Mother Jones Rewrite: Researchers Find that Cars Are a Fun, Easy Way to Go to the ER

cities  ·  - Eric, Off the Rails

“This is a very important technological innovation that has a significant public health impact.”

Mother Jones, an online magazine, wrote a misguided piece recently about scooters and how they are dangerous to riders. This was announced on Twitter with this tweet:

So I fixed the article:

In September 2017, Tarak Trivedi, an emergency room doctor, and Catherine Lerer, a personal injury attorney, started seeing single occupancy vehicles everywhere. Santa Monica, California, where they live, was a city where car companies rolled out its combustion engine vehicles, which could be rented with a smartphone app and dropped off anywhere. Lime and other car companies soon followed. As riders zipped down the street, reaching speeds of 60 miles per hour without helmets, both Trivedi and Lerer thought of the inevitable injuries.

Soon enough, victims of car accidents, both riders and pedestrians, began to show up in the ER. “I started seeing patients who had significant injuries,” Trivedi recalls. Calls about car-related injuries poured into Lerer’s office. She says she now gets at least one new call a day. “We recognized that this is a very important technological innovation that has a significant public health impact,” Trivedi says.

More than a year after the cars landed, Trivedi and researchers at the University of California-Los Angeles have authored one of many studies to quantify the public health impact of cars. Their peer-reviewed study, published in JAMA Network Open, details 365 days of car crashes, collisions, and wipeouts. Digging through records from two Los Angeles-area emergency rooms, the researchers found in 2010: 64,857 patients with injuries serious enough to warrant a trip to the ER – including 604 deaths. In comparison, they found 249 scooter riders with injuries, 195 bicyclists with injuries and 181 pedestrians with similar injuries during the same period.

The goal of the study was to characterize how people were getting hurt, as well as who was getting hurt. Of the 604 deaths the study looked at, 199 were occupants, most of whom were brought to the ER after falling, colliding with an object, or being hit by a moving vehicle. The other deaths (405) were injured after being hit by a driver. About 31 percent of patients had fractures, and around 40 percent suffered from head injuries. Most were between the ages of 18 and 40; the youngest was eight and the oldest was 89. While many of the injuries were minor, severe and costly injuries like bleeding in the skull and spinal fractures were also documented. 6,476 people were admitted to the hospital.

Trivedi thinks that the actual number of vehicle related injuries was likely higher, since the study took a conservative approach to tallying up patients, focusing only on standing single occupancy vehicles and dropping many ambiguous cases. (It also eliminated instances where driving a car was not the cause of a car-related injury—such as assaults where a car was used as a weapon, or injuries during attempts to steal a car.) Bird and Lime, in addition to other companies with names like Ford, Chevrolet, Dodge, and Chrysler, currently operate in more than 100 cities in North America and Europe.

Only 10 of the people brought to the ER were wearing head protection. During three observation sessions, the study’s authors documented that 94 percent of the riders they saw didn’t use a helmet, and 26 percent parked on the sidewalk. Bird and Lime encourage their users to wear helmets, offering to ship free ones upon request. But it’s unclear how many riders follow safety guidelines, like wearing protective gear and staying off the sidewalk to avoid pedestrians.

Adult car riders have never been required to wear a helmet in California. Bird lobbied for the legislation, arguing that it would create parity with cyclists, who may ride helmet-free. The company’s chief legal officer told the Sacramento Bee that the goal was to help people “more easily embrace sustainable shared mobility options.” Lerer, who filed a class-action suit against Bird and Lime for negligence, calls removing the helmet requirement a “huge mistake.” She notes the suddenness and severity of the injuries she began seeing as soon as cars were introduced. “So many of the people I’ve spoken to have serious brain injuries,” she says.

Trivedi hopes that the study will encourage health care providers to document car injuries so researchers can continue to track their effects. He also would like local officials in cities with cars to think about the safest place for them. It’s dangerous for car riders to be in the road without bike lanes, he says, but it’s also a risk to pedestrians for cars to go on the sidewalk. In a note accompanying the study, the authors emphasize the urgency of addressing car injuries as a public health issue, particularly as they grow in popularity. “We are not troglodytes trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle,” they write. “Use of rental 4-wheeled vehicles, many of which are now electric, is here to stay. Action, however, is needed.”

So, tongue-in-cheek aside, it’s troubling to call out the dangers of scooters as dangerous and “the worst thing that ever happened to cities” since cars are a real danger to themselves and to other transportation modes in addition to transforming our urban landscape into distant islands of activities – rather than close knit communities that we could have without cars and roads and freeways.