Santa Monica is your typical California beach town. It's seaside boardwalks are lined with palm trees, fringed by milky sand, always packed with people. If you wander along the beach path, you end up at the world famous pier, which has started shows like Baywatch and movies like Forrest Gump. The pier is full of food stands, fishermen, tourists and street performers, guys like Davey Peterson. I'm a street performer on the Santa Monica Pier in California. I sing and dance. I
do hip hop, pop rock and Latin musy. Baby, how was I? That's so? Davey's got this dramatic act. He's out there shirtless and oiled up and a gladiator style skirt and a mask of zoro hat, dancing, kicking and singing like he's in a karaoke bar. He's been dancing on the pier for years now and says a new crowd has encroached on his turf lately, people writing electric scooters. I was performing for a group of people, maybe several dozen, when I was hit from behind by a bird scooter.
Santa Monica became ground zero for the electric scooter sharing boom last September when a startup called Bird began spreading the vehicles all around town. And as I was lying there on the deck, I looked up and I saw a young man with a scruffy beard looking down at me from a Bird scooter. And he looked down at me and he said, what the f dude, and then he took off. So it was a hit and run. It was only the next morning the davy realized how
badly he'd been hurt. So I went to the emergency room at u C l A, where I found out that had a broken arm and that my right bicep had actually been severed from my lower arm. I had to have my biceps surgically reattached to my lower arm, and that's a major surgery that takes at least a year and a half to two years to completely recover from. Hi. I'm Joshua brusting in for Bradstone and Olivia Cavill, and this week on Decrypted, we're exploring the unintended consequences of
a sudden rise of scooterter sharing services scoota. Startups like Bird, Lime, Scutin, Spin have arrived in over a hundred cities around the world. While some people think scooters could usher in a whole new era of urban transport, others view them as a danger. Patients with scuota related injuries have been streaming into emergency departments,
with everything from gravel rash to concussions. These injuries are obviously unintended, and although some might argue they were foreseeable with scooters, the question now becomes are these things as safe they should be and who bears responsibility for the accents that do happen stay with us. Starting late last year, scooters appeared virtually overnight in dozens of cities around the US.
Many people love jumping on a scooter and cruising to their next destination, or just scruising around for as little as a couple of bucks. Then they could leave the scooter wherever they liked, ready for the next rider to pick up. Here was a service that was an immediate
hit with consumers. It was also one that should have appealed to city officials in search of ways to reduce car use, or at least that's what the invistas who poured hundreds of millions of dollars into them saw the first two scooter sharing companies, Bird and Lime, said they were shocked by the unexpected and instantaneous public enthusiasm for their product. They were also taken aback by how polarizing
they became. Scooter companies have drawn criticism as law breakers because they often failed to run their plans by city officials. People who didn't use the scooters saw them as an eyesore in a nuisance, and within months, sensational stories about grizzly scooter injuries were hitting the headlines. Safety issues were driving a major backlash from city governments in Santa Monica and elsewhere. Officials rushed to set up permit programs and
begin quizzing applicants about their plans for public safety. Scooter companies have always said they're doing their best. They've suggested people wear helmets and even given away helmets for free, but their biggest message on safety is that scooters aren't actually the problem carsa and reshaping the streets to make them safer as a job for the city governments themselves. Hundreds of scooter injuries have been reported in the United States.
Getting a total headcount is nearly impossible, though, because no one's compiling firm statistics. I've heard stories about elderly pedestrians being knocked unconscious on footpaths, teenagers with severe facial burns, writers with no helmet flying head first over handlebars, and in some cases, even death. This morning, we are waiting to learn the identity of a twenty one year old killed in a crash in Cleveland over the weekend. Yeah,
she was hit downtown writing an electric scooter. A man riding an electric scooter is dead after being hit by an Suvly is a sad first for Dallas. A writer of the new electric scooters died after falling. It happened over the weekend. I spoke to a physician in Atlanta who recently treated a patient with a traumatic brain injury
who was unconscious for days after an accident. Another doctor said that more than a hundred patients have wound up in one emergency department in Los Angeles from scooter related injuries, with some learning and intensive care for weeks. Wally Gurabi, an emergency room doctor at one of u c l A's medical centers in Santa Monica, told me the most
common scooter injuries are usually to the face. Just think about you know your face, landing on the asphalt, danting your face and tattooing your face with all sorts of uh, you know, lacerations that will take a plastic surgeon to work for hours and try to clean your face and get the dirt off your face so you don't tattoo for the rest of your life, he said. He says a lot of orthopedic injuries that happen when people stretch
out their arms while trying to break their fall. You start by breaking your wrist as one, then transmit the force to the elbow and then transmitting all the way to the shoulder along the ribs, breaking the ribs, the ribs sponsoring your lung. After we started looking into scooter injuries, people came out of the woodwork willing to share their personal stories. We heard from Daria Kent in California, Victor San Andreas and New York and pay to Flex and
Los Angeles. I took the scooter out of the car and I was scooling down the hill going home and the breaks launch on their own. As about that time, my scooter power kicked in, took off at full speed and I fell off the scooter and he had a big smile on his face just went to kind of a look of terror, and then he just smashed right into the front of my bike. I don't remember anything
up to the point where I was flying in the air. Unfortunately, my helmet didn't protect my chin and it was severely bruised, swollen, numb, and purple for several weeks. I think the only thing keeping my teeth from shattering where my invisiligned braces. I gotta had a concussion because I hit my face and my right to nail came off. And I am now in six weeks of painful physical therapy so I'll be able to bend my leg as I'm learning to be able to walk again, and my left hand I have
