SF General Hospital has been seeing many scooter-related injuries.[1] The chief of emergency medicine reported three scooter related emergency room visits on one Friday - two concussions, no helmet use.<p>Such injuries used to be tallied as "other", because they were rare. SF General has started keeping statistics on small powered vehicle accidents.[2]<p>The emergency medicine people are saying "helmet". They can fix most other injuries, but not brain damage.<p>The high-tech solution to this comes from Hovding.[3] They make an automatic inflatable helmet that inflates like an air bag if you fall. It's available in Europe and Japan, but not the US. €299. It's impressive, but not as good as a hard helmet. It fails US helmet tests.[4] Good idea, needs more work. Startup potential.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Injuries-are-the-untold-part-of-the-scooter-13219335.php" rel="nofollow">https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Injuries-are-the...</a>
[2] <a href="https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2018/08/411406/scooter-safety-ucsf-doctors-track-new-injuries" rel="nofollow">https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2018/08/411406/scooter-safety-ucsf...</a>
[3] <a href="https://hovding.com/" rel="nofollow">https://hovding.com/</a>
[4] <a href="https://www.helmets.org/hovdingcommenttocpsc.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.helmets.org/hovdingcommenttocpsc.htm</a>
Riders ride on the sidewalk because it's far more dangerous to ride on the street... cars are already not paying attention to bicyclists/motor cycles, are we to expect them to pay attention to scooters?
This type of thinking would do humanity a lot of good if applied to cars & rules of the road. In my opinion using a public resource (roads) you should be compelled to follow the rules<p>- Speed Limits<p>- Stop Signs<p>- ...
the goal for supporters of such approaches is not safety, but rather control. new things signal a changing of the guard (no matter how remote the possibility), and they oppose it by reflex. grousing about blocked sidewalks and people getting hit by scooters is largely the brain rationalizing the underlying instinct so as to provide ego coherence (i.e., "i am a good and safe person" rather than "i'm trying to preserve my status in the world").<p>many people want scooters (along with bikes and e-bikes). it fills an important missing middle between walking and driving. the better approach is to replace parking lanes on city roads with a grade-separated (from both regular roads and sidewalks) lane for these missing middle modes of transportation.<p>as for road safety, strict imposition of the kind of regulation noted in the article actually creates danger. the reason we have such powerful engines in our cars is to provide headroom to accelerate out of accidents (where braking out of them would be difficult or impossible).<p>i'd be all for much harder driving tests, where licensees show a mastery of control over the vehicle in difficult conditions, much like commercial pilots. i'd also support stricter enforcement of distracted driving laws (rather than speed enforcements). those would actually help reduce auto deaths.