July has been a tough month of bad news for Lime, the brand that rents e-scooters and e-bikes in Seattle under a permit from the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT). Not, however, that you would have heard about it from Lime, or SDOT.
The first bombshell was rumor confirmation on July 18th from the City Attorney’s office that Lime had agreed to pay $2.5 million to a rider and his wife who had sued the city in 2023 for his horrendous injuries riding a Lime e-scooter. Five days later, on July 18th, SDOT released documents under a Public Disclosure Request, admitting there had been a Lime e-scooter ride fatality in Belltown almost a month earlier of which neither Lime nor SDOT had offered any mention to the public.
Are these the kind of events that should finally jolt Seattle, awash in thousands of rental e-scooters and e-bikes like no other city in the country, to demand whether SDOT has created a program anyone beyond the homegrown and tourist rider class really wants? As to Lime in Seattle, what has SDOT giveth? What has Lime taketh away?
Are any of the rules for e-scooters, no riding on sidewalls, no parking flouting the rights of people with disabilities, no riding under age 16, actually to be observed? Will the indisputable pile-up of injury statistics and the endless sidewalk clutter ever get an engaged response from SDOT? Will SDOT answer the obvious question, how much money is Lime making in Seattle from the permit SDOT has issued to install and conduct its business on the public’s right-of-way?
The newest e-scooter fatality, in e-scooter-saturated Belltown, certainly is a terrible milestone for Lime and for SDOT. Now we have the first e-scooter rider killed from riding an e-scooter on a Seattle sidewalk. By SDOT’s accounting this was the fifth fatality, one each year, in the five years of SDOT’s rented e-scooter program. Dark blessing: at least the deceased was a rider, not a young or old pedestrian mowed down by an e-scooter.
Sooner or later, a sidewalk fatality had to happen, with sidewalk-riding e-scooters seen everywhere and at any time. On sidewalks thoroughly documented by SDOT for their thousands of cracks, breaks and uplifts — many of them, over 15,000 when last inventoried in 2017 – sidewalk uplifts caused by trees. SDOT itself owns 25% of those trees, thereby putting on SDOT the responsibility of correcting many trees’ sidewalks damage.
Judging from a very cursory police report and my visit to where he died, it was a sidewalk damaged by a big red oak tree owned by SDOT that did in Patrick O’Donnell, the Belltown deceased. O’Donnell, about 34, seems to have been an out-of-town visitor on a business trip with a co-worker. Just before 8 pm on June 24, he was riding a Lime scooter southbound on the sidewalk on the east side of 1st Avenue between Lenora and Blanchard. He hit a bump on the sidewalk (that bump the work of SDOT’s adjacent red oak), right before the parking lot north of the Army Navy Surplus Store.
He fell from the scooter. Medics quickly arrived. They found no pulse but attempted CPR. He was transported to Harborview by the Fire Department and pronounced dead. The Lime e-scooter involved was not secured as evidence because a homeless man made off with it from the scene while the Fire Department was trying to aid its rider. Our Seattle.
Yes, there are lessons here. One lesson is that Seattle should be fixing sidewalks for everybody’s sake, all over the city, with hundreds of millions of dollars in documented back-logged repair needs. But first, the e-scooter riding on sidewalks midst be put to an end.
When approving SDOT’s proposal in 2020 to invite rental e-scooters to Seattle, the City Council adopted an ordinance explicitly outlawing sidewalk e-scooter riding. It’s already the law. On any afternoon e-scooter riders in South Lake Union speed back and forth on the sidewalks, claiming the yellow ramps installed for disability access as their own dedicated e-scooter runways. Capitol Hill and Belltown are nearly as bad, the U District right behind.
No neighborhood of the city is spared. Deeply, annoyingly, exasperatingly to the ordinary pedestrians who remember when sidewalks were for walkers and walking, their refuge from motorized vehicles. In Seattle, that’s a thing of the past. Quite literally, no one at SDOT has their backs.
Nothing makes a sidewalk more hostile civic space than having an e-scooter rider burst unexpected past a walker from behind, at four- or five-times walking speed. The more e-scooters, the more illegal riding. Seattle now has more than three times as many e-
scooters as Portland, only a slightly smaller city, where Portland Bureau of Transportation proactively manages an e-scooter rental program that seems to satisfy public demand without engulfing Portland in scooter glut.
No one in authority in Seattle has stepped up to manage the sidewalk riding problem. Ask by-standing cops why they don’t write a ticket. The answer as likely as not is they’ve never been told it’s illegal and certainly they’ve been conditioned not to enter the fraught space of risking any hint of enforcement disparity when encountering anyone on two wheels.
