Bikes, E-bikes, scooters, and safety

From the NY Times:

...The other new study of e-bikes, which was published in December in Injury Prevention, is more cautionary, however. For it, researchers at New York University’s School of Medicine combed a national database of emergency room visits for information about accidents related to riding a standard bicycle, motorized scooter or an e-bike from 2000 to 2017.

They found plenty of reports. More than nine million men, women and children showed up in an emergency room after being hurt while riding a standard bike during those 17 years. Another 140,000 injured themselves on scooters, and about 3,000 on e-bikes (an uncommon novelty in the early years of the study). 

In general, the e-bike injuries were the most severe and likely to require hospitalization.

Why e-bikers tended to hurt themselves more seriously than other riders is not clear from the injury data, says Charles DiMaggio, an injury epidemiologist at NYU Langone Health, who led the new study. 

But speed likely played a role. “We know that e-bikes can go faster than traditional pedal cycles,” he says, unless you are a bike racer who bombs down hills at more than 20 or 30 miles per hour. “And we know that increased speed often results in more-severe injuries”...

Rob's comment:
The other study featured in the story involved only 101 people while the study discussed above found that 9 million people were injured on regular bikes and thousands more on scooters and E-bikes.

See The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on bicycle injuries in the US and Getting children on bikes.

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