{"id":997905,"date":"2026-08-13T10:13:11","date_gmt":"2026-08-13T10:13:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/997905\/"},"modified":"2026-08-13T10:13:11","modified_gmt":"2026-08-13T10:13:11","slug":"opinion-latest-death-involving-an-e-scooter-is-a-wakeup-call-for-chicago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/997905\/","title":{"rendered":"Opinion: Latest death involving an e-scooter is a wakeup call for Chicago"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alarm bells are sounding in Chicago as another family lays a child to rest after an electric scooter collision. The tragic accident<\/a> marks the third fatal youth e-scooter injury in Chicago this year. <\/p>\n

Our city is not alone in the trend of increasing e-scooter injuries. Nationwide, pediatric scooter injuries<\/a> have increased by 2.4 times since 2020, resulting in thousands of injuries. As injury prevention experts, we recognize that many of these injuries \u00ad\u2014 particularly injuries leading to death \u2014 are preventable with appropriate safety measures such as helmets, age restrictions and access to biking lanes.<\/p>\n

While youths and adults view e-scooters and electric bikes as fun, accessible modes of transportation, they can pose a serious health risk to riders. As physicians, we see this in the emergency department on a regular basis. Whether we are resetting broken bones or ordering scans to assess for brain bleeds, we have seen how access to e-scooters has outpaced regulatory policies to ensure that these vehicles are used safely among youths. The worst occurrences ultimately result in fatality.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Typically, when we hear a patient is at our trauma center because of an e-scooter accident, we expect to treat common broken bones or scrapes that come from a fall. However, we have increasingly begun to anticipate life-threatening injuries such as skull fractures, brain bleeds and severe traumatic brain injury. This year, on a busy trauma shift, one of us cared for a youth who died from scooter-related injuries.<\/p>\n

While the loss of all patients is challenging for the care team, we feel a distinct sorrow for patients who die from a preventable cause. This feeling also ripples throughout the community, casting a shadow on fellow classmates, family and loved ones.<\/p>\n

It is vital that caregivers of youths, the public health community, legislators and healthcare providers mobilize now to prevent another life being lost too soon. Nationally, emergency medicine physicians are doing so by advocating for improved helmeting<\/a> and educating parents of the risks involved with e-scooters.<\/p>\n

In response to concern over the influx of e-scooters, Chicago launched the E-Scooter Safety Campaign<\/a> in May. It includes rider education material and signs, ongoing commitment to expanding bike lanes and more regulation on sidewalk riding. Additionally, the state of Illinois recently passed a bill, SB3484<\/a>, that classifies and regulates micromobility devices such as e-scooters. The bill restricts sidewalk riding of e-scooters in an effort to prevent injury to pedestrians. However,\u00a0 the bill does not implement restrictions aimed at reducing collisions between e-scooters and motor vehicles \u2014 the No. 1 cause of e-scooter fatalities. The bill also lowers<\/a> the driver age for low-speed e-scooters from 18 to 16, expanding youths\u2019 access statewide to scooters.<\/p>\n

While these programs are a step in the right direction to improving e-scooter safety, Chicago should also consider policies designed around the developmental needs and behaviors of youth. This could include stronger age restrictions for high-speed devices, requirements for helmet use among minors, targeted safety education in schools and youth-serving organizations, and greater oversight of e-scooter companies\u2019 marketing and accessibility to younger riders. Importantly, these policies should be informed by injury data so that resources are directed toward the neighborhoods, populations and circumstances where injuries are occurring most frequently.<\/p>\n

While micromobility devices such as e-scooters pose a new public health threat, we have examples of effective injury prevention strategies that can inform how Chicago responds. For decades, public health interventions that combined community education, resource allocation and policy change have sharply lowered the death rate in youths from bicycle accidents to roughly 100 deaths per year nationwide. A similar approach can be leveraged to prevent e-scooter accidents.<\/p>\n

As physicians, we should not have to tell another family that their child\u2019s death was the result of an injury that could have been prevented. The alarm bells are sounding, and we should be listening.<\/p>\n

Dr. Narmeen Khan is a pediatric emergency medicine physician at the University of Chicago. Dr. Symphony Fletcher is an emergency medicine resident physician at the University of Chicago.<\/p>\n

Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here<\/a> or email letters@chicagotribune.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Alarm bells are sounding in Chicago as another family lays a child to rest after an electric scooter…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":997906,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5124],"tags":[960,399800,29653,250141,62600,5386,1818,399801],"class_list":["post-997905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-chicago","tag-chicago","tag-e-bikes-chicago","tag-e-scooters","tag-electric-bikes","tag-electric-scooters","tag-il","tag-illinois","tag-pediatric-scooter-injuries"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117087673542131382","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/997905","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=997905"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/997905\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/997906"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=997905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=997905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=997905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}