For Lime’s and SDOT’s July news, what’s worse? Seattle’s first sidewalk e-scooter fatality? Or confronting a $2.5 million injury payout as marking the tip of the iceberg of e-scooter serious injury. Maybe of the two, the worse is the e-scooter non-stop river of injuries, especially traumatic brain injury resulting from the head-banging nature of e-scooter falls and the near total absence of legally-required helmets on riders.
Speaking on the phone last weekend with the beneficiary of the $2.5 million Lime injury settlement, whom I am sure he would rather not be if he could get a do-over of his life-altering bad e-scooter day, it was easy to respect his wish for protection of his privacy.
Some of the facts, however, can still be shared from the public record. He was riding a Lime scooter that crashed from hitting a pothole on 42nd Avenue SW in front of the Safeway in West Seattle Junction in October 2022. He landed primarily on his head, suffering severe head injury requiring an emergency craniectomy, and also rib fractures, a clavicle fracture, pulmonary lacerations and more. He filed his claim the City of Seattle in September 2023, after months of miraculous recovery in Harborview. The lawsuit against the City followed, finally resolved (but only in a legal sense) in July with Lime’s agreement to pay to settle the case and avoid a jury trial.
Putting this particularly awful case in larger context, a Harborview researcher identified has identified 229 e-scooter injury cases between January 2022 and October 2024 in the Harborview Trauma Registry. These cases were from across King County; a safe supposition is that they were largely from and representative of Seattle. A preliminary presentation of results, still awaiting publication, indicated that three patients actually died at Harborview. Overall, 84% had fractures, 76% had head or neck injuries, including traumatic brain injury.
On a systematic measure of severity widely used in trauma assessment, the Injury Severity Score, almost 20% of the cases were rated as Severe or Very Severe. At what kind of treatment cost? On average, $92,000 per case.
Meanwhile, the Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center has updated its tally of e-scooter injuries of all kinds encountered from to 2020 to 2023 was previously seen in Post Alley. Measuring all manner and level of e-scooter encounters in UW Medicine emergency and urgent care facilities, the count jumped up in 2024 by 35% over 2023, to 351 encounters, bringing the total since 2020 to 850, and that’s not counting Swedish and Virginia Mason, nor any of the injuries that never showed up in the emergency rooms. The news will likely not get better.
Another program at Harborview has surveyed 70 patients with e-scooter related traumatic brain injury to date, in order to focus on long-term outcomes and recovery. A manuscript is in the final phases of being finished. Results are virtually waiting in the wings. Their time on stage is coming.
How does a public agency sleep at night sponsoring a public program facing a July like this July? Whatever it hopes or proclaims the program benefits to be? Even more remarkable for an agency like SDOT that simultaneously touts its Vision Zero traffic safety program, glued to its firm belief: “the only acceptable number of serious injuries and lives lost on our streets is zero.” This SDOT rental e-scooter and e-bike program needs a deep performance audit of actual results versus every one of its claimed expectations, benefits and costs, starting with injury risk.
In assessing the program, one more point needs to be made. That assessment needs to be truly independent and rigorously data-grounded. Program managers’ word-smithed accomplishments write up and PowerPoint slides are not what is required by way of
independent assessment. Charged with running the program they’ve allowed to grow so big (15,500 rental e-sooters and e-bike are now operating in Seattle) they can hardly keep up with the vendors’ blatant disregard for permit compliance — improper parking, for example.
Crucial needs have been disastrously under-budgeted. With a 2025 budgeted total e-scooter/e-bike program spending plan of $1.8 million, $1.1 million of which (61%) is the labor cost for three full-time managers and three part-time student interns.
These well-paid program staff are the last people in whom confidence should be placed by the City Council or anyone else for unbiased hard-headed program assessment. Meanwhile, the entire 2025 budget for a consultant and materials for an outreach safety education campaign? Just $50,000. That’s not enough: fees paid by the vendors should support more than that.
Consider also the user and non-user survey SDOT has been promising for years, and was not done in 2024 when $100,000 was budgeted. For 2025 that budget line has been reduced to zero. But one budget item reliably funded is the annual $12,500 for SDOT’s dues to the non-profit industry trade group, the North American Bikeshare and Scooter Share Association. Supported by industry players, Lime for example, where SDOT’s shared micro-mobility manager has been elected to sit on the association’s board of directors, pledging her interest to be closely connected with industry peers and partners and the advocacy to keep bike share and scooter share “growing for years to come.”
E-mail requests inviting comment for this post have been sent to Hayden Harvey, Lime’s Pacific Northwest director of government relations, and to Stefan Winkler, SDOT’s New Mobility Program Manager, both on the $2.5 million Lime injury settlement and the recent Belltown e-scooter sidewalk riding fatality. Neither has responded.
