The French Academy of Medicine says electric scooters are becoming a public health risk and recommends that helmets be made compulsory. It reports that the number of injuries has increased by nearly 180 percent between 2019 and 2022.
10 percent of French people say they are regular users of electric scooters and three quarters of them are between 18 and 30 years old, according to a recent report by the French Academy of Medicine, relaying figures collected from public records.
According to road safety authorities, 24 people died following a scooter accident in 2021 in France and 11,256 others were injured.
At the end of August, 2022, there had been 19 deaths involving scooters.
In 9 out of 10 accidents, scooter users were not wearing a helmet.
The Academy of Medicine is pushing to change this and make the wearing of helmets compulsory.
Such rules have already been applied in other countries such as Japan and South Korea and cities such as Quebec, Los Angeles and Barcelona.
Careless behaviour
According to the academy, 75 percent of accidents were isolated falls, often associated with carelessness.
Excessive speed, consumption of alcohol, inattentiveness, one-handed driving and cell phone use were also factors.
The presence of an obstacle on the road only existed in one third of cases, the report found.
Injuries often concerned the forearms, elbows and wrists, but head injuries were also very common.
Cranial trauma, fracture of the jaw and nose are much more frequent after a fall from a scooter than after a fall from a bicycle, the report found.
The Academy of Medicine is also pushing for stricter manufacturing standards that would help improve safety.
It regrets that complete freedom is left to manufacturers to define the presence of indicators or not, the diameter of the wheels and the width of the platform of these scooters.
Today, the platforms are on average only 14 cm wide. It would take 10 cm more for an adult to put their feet side by side and therefore have a more stable riding position, the report points out.
Fatal falls
To deal with the rising number of accidents, sometimes fatal, cities have begun to regulate the two-wheel fleets that have flooded the market since 2018.
Nice, Montpellier and Toulouse have banned self-service scooters completely.
In Paris, speeds for rental scooters are now capped at 10 km/h in designated "slow zones" in central as of November 2021, with an allowance of 20 km/h on major roads and cycle ways.
Since September, the city of Lyon has banned minors from using self-service scooters.
The rule was brought in a month after the death of Iris and Warren, aged 15 and 17, in a fatal collision with an ambulance on 22 August, 2022.
But clamping down on age limits does not really convince Gilles Bagou, an emergency anesthetist at a hospital in Lyon.
In his 2021 report, which was published in a scientific journal, Bagou wrote that the number of people injured in scooter accidents in the Rhône region had multiplied by seven between 2017 and 2019 in Lyon.
Awareness
He pointed out that head injuries represented "around 20 percent for cyclists in accidents, compared to 37 percent for scooter users".
"The fall mechanism is different on a scooter, with a more forward tilt, over the handlebars. As for bicycles, people fall more to the side," Bagou told BFM TV on Monday.
He says prohibiting minors from taking self-service scooters is not enough.
"The problem is awareness. If young people are informed of how to ride a scooter, there will be fewer accidents. We should also see if this ban on minors is really respected," he continues.
