Seattle’s Scooter Safety Problem

You may be among the majority of people in Seattle who have never ridden one of the thousands of stand-up rental e-scooters, mostly Lime green, licensed and permitted by the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT). Those who do ride them are everywhere, zooming down sidewalks, weaving between cars on the streets. And maybe you’ve wondered, “Aren’t those e-scooter riders risking injuries?”

Then you might also have asked: “Does SDOT actually know the injury risks to its e- scooter riders?” And finally: “If SDOT does know, are they telling anybody?”

The alarming answers are: Yes, those SDOT e-scooters are dangerous for riders. Yes, SDOT knows how bad the injury risk is and has known for more than three years. And no, SDOT is not telling us what they know.

That adds up to a very bad look for SDOT. This agency tirelessly proclaims that safety is its core value. Its cherished Vision Zero safety program is anchored in the mantra that every fatality and serious injury on Seattle’s streets and sidewalks is unacceptable. Or so they say.

In January, the Washington Traffic Safety Commission in Olympia published an extraordinary report from Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center, generally shortened to HIPRC. The report, “Electric Scooter Related Injury in Seattle,” examined patient records of injured e-scooter riders at the Harborview emergency department and other UW Medicine-affiliated locations.

Researchers found that since SDOT launched its e-scooter rentals late in 2020, related injuries have skyrocketed. All told, 280 or so injured e-scooter riders were treated by UW Medicine, mostly in ERs, from 2021 to 2023. Arm and leg injuries and head and neck injuries were most common, followed by contusions and fractures.

Probing the patient medical records yields something even more important than the number of injuries. How do the injuries occur? The report found that the injuries overwhelmingly occur (87 percent) from riders falling off the scooters, and only rarely from collisions in traffic, (just 5 percent).

This simple fact, revealed by patient records, opens a troubling backstory for SDOT.

SDOT has known at least since November 2021 that there are many more scooter injuries overall than there are scooter/car collision injuries. They learned that from about 4,900 responses to a rider survey after the scooter rental program’s first year. Among other things, the survey asked about injuries – whether you had been injured and whether you had sought medical attention. Also included was space for a tell-us-what-happened narrative response.

The startling results SDOT were certainly never expected. More than 500 e-scooter riders said they had sustained an injury, some riders more than once. Well over 100 reported they had sought professional medical attention as a result. The narrative responses, never completely published by SDOT but obtained by Public Disclosure Request, told individual riders’ grisly tales: broken bones, sprains, concussions, lacerations, lost teeth, contusions, long recuperations. The narratives told of hitting potholes and sidewalk uplifts, skidding on wet pavements, and falling when brakes failed. As in the HIPRC study, injuries rarely involved a collision with a car.

This led SDOT on a search for alternative facts for its first-year evaluation of the e-scooter-rental program, finally published in April 2022. SDOT scoured a body of 8,000 Seattle Police Department documents called Traffic Collision Reports that are required of SPD officers for every single traffic collision in Seattle for which an officer responds.

The reports are prepared on a standard form and must be regularly submitted to the Washington State Patrol for use in statewide traffic-collision data aggregation and analysis. But a rider pitched off an e-scooter by a big crack in a sidewalk? No police officer, and no Traffic Collision Report. So SDOT’s alternative facts would seem to come from flawed data that don’t capture the whole picture.

Accordingly, for the first year of the e-scooter rental program, SDOT located only 17 Traffic Collision Reports involving e-scooters. One was an e-scooter fatality. Five were coded by SPD officers as serious injuries.

The gap between the tiny injury picture pulled from Traffic Collision Reports and the big-injury picture reported by hundreds of riders needed some comment, of course. The SDOT story is to say that its original intention to collect emergency room data for its own understanding of e-scooter injury risk had been sidelined by the pandemic. It wrote in its report, now 36 months ago: “In the near future, SDOT hopes to engage with medical researchers to better understand rate and severity of injuries.”

So SDOT did what, finding itself in this pickle? In June 2022, it turned to who else but its own hometown Harborview Medical Center and the highly regarded injury research and prevention specialists at HIPRC to try to revive the pandemic-foiled program of emergency room data collection. From SDOT: “We are very interested in bringing whatever we can to the table to expedite this – e.g. hiring a consultant, supporting hiring a research assistant, etc. Would that be helpful? We appreciate your efforts on this so far and are eager to help get it across the finish line.”

