According to a study by the University Hospital Essen, apparently more people have accidents with e-scooters than are recorded in the official statistics.

Head injuries are often the result, in the cases recorded in the study the drivers almost always did not wear a helmet.

The authors of the Essen accident surgery recommend a helmet requirement for the scooter.

The most common cause of accidents with e-scooters with their comparatively small wheels was said to be falling over curbs that were too high.

This should be taken into account in future traffic planning and the expansion of cycle paths.

For the study, the large Ruhr area clinic recorded all patients who reported to the emergency room after e-scooter accidents from June 15, 2019 to the end of October 2020.

In a second step, these 68 scooter drivers who had had an accident were asked by telephone whether they had reported their accidents to the police.

Almost three quarters (73.5 percent) of the accidents were not reported to the police, according to the result.

Since the Essen emergency room study does not record all but only seriously injured scooter drivers, it can be assumed that there will be significantly more scooter accidents than previously known.

The Federal Statistical Office first reported official accident figures for 2020 at the end of March last year.

According to this, there were 2,155 e-scooter accidents with personal injury nationwide that year, 566 of them in NRW and 21 in Essen.

According to the Essen study, 70 percent of the injured scooter drivers (48) had to be hospitalized, 20 underwent surgery and 8 came to the intensive care unit.

The head, cervical spine and upper extremities were most frequently injured.

Only one of the 68 e-scooter drivers involved in an accident wore a helmet, although several studies have shown that this can significantly reduce the severity of injuries.

On the other hand, accident victims included for comparison who were traveling by bicycle or e-bike wore a helmet in more than 50 percent of the cases in the same period.

According to the Essen study, 11.8 percent of scooter drivers had an accident while under the influence of alcohol (8).

Half of these alcohol-related accidents involving e-scooters resulted in serious head injuries.

All of these accidents happened over the weekend or a holiday.

The authors of the study therefore recommend more inner-city checks of e-scooter drivers at weekends.

Münster: Blind people complain about obstacles caused by e-scooters

In the meantime, the city of Münster has to decide again on a ban on e-scooters with station-free rental systems in the city area, as demanded by blind people.

This was decided by the administrative court of the North Rhine-Westphalian city, according to a statement on Thursday.

Specifically, it is about an application from the Blind and Visually Impaired Association of Westphalia, whose members would be “unexpectedly and in constantly changing places on sidewalks” by the stationless e-scooters “obstacles and barriers in the way”.

The association was not able to credibly claim a ban on scooters in the so-called free-floating system.

It is also at the discretion of the competent authority to order the removal of disruptive e-scooters.

However, the city of Münster exercised this discretion “not free of legal errors”, it said.

A blanket reference to the self-commitment of scooter operators is not sufficient.

One in three operators in Münster does not even have specific regulations or agreements in the case of e-scooters parked in a way that obstructs them.

The city itself is of the opinion that the scooters repeatedly lead to traffic delays and accidents.

According to the administrative court, there is a lack of "effective control" of the self-commitment of the operators to remove disruptive scooters.

An appeal against the decision can be lodged with the Higher Administrative Court for the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.