“Accident in Ostercappeln: 85-year-old pedelec driver dies”https://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/.”Two e-bikers seriously and life-threateningly injured after an accident near Königsbach-Stein”https://www.sueddeutsche. de/panorama/.”Head injury: E-scooter driver crashed in Apolda with 1.45 per mille”. These reports all come from Germany on Wednesday last week. But they could come from any day, because the police report accidents with e-scooters and e-bikes every day.
The electric vehicles were one of the great hopes of the traffic turnaround. They could be “a real additional alternative to the car,” said the then Federal Transport Minister Andreas Scheuer (CSU) before their introduction in 2019. Instead, they usually replace the (sometimes drunk) footpath or public transport, as studies soon showed. They annoy townspeople who have to step over broken scooters on the sidewalk, and they are increasingly involved in accidents.
As the The Federal Statistical Office reported on Tuesday in Wiesbaden, the number of accidents involving pedelecs, as e-bikes or electric bicycles are also known, has risen sharply since 2014. Accordingly, these accidents often had more serious consequences than those involving bicycles without a motor. Bernhard Veldhues, who heads the “Economic Structure and Transport” group at the Federal Statistical Office, sees one reason for this in the older age of e-cyclists. After all, motorized two-wheelers are particularly popular with seniors, and the older the rider, the higher the likelihood they’ll be seriously injured in a fall, Veldhues says. Of the 131 e-cyclists who died in 2021, almost 70 percent were older than 65 years. But the number of younger people injured is also increasing: in 2014, every ninth person who had an accident with a pedelec was under 45 years old, by 2021 around every fourth.
Young drivers in particular have accidents with the e-scooter
In the same period, the number of pedelec accidents involving personal injury has increased almost eightfold (from around 2,200 to 17,300), which is probably also due to the fact that more and more pedelecs are being sold and used. With normal bicycles, the number of accidents fell from around 77,000 to 68,000. However, all of this relates only to cases recorded by the police, and that is likely to be less than a quarter of the actual number, according to trauma doctors at the University Hospital in Essen in January in a study appreciated.
Siegfried Brockmann, Head of Accident Research at the insurers, therefore finds “more offensive communication” about the benefits of a helmet to be sensible. “Legally, a pedelec is a bicycle,” said Brockmann of the German Press Agency. This means that helmets are not compulsory, despite the sometimes higher speed. “The question is whether it can stay like this in the long run,” says Brockmann. Helmets could also significantly reduce the risk of serious injury in the event of a fall with an e-scooter, as crash tests have shown.
The e-scooters, those scooters with an electric drive that have been flooding the cities for several years, are particularly popular with teenagers and young adults. It is not surprising that the people who were injured (4882) or killed (five) on an e-scooter in 2021 were 31 years old on average, i.e. significantly younger than those who were involved in accidents with a bicycle. In the big cities, you often see young people in twos, sometimes in threes, riding on what is forbidden. According to the current statistics, the most common reason for an accident, apart from using the road incorrectly, was the influence of alcohol. With e-scooters, as with cars, the 0.5 per mille limit or 0.0 per mille applies during the probationary period and under 21 years of age – if you even have a driver’s license. After all, 14-year-olds are allowed to steer the scooters.