berminent damage my small finger. Um. I cannot make a fifth anymore. He landed on his forehead, and he was laying on the pavement, um with his forehead bleeding and and initially in a really unresponsive state, his eyes rolling around a bed and um and just not really moving his body, um um, just looking to be in a state of shock. It's pretty gruesome, but it's important to put these anecdotes into perspective. People have taken well over twenty million rides on Lime and Bird in less than
a year. For context, in more than one thousand cyclists were killed in the United States, and there were almost four hundred and seventy thousand cycling related injuries, according to the Centers for Diseased Control and Prevention. Interestingly, doctors told me that you're actually more prone to accidents riding a scooter than a bike. When you're peddling on a bike, your entire body is engaged, you're paying more attention to
your speed and other hazards on the road. But on a scooter you kind of lulled into a sense of complacency, just relaxing, cruising along, pushing a button to accelerate. Then when you do hit something or knocked off the scooter, you fall unprepared, unengaged, and more often than not, unprotected because most people don't use helmets. When I've been on
a scooter, I didn't have one around. But actually not wearing a helmet is by far the biggest safety issue, according to pretty much all the doctors I spoke to. You know, we can fix broken bones in the arm and shoulder, and we can stitch you clean you up. Wow. You know if you beat in your head, there's always some damage that you're not going to be able to that that will be ferment. All scooter writers in California have been required to wear a helmet by law, but
Bird recently convinced the state to change the rules. Governor Jerry Brown signed the bill last month that allows adults to cruise California streets on scooters without a helmet, just like the cannon bikes. It takes effect on January one. Okay, so scooters aren't as safe as they should be. I think that's actually something that pretty much everyone agrees on. The scooter companies say that a big part of the answer is for cities to create protected lanes and do
other things to slow cars down. Bird didn't make anyone available for an interview, but they did send a statement in which a company spokesperson said, as Bird partners with cities, we are putting safety front and center of what we do.
But Taylor Bennett, director of public Affairs at Lime, so the responsibility laid both with private companies and city officials, and so there's an onus on us, and there's a notice on cities to really make sure that we're putting safety first, and we are looking at our roadways in a way that considers these new mobility options. Urbanists have
been talking about this for decades. American cities are fundamentally built for cars, so for now, scooter writers in many cases have to choose between sharing the road with cars, which is dangerous, or sharing the sidewalk with pedestrians, which is both dangerous and illegal. The scooter companies have been careful to limit their own legal responsibility. Both Bird and Lime have clauses and their user agreements steering riders into
binding arbitration. They also have clauses prohibiting class actions, but the strength of those agreements is already being challenged by personal injury lawyers like Katherine Leara, who was based in Santa Monica. When I saw these scooters out on the street in front of our house, I immediately thought, Wow, these are dangerous and someone's going to be injured. Soon after that, Catherine put a page up on her website calling for scooter victims to get in touch, and she
said the response was swift. The phone started ringing and they haven't stopped since then. Catherine says she's now receiving a call a day from a fresh scoot of a dim. She blames the companies, which she says is putting profit over public safety. Earlier this month, Catherine filed a lawsuit against burden Lyme on behalf of nine people who have been injured by scooters, one of them as Our Street
performer Davy Peterson. Catherine said she plans to file at least a dozen more personal injury claims and coming months. I fully placed the blame on the scooter companies for the injuries that are happening. They dumped these scooters on the cities without first consulting with the cities and making sure the proper rules and regulations were in place um and so the cities were blindsided by these and had to scramble to educate the public about the rules that
apply and come up with new rules that apply. And so, had they worked with the cities before they dropped these scooters, I think a lot of these injuries would have been avoided. Cities are catching up to the scooter craze by launching silet programs. In August, Santa Monica launched a pilot that allows two thousand scooters from four companies, Bird, Lime, Lift
and Jump. Portland Oregon also has a pilot program underway, and so does l A. To name just a few, scooter companies say they're writers will be safer as more scooters hit the streets and drivers get used to seeing them in the road. They also say education campaigns and better scooters will also improve safety. Taylor from Lime told me the company has just released its third generation scooter,
trying to make them safer with every upgrade. Lime's latest model comes with bigger tires which are more durable to potholes, breaks on the back wheels not just the front, a sturdier frame, and jewel suspension. And Taylor also said they always advise riders to wear helmets. Our stances, you should always be wearing helmets. We just ordered a quarter million helmets and going to give those out at the local level,
making sure folks have access to free helmets. Taylor told me that he knows helmets don't look cool and that they're kind of awkward to carry, so the company is investigating collapsible helmets as a future option. The scooter companies are also calling on local officials to make city infrastructure more scooter friendly. They want protected bike lanes and designated parking to protect both riders and pedestrians. I asked Taylor whether the company knew putting these scooters on the streets
would inevitably result in some accidents. Yeah. I think when you roll out a new technology, there's going to be um some positives and some and some things that require some fixing and tweaking. And you know, this is brand new, like as quickly as it unfolded. It's it's our job to help address those and and that's you know, with our new scooter and all of the safety products, and
that will continue to evolve and be enhanced. So I used to ride a push scooter to school when I was a little kid, but I have never been on an electric scooter. I know that you recently went to San Francisco. Yeah. I think one of the things that you'll immediately notice from being on one is that that memory of being a kid and being on a scooter, and it's a good thing or a bad thing. I mean, I'm an adult man and I'm riding on a scooter. It felt a little bit silly, but it's kind of fun.
Put me in like the moment, were you on the sidewalk, were you on the road, how are you riding it? Yeah, so when I was there