documentation of cyclists or riders of e-devices except through independent and unsupported research such as what is done at Gorski Consulting.
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