Experts Warn of Risks Posed by Scooters

WASHINGTON — Dr. Deborah Levine wonders how many of the kids who get scooters for Christmas will wind up in her emergency room.

Ann Brown, chairwoman oj the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission, wonders how many will wind up in her accident statistics.

Both say that the lightweight scooters, although fast and fun on their low-friction, inline-skate-type wheels, have risks that the young riders and their parents might not realize. And they say the scooters require safety equipment that the parents may not have bought.

Levine, a pediatric emergency room physician at Bellevue Hospital Center in New York City, lives seven blocks from the ER. “I would pass 10 scooters on the way to work,” she said. “I’d be walking to my shift and I’d say, ‘I’m going to see some of those kids, I bet.’ ”

Brown’s agency includes scooters as a category when it tallies emergency room visits from product- or activity-related injuries. CPSC reports nearly 30,000 scooter-related injuries and three deaths so far this year.

Although some adults ride the scooters, about 85% of the ER visits are by children under 15, Brown said. “Our experts estimate 60% could be prevented or reduced in severity by using safety gear,” she said.

CPSC recommends a bicycle helmet that meets the agency’s safety standards. “And make sure you have elbow and knee pads,” Brown said. “All of this, including the helmet, costs less than $35.”

CPSC has been tracking scooter injuries since the agency began in the early 1970s, said spokesman Mark Ross. But sales of the new, spiffier scooters took off just last year--”the business went from zero to $200 million practically overnight,” Brown said. Some 5 million scooters may be sold this year, she said.

The scooter fad is so new that people, especially kids, don’t know how to handle them, Levine said. Scooters’ small wheels are prone to get stuck in sidewalk cracks or ricochet off stones, said Ross.

Kids ride them not just on the sidewalks of old New York but in the streets, which worries Levine. “They should all be riding in parks, away from vehicular traffic,” she said.

Children may not have the capacity to realize the risk they face, Levine said. She recalled one child who failed to get off his scooter as a car approached. He was hit and broke many bones. His friends, who were with him in the intersection but on foot, ran out of the way, she said.

And children may not be coordinated enough to stop a scooter well, Levine said. “We had children who crashed into walls because they didn’t get to brake in time,” she said.

Adults who use scooters to commute faster through city traffic may also face problems, said physical therapist Teresa Schuemann of Bingen, Wash.

Scooter riding may lead to stress injuries from overuse, Schuemann said. All the starting and stopping is done with the same leg, as the other rests on the scooter’s low platform, and the rider is slightly off-balance because the propulsion leg is lower. This puts more stress on some parts of the propulsion leg than on others, she said. The result could be compression injuries to the outboard side of the knee, as well as ligament and tendon tears, she said.

Consumer Product Safety Commission news release on scooters:

https://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/prerel/prhtml00/00178.html

American Physical Therapy Assn. news release on scooters: https://www.apta.org