That was 34 months ago. Through the remainder of 2022, SDOT and HIPRC jointly polished a research methodology. SDOT’s e-scooter program manager committed to providing $75,000 to fund the study. SDOT drafted a Memorandum of Agreement for the study, tweaked into final form after vetting through the University of Washington Office of Sponsored Programs.

Research staffers were identified and began work. The SDOT program manager even praised the study to the federal Centers for Disease Control in November 2022, 29 months ago. “Our partnership with the HIPRC to develop a shared-mobility injury study will help us better understand injury rates across demographics and meet the safety needs of our program going forward.”

Indeed, SDOT’s research program with HIPRC was poised to lead the way to nationally-
significant improvements in data-collection practice. Seattle wasn’t the only city that had encountered the inadequacy of traffic collision data for assessing e-scooter injuries. It was a national problem. So much so that an aptly titled report, “Data Challenges Associated with Assessing the Prevalence and Risk of Electric Scooter and Electric Bicycle Fatalities and Injuries,” was issued by the National Transportation Safety Board in November 2022.

But something seemed to go amiss. The internal emails (dozens of emails obtained under a Public Disclosure Request are the source for this account) show that a key SDOT e-scooter manager was pulled away on temporary assignment to write the “Vision Zero Top-to-Bottom Review” document that the new SDOT Director had commissioned.

By the time the Top-to-Bottom Review draft was completed and the manager returned to e-scooters, the project apparently had stalled, as revealed in an internal email dated February 9, 2023: “Wanted to flag this as we have not officially signed the MOA, but HIPEC has been working. I know we’ve talked about going a different direction, which I think is certainly worth at least considering, but just feels like we need to make headway on that sooner rather than later so we’re not having them do more work.”

Next, a scheduled progress meeting was abruptly postponed. HIPRC was told that some questions were being “run up the chain.” Answers must have come back down the chain pretty quickly. On February 15, 2023, HIPRC was handed the bad news. The study had been halted. “Our leadership is concerned that without some key pieces of information, the study results will not be actionable for us as a city department of transportation,” the email said.

And that was the end of that, regardless of what SDOT had promised the public and boasted of to the federal CDC. Matters then took an unexpected turn. National discussion had caught traffic-safety and public-health professionals in e-scooter data topics, especially the need for more information from hospital emergency departments.

The recent NTSB report had been anticipated. An alert research director at the Washington Traffic Safety Commission had been paying attention to the development of the SDOT/HIPRC proposed research. She immediately recognized its value as a demonstration of better data-collection practice. She quickly found dollars to backfill for SDOT’s funding withdrawal.

What had been an SDOT project became a Washington Traffic Safety Commission project, and SDOT was left at the station. The work by HIPRC regained momentum very quickly in 2023 and was brought to conclusion by the end of 2024. Results were shared as a courtesy with SDOT prior to publication late in 2024. SDOT chose to keep its distance, making no comment.

The research report was elegant, simple, and short. Its main findings were the sheer volume of e-scooter injuries, their 87% connection to falls, and the rarity of injuries from traffic collisions. There was much more:

First, the total number of e-scooter related injuries in Seattle to be located in emergency-room records was surely even higher than the 282 that the HIPRC had identified at UW Medicine-affiliated locations. That was because the HIPRC records search did not cover the emergency departments at Swedish or Virginia Mason, where many other injuries were surely seen.

Second, from the sizable sample of the records from which HIPRC could determine the fact, 97 percent of the e-scooter-related injuries were sustained by riders of e-scooters in SDOT’s shared-scooter rental program. The big injury upsurge flowed directly and overwhelmingly from the SDOT program, not privately-owned e-scooters.

Third, while there are lots of ways to be injured riding an e-scooter, and while they range widely in severity, head and neck injuries are key telltales of significant and serious injury, and they were noted in 47% of the e-scooter injury records, a much higher rate than for injured bicycle riders. It’s a lot easier to fall off an e-scooter than to fall off a bicycle. And that’s not good, because pitching off an e-scooter is such a likely way to hit your head. A third of the e-scooter injuries were fractures, also a serious injury.

