\u201cI\u2019ve seen many injuries that permanently change people\u2019s lives. We take care of healthy people who come in after a bike or scooter crash with a severe brain injury. Sometimes these individuals require emergency surgery,\u201d Weiss said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Weiss and colleagues even released a study in April about the alarming trend. The team analyzed 914 patients treated for injuries linked to both pedal-powered and electric micromobility devices<\/a> at NYC Health + Hospitals\/Bellevue over five years from 2018 to 2023.\u00a0<\/p>\n The study found that e-bikes and scooters are driving a sharp rise in serious brain and spine injuries at one of the busiest hospitals in NYC: Health + Hospitals\/Bellevue in Lower Manhattan. Nearly 7% of trauma admissions involved micromobility crashes, with pedestrians often suffering worse brain injuries than riders.<\/p>\n The share of trauma cases seen in Bellevue\u2019s emergency room \u2014 whether patients were admitted or not \u2014 that involved such devices increased from less than 10% in 2018 to more than 50% by 2023.<\/p>\n \u201cThat was one of the major takeaways from the study,\u201d Weiss said. \u201cWhen we broke it down by year, in 2018, we only saw 7.9% accidents that involved any sort of electric bike or scooter, and it went up to 55% by 2023.\u201d<\/p>\n Pedestrian injuries, per the study, were especially severe, Weiss explained.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n \u201cAnother important takeaway from our study is that the group of people that actually did the worst with medical outcomes or severity of injuries was actually people who were not riding a bike or scooter but instead just walking across the street and hit by a bike or scooter,\u201d the doctor said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Roberta Simon knows the pain of an e-bike collision all too well. She told amNewYork she was out for a run in Central Park in Aug. 27, 2024, when a teenager riding an e-bike collided into her. She does not remember much from the collision, but recalled waking up days later in Mount Sinai Hospital.\u00a0<\/p>\n The young cyclist remained at the scene when police arrived to take a report. Simon said she suffered a brain bleed and needed 40 staples in her head. She spent about a week in the hospital, but later needed to be readmitted due to her sodium levels being dangerously low.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cTwo days later, I had to be rushed back to the hospital,\u201d she recalled. \u201cI spent another almost week there.\u201d\n<\/p>\n Simon suffered temporary hearing loss as a result of her injuries.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a little surreal. I\u2019m just now starting to be better about it,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was bad\u201d\n<\/p>\n Danielle Defoe, MD, the associate trauma medical director at Jamaica Hospital, told amNewYork that she has seen a significant increase in collisions involving micromobility devices. Like Weiss, she has seen the number of injuries creep up each year.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I looked back at our data, in 2021 and 2022, we were only seeing between 30 and 40 patients a year from these accidents. But in the past year, we saw over 100 patients,\u201d Defoe said. \u201cIt\u2019s a pretty significant increase in the number.\u201d<\/p>\n Even though the statistics pertain only to Jamaica Hospital, DeFoe said it is likely that many hospitals across the city have been seeing increases, too.<\/p>\n Some of the most common micromobility device-related injuries treated at Jamaica Hospital include fractures and traumatic brain injury. The ages of patients run the gamut.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a mix,\u201d the doctor said. \u201cThe thing about these e-scooters and e-bikes is that it\u2019s easy for people of any age to get on. So we\u2019re seeing a mix that way. There are pediatric patients, ages 15 and 16, to 60s and 70s.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Defoe said the patients include micromobility device users who are hit by other vehicles, as well as pedestrians hit by e-bikes and e-scooters.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n What does the Department of Transportation say?<\/strong><\/p>\n When amNewYork contacted the NYC Department of Transportation (DOT), the department\u00a0said that as of July 1,<\/a>\u00a0fatalities involving riders of e-bikes, stand-up scooters, and mopeds have increased from 16 to 18 compared to last year, though they remain below the 23 recorded at this point in 2024 and 2023.\u00a0<\/p>\n Collisions without deaths have also increased, according to the NYPD\u2019s latest statistics<\/a> as of July 5. E-bike crashes jumped to 491 this year, compared to 358 during the same time last year. Stand-up scooter crashes also increased during the same period, from 510 to 677.\u00a0<\/p>\n Moped collisions decreased this year, dropping from 814 in 2025 to 562 in 2026.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n Vincent Barone, a spokesperson for DOT, sent amNewYork a statement discussing safety improvements to city streets:\u00a0\n<\/p>\n \u201cWe applaud Bellevue Hospital for this important study, which aligns closely with our data and reinforces the importance of our Vision Zero work and building safe streets. The Mamdani administration has been working with urgency on a multi-pronged approach to improve our street infrastructure, remove illegal devices from our streets, and champion legislation to finally hold app companies accountable for incentivizing unsafe riding behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n NYC DOT penned a letter<\/a>\u00a0to app companies reminding them they are legally required to provide safety equipment to workers and ensure the workers take a new NYC DOT safety training.\u00a0Mayor Zohran Mamdani also said in March<\/a> he would work with the NYC Council to address the \u201croot causes of unsafe e-bike and cycling delivery practices.\u201d<\/p>\n As for the doctors, they say raising awareness about safety is key.\n<\/p>\n \u201cI just don\u2019t think the public is aware of the true rules of e-bikes, and they are not really obeying the rules of the road,\u201d Defoe explained, as she has seen riders not staying in the bike lane, weaving through traffic and going through red lights when they think it is safe.\u00a0<\/p>\n The doctor added that she and her team of injury-prevention specialists raise their own awareness of staying safe on the road, including wearing a helmet and follow traffic laws.\n<\/p>\n \u201cWe try to reeducate people every time we see them to try and reinforce the rules to try and prevent something worse from happening,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Emergency and trauma doctors in NYC are warning that injuries from e-bike crashes and other micromobility device collisions…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":808173,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,76603,32898,376511,376512,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,303986,376513,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":["post-933736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-america","tag-bellevue","tag-department-of-transportation","tag-e-bike-crashes","tag-jamaica-hospital-medical-center","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-newyork","tag-newyorkcity","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-nyu-langone","tag-traditional-bikes","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116917001831322449","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/933736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=933736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/933736\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/808173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=933736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=933736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=933736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"an](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/DOT-240229-Public-E-bike-Charging-Stations-Pilot-014.jpg\" "\\"Doctors")
Public E-bike charging stations at Cooper Square, Manhattan.NYC DOT<\/p>\n![\"exterior](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/jhmc-building-front.jpg\" "\\"Doctors")
Jamaica Hospital Medical CenterPhoto credit: Jamaica Hospital Medical Center<\/p>\n