Is e-cycling safer than e-scootering? Comparing injury risk across Europe when vehicle-type, location, exposure,...

Recently, e-scooters have proliferated worldwide. Municipalities have been struggling with regulating e-scooters due to public concerns that the injuries from the new crashes outweigh the health and environmental benefits of micromobility use. Indeed, several studies have reported crash risk for e-scooters 4 to 10 times higher than that for bicycles.

We had unprecedented access to crash and exposure data collected in 2022 and 2023 from a rental service of e-scooters and e-bicycles in seven European cities. We conducted a retrospective cross-sectional study to compute injury rates and incidence-rate ratios for each city while directly controlling for geography, ownership, and exposure (measured in three different ways).

We analyzed 686 e-scooterist and 35 e-cyclist crashes. Injury rates were higher for e-cyclists than e-scooterists in most of the cities, for all exposure measures. Further, the incidence-rate ratios indicate that the injury risk was 2.5-10 times lower for e-scootering than e-cycling.

E-scootering may not be riskier than cycling as several studies have claimed. In fact, by exploiting technology to control for location, exposure, ownership, and usage, our analysis shows that e-scooterists experience lower crash rates than e-cyclists. While our analysis has some limitations and cannot be considered conclusive evidence, taking location, usage, ownership, and high-resolution exposure into account-which our analysis did contrary to previous studies-is crucial for a more accurate comparison among (micromobility) transport modes. In general, our research suggests incorporating geofencing and GPS-derived exposure metrics in future safety assessments.

The results and methodologies presented in this paper may help urban planning of rental micromobility services within cities.