Fourth, with such a high incidence of head injuries, it was clearly noteworthy (so far as the pertinent sample of patient records could be determined) that helmets were worn by only 18 percent of the injured riders. That pointed to a big problem: in approving the e-scooter rental program back in 2020, the Seattle City Council wrote into law a helmet requirement for riders. Anyone can plainly see that neither SDOT nor SPD has taken any meaningful initiative to see that safety law observed.

Fifth, impairment from alcohol use and substance use is a huge problem among enough e-scooter riders to show up to an extraordinary degree among the injured. From the sizable share of the patient records from which the question could be answered, alcohol use was involved in 64 percent of injuries and other substance use in 23 percent of injuries.

From SDOT’s standpoint, the HIPRC report might just as well not exist. No one in Seattle–not a rider, nor a prospective rider, nor a mere passerby, nor the City Council or the media–has heard one word from SDOT about what highly-qualified researchers at our own city’s most preeminent public-health institution have learned about the injury risks of e-scooters in Seattle.

Yet this is in a study SDOT itself had basically initiated, helped design and proposed to fund just over two years ago. Before SDOT tried, but failed, to kill it.

Recently, HIPRC gathered data for 2024, again looking at e-scooter-related injuries at the UW Medicine-affiliated locations, including the emergency department at Harborview. For 2024, the preliminary count is 128, a slight decline from 150 in 2023. But that pushes the total number of e-scooter-related injuries in four years, 2021-2024, to over 400.

Add to that number the injuries very likely seen at Swedish and Virginia Mason, and the total is almost certainly over 500 injuries, 97 percent of them involving SDOT’s e-scooters, if the HIPRC study is any guide. And recall that in the 2021 rider survey, only one scooter rider in five who reported some kind of injury had actually sought professional medical care.

In short, there has been an e-scooter injury epidemic in Seattle.

Meanwhile, in the only evaluation of its e-scooter program SDOT has ever published, the agency has relied on Traffic Collision Reports, despite its own survey and the HIPRC study showing that collisions are only a tiny share of e-scooter injuries. Nevertheless, the collision reports do confirm that injuries have been surging.

From SDOT’s responses to Public Disclosure Requests, we know that it has reviewed at least 19 Traffic Collision Reports reflecting e-scooter riders seriously injured in Seattle in 2024. That’s up from SDOT’s first-year tally by about the proportion that the much larger emergency room tallies have gone up in the HIPRC review.

We know too there was one fatality of an SDOT e-scooter rider in 2024. SDOT learned the circumstances only after it received a copy of a special Seattle Police Department investigation that Lime itself requested. Won Jae Ro, age 24, died at Harborview on October 9. According to the King County Medical Examiner, the cause of death was blunt force injury to the head as a result of falling from a Lime e-scooter while not wearing a helmet. His friend told the SPD interviewer that he and Ro had been drinking together the night of October 5 and that they had shared a bottle of wine and Ro himself consumed five or six hard liquor drinks.

They then went to Dave’s Hot Chicken Restaurant at 12th and E. Pike, visiting with friends before its closing. Ro then left at 2 am on October 6 and rode a Lime e-scooter southbound in the bike lane on 12th.

According to his friend riding another scooter behind him, Ro just seemed to topple over for no apparent reason. The fire department responded to the friend’s 911 calls and Ro was transported to Harborview. He died three days later.

SDOT has never established a protocol for the fire department to contact SDOT regarding its aid responses to SDOT’s injured e-scooter patrons. Because there was no traffic collision, there was no Traffic Collision Report. The SPD investigator’s report prepared for Lime somehow made its way to SDOT and was caught in the net of a Public Records Request. I can find no public-facing reference by SDOT to this fatality. This was the fourth death of an SDOT rental e-scooter rider in Seattle.

When will we see transparency, never mind accountability, from SDOT about the injury risk of its shared e-scooter program? Don’t hold your breath. On March 4, SDOT’s Chief Safety Officer presented to the City Council Transportation Committee a progress update for 2024 on SDOT’s Vision Zero initiative to eliminate fatal and serious injuries on Seattle’s streets. It included a PowerPoint slide with a line graph depicting serious injuries to people walking and people biking, including in 2024.

Where on the slide could be seen the number of people seriously injured while riding e-
scooters, asked Councilmember Rob Kettle. SDOT replied that this number was unavailable because the Traffic Collison Report form had no specific box for e-scooters. Therefore, some of the e-scooter injuries had been tucked into the people-walking category and some into the people-biking category.

End result: inaccurate, understated tallies of both the seriously injured walkers and bikers. And complete invisibility in the presentation to the Council for all the seriously injured e-scooter riders. This, even though multiple Public Records Requests indicate that SDOT had reviewed the 19 individual Traffic Collision Reports involving e-scooter injuries.

As for the 2024 e-scooter fatality, it is also nowhere to be seen. None of this should come as a surprise. When finally completed in July 2023, the Vision Zero Top-to-Bottom Review staved off any questions about serious injuries involving SDOT’s e-scooters by simply whitewashing the topic out of the report. That was the document the new SDOT Director had promised in October 2022, in a Seattle Times op-ed, would be data-driven, and would share the data, good and bad.

Just days prior to the SDOT Chief Safety Officer showing the misleading slide to the City Council, Mayor Bruce Harrell had appointed a new Interim Director at SDOT. Adiam Emery is eminently qualified and experienced. But there is a lot of hard work ahead.

Few of the challenges facing SDOT are as problematic as its own sponsorship of a program that is injuring its patrons, week after week and month after month. It is time for years of dissembling to stop. From fresh leadership at SDOT, the public deserves full disclosure of rental e-scooter injury risks.

There’s more. Something has to be done to stop the hundreds of e-bikes and e-scooters abandoned and blocking sidewalks, bus stops and street furniture, all in contravention of the explicit terms of the vendors’ permits. No other city in America can touch Seattle for e-scooter trashing of the pedestrian environment.

And no one on the sidewalk should have to jump aside and out of the way of an oncoming e-scooter rider appropriating the sidewalk – even worse, unseen from behind. Anyone can see that neither SDOT nor SPD has taken any interest in enforcing the ordinance that bans riding e-scooters on sidewalks.

There is one more question SDOT has never answered for the public or the Council. How does the money actually work in the e-scooter concessions SDOT has conferred? Take Lime, which is actually a privately-owned San Francisco firm called Neutron Holdings, Inc., reputedly backed by Uber and Google. Lime has had a virtual monopoly, accounting for 78 percent of SDOT e-scooters and 87 percent of e-scooter rides.

How much money is Lime collecting in Seattle from its SDOT concession to use the public’s streets and sidewalks? Probably SDOT itself doesn’t know the answer for sure, although it ought to be able to make a well-educated guess. But anyone can make a rough back-of-the-envelope calculation based on Lime’s pricing formula, which is based on minutes of ride duration and distance traveled, and can be matched to the number of trips, average trip durations and average trip distances drawn from SDOT’s data dashboard.

That calculation conservatively suggests Lime in 2024 likely collected in Seattle something well north of $20 million. How much did Lime return to the City of Seattle for that valuable concession under an SDOT permit authorized by the City Council? And further, what are the sources and uses of funding and their dollar amounts that support SDOT’s management of the program?

Is funding adequate so that SDOT can enforce Lime’s compliance with permit conditions, such as the good repair of its scooters and their adherence to the permit’s e-scooter parking conditions? How often and how much has Lime or the City paid in injury claims or damage claims arising out of the rented e-scooter program, not only for riders’ injuries, but for third parties’ property damage occasioned by SDOT e-scooters?

The last semblance of an actual report produced by SDOT on its shared e-scooter and e-bike program was published in April 2022, three years ago. The City Council has never reviewed the program authorization, voted by the City Council in August 2020, almost five years ago. It has never revisited SDOT’s rosy representations of program expectations that have never been met to this day.

It’s time for an independent performance review of the entire program, starting with its safety record. Or rather, its injury record. Then moving to other public interest issues. That review cannot be performed by SDOT when its own shared mobility program manager– responsible for administering the program on the public’s behalf, not the vendors’ behalf– also wears a second hat. She is a board member of a national industry association, of which Lime is a dues-paying member, dedicated to promoting the expansion of shared e-scooter and e-bike programs around the country.

It’s the City Council that has to call the question. Seattle, like Paris, which shut down its rental e-scooter program 18 months ago, has seen enough. In Seattle, fix it if possible. Or end it.