They should get another chance, as soon as the City Council has stepped up to the need for an independent assessment. Addressed to everyone concerned: all the residents, whether or not they ride e-scooters. All the other elected and appointed public officials charged with protecting public health and supporting safe and efficient transportation. All the vendors. Everybody.
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Agreed. It would be nice if we could enforce a LOT of laws/rules in this city (not just those related to e-scooters and e-bikes). But who is going to do it?
Thank you Doug, I appreciate this update. You’ve probably noticed that Lime has introduced a third vehicle this year, the electric motored no-pedal “Glider”. I’d be interested to know your thoughts as to why SDOT thought there was room in Seattle for yet another e-rental variety.
Thanks again!
I Will Happily Advocate On Injured Persons Behalf & Was Struck By A Driver Barreling Down The Sidewalk Literally Weeks After A Surgery Where 2 -10 Inch Titanium Rods & 36 Screws Were Installed. I Have Pictures Of The Injuries From The Collision & My Teeth Which Ended Up on Sidewalk. Happy To Attend City Council Meeting To Testify.
Thank you, Doug. These scooters and ebikes are health and safety hazards, public nuisances, and eyesores.
The problem is exacerbated by both a lack of accountability on the part of Lime and SDOT, and an absence of reporting on the problem by the media.
We don’t need a survey or consultant to review this data. Follow the lead of Paris, these e-scooters and e-bikes need to go away.
Surprised? I’m certainly not. As it happens I’m the son of a former SDOT employee who retired back in 1982, so I grew up with lots of traffic and transportation discussions, which is why when I saw scooters with one or more persons riding on them, no helmets, sometimes in heels (fancy dressed…) I’ve been saying for years it’s a lawsuit waiting to happen and now I’m even more saddened to learn of the deaths. Oh, and yes, it’s very annoying the way these noncomplying non-licensed individuals take their lives in their hands along with others, innocently walking or even driving. I was on a bus and one of the scooters drove down the ramp from the sidewalk into the street right in front of the bus who thankfully was on top of her game slammed on the brakes, saved that clown’s life…talk about living in a video game… I don’t recall, but he was probably on the phone too.
Thank you for your in-depth report… But I’ve gotta go clean some lime scooters off my parking strip now…
I like the scooters
I use lime scooters and ride responsibly. Without them my commute to work takes twice as long. I qualify for Lime Access making it affordable to use them. Often scooters are moved or pushed over by homeless people or moved about by drug users who use them to move their belongings. Lime helps people get to places transit doesn’t reach. The city has long had bad sidewalks and potholes in its streets so we should be fixing those no blaming lime scooters.
Wait, it’s illegal, as Doug MacDonald writes, to ride your scooter on the sidewalks of Seattle …. unless there is absolutely no other recourse …. due to safety concerns including cracks in sidewalks and roots of tall trees that break up pavement. I’m sad that a young man died at just 35 years (the more he could have done!), and I am deeply sorry for his family’s grief…. but the city of Seattle is absolutely not at fault here….Also I”m glad Lime is paying for the horrendous recovery costs of the person with traumatic brain injuries. Probably neither one was wearing a helmet; as noted, they seldom do.
I’ve had to literally jump out of e-scooters before, on very crowded University Way sidewalks in the U District. Not once, has any e scooter rider called out a warning.
Lots of people love to hate on the scooter share, but as a downtown resident, I think it provides an indispensable public service. Yeah, people are sometimes buttheads when it comes to parking them (but that seems to be true no matter what kind of vehicle you entrust the general public with — see re: cars across sidewalks or in bike lanes). And yeah, a few are also buttheads when they’re sharing space with pedestrians (sorry, I’m not a fan of a strict no-scooters-on-sidewalks rule either — keep it under 5mph, and give deference to pedestrians, and I’m not gonna be mad at you for choosing not to be in the traffic lanes on the Denny or Boren overpasses).
The thing is, I think all this anger at Scooters is misplaced. Everything about our transportation infrastructure favors 6000-pound killing machines that actually do regularly take the lives of pedestrians, bicyclists, each other, and even scooter riders. Anything that gets trips out of cars and into other modes is a net positive. We can make some of the negative things better (the SF bike share program gives you a discount if you return ebikes to docks). The more we invest in protected bike lanes (paint and flex cones are not protection), the more the scooter riders are going to stay off the sidewalks. If there are particularly busy areas with problems with scooters on sidewalks, those should be prioritized for better cycling infrastructure.
Considering how popular the Scooter program is, I’m honestly surprised only 1 person is dying per year on average. It’s probably nearly impossible to quantify, but I wonder how many lives were saved by reducing demand for wider, faster roads.
