If the “EDPM” category includes all motorized personal transport vehicles, and lists both accidents occurring on board a monowheel, a Segway, a hoverboard or an electric scooter, it is the latter that causes the more accidents, being much more used than the others.
With 22 deaths involving this type of device in 2022 compared to only ten in 2019, the category is particularly exposed and a real cause for concern as the figures concerning it are alarming.
And it is not the recent study carried out by the anesthesia-resuscitation services of the Paris hospitals (AP-HP) and published in the journal JAMA Network Open, which will reassure us. Indeed, the Traumabase research group, from the Pitié-Salpêtrière AP-HP hospital, Sorbonne University and Inserm, studied the severity of injuries following road accidents involving personal motorized transport vehicles, and its conclusions are rather disturbing.
According to this study including all patients admitted to one of the 26 AP-HP trauma centers and participating in the study following an accident with an EDP, a bicycle or a motorcycle between 1er January 2019 and December 20, 2022 (i.e. 5,233 patients), electric scooter accidents cause injuries as serious as those resulting from a motorcycle accident.
And the figures are striking: 45.5% of patient drivers of an EDPM had severe head trauma, compared to 39.7% for motorcyclists. This figure is partly explained by the fact that only 25% of accident victims in EPDM were wearing a helmet at the time of the accident.
With often long hospitalization (15 days on average), three-quarters of the victims of an accident involving an EDPM were taken care of in the intensive care unit.
In two-thirds of the cases, people injured in EDPM and admitted to the services of Parisian hospitals also needed surgery, whether following fractures of the limbs, or in neurosurgery following significant head trauma.
Finally, 9% of seriously injured EDPM users died, the majority as a result of serious head trauma.
Figures that send shivers down your spine and which really raise the question of the obligation to wear a helmet on this type of machine since common sense and individual responsibility seem to be too often lacking. A solution which seems obvious and which, however, remains absent from the Government’s measures concerning the supervision of the use of EDPMs.
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