Doug – Thank you for the time, effort and thought you put into your outstanding piece. More evidence, if any were needed, that you were one of the best WSDOT Secretary’s ever. Your post reflects a rare combination of policy chops, analytical skills, and common sense, a combination vanishingly rare at City Hall these days.
Scooters and e-bikes joined my menagerie of peeves after watching more than one disabled passenger unable to get out of her vehicle, because the curbside was blocked and she couldn’t get to her wheelchair. Apparently SDOT has other priorities.
After too often yanking my dog out of the path of another too-fast, out-of-control scooter on another Seattle sidewalk, it is obvious that it’s time to get these ego trippers into the street for the safety of pedestrians, their children, their dogs, and the scooter operators themselves.
We have created all these bike lanes in the street, how about making the scooters and motorized bikes use them? Scooters et al on the sidewalks piloted by (usually) un-helmeted morons (redundant) are a dangerous safety joke.
Put all these danger-mobiles in there, too. They may as well be out there where they can only run into each other.
Sdot smoothed the sidewalks on s15th last spring but missed a particularly tall spot by Jefferson Park and while my husband and I were walking he tripped on it and banged his knee and broke the screen on his phone. It was even marked with blue paint indicating that it was planed to be ground down as well. Obviously sdot has a lot on their plate to be fair. They definitely have a lot of room for improvement in different aspects of there work. The false sense of security from the whole rest of the street being fixed had a lot to do with it. My husband’s inattentiveness also had a big part in it. Had he been on a e scooter it could have been really ugly. Now not being a driver I can’t really judge what the streets are like in comparison. He rides limes alot more than he walks. Usually bikes thankfully. I don’t think I really can fault anyone for not wanting to ride anything out in the streets considering the reckless, inattentive, inconsiderate and blatantly law breaking drivers I see around Seattle. Just the fact that people are driving in the first place kind of shows a lack of outward thinking considering global warming and it’s effects it has had and will have on other people, and those efforts are even worse for those who don’t have the money for an air conditioned vehicle to lounge in confront from a to b or even a roof over their head to block the ever more oppressive sun from literally killing them. I think that anything to help reduce the damage being done to the planet is worthwhile. All that being said the medical data doesn’t look good for the scooters and it definitely sounds like the people on the scooters are thinking nearly as outwardly as one would hope. Perhaps the scooters need to be removed from the streets. Now if someone wants to risk their own health and safety thats on them but they are welcome to purchase their own scooter. Might encourage them to be a little more thoughtful how they ride. Very informative article thank you for the time and thought you obviously put into it. I had no idea there was such a over abundance of lime vehicles around and the how much they were negatively effecting the other people who are just trying to get around without destroying the planet. Hopefully we all can remember to think about how our decisions send ripples in the pond of existence we all are blessed to share.
I used to love Lime scooters—until one crash in 2021 changed my life. I hit a pothole, suffered a traumatic brain injury, and have never recovered. It ruined life as I knew it.
I’m not against scooters. They may be worth the risk—but right now, we don’t know.
What we do know:
• E-scooter riders are 15x more likely to be injured per trip than car drivers.
• 76% of injuries involve the head or neck.
• Seattle had 229 trauma cases in just 3 years.
Lime operates on public sidewalks we haven’t maintained, without meaningful safety enforcement. Until we have data showing the benefits outweigh the harm, this feels like a public experiment with private profit and real human cost. I used to love Lime scooters—until one crash in 2021 changed my life. I hit a pothole, suffered a traumatic brain injury, and have never recovered. It ruined life as I knew it.
I’m not against scooters. They may be worth the risk—but right now, we don’t know.
What we do know:
• E-scooter riders are 15x more likely to be injured per trip than car drivers.
• 76% of injuries involve the head or neck.
• Seattle had 229 trauma cases in just 3 years.
Lime operates on public sidewalks we haven’t maintained, without meaningful safety enforcement. Until we have data showing the benefits outweigh the harm, this feels like a public experiment with private profit and real human cost.
Recently the city of Woodinville joined in the Lime craze. A couple days later there were 3 scooters parked right in the yellow curb cut at the main intersection in town. So much for the disabled
These incidents, as described, seem to be primarily operator error. I wonder if alcohol and / or excessive speed were involved with any of these accidents. I think to state that Seattle has an excessive number of these devices is overstating the situation. Dublin, London, Lisbon have scooters and e bikes running around everywhere. The difference being, they have dedicated lanes. There isn’t a city on this planet that doesn’t have uneven sidewalks and bad street pavement.
This ‘crisis’ seems to be one of personal responsibility, put a large user warning on them. Ultimately, you can’t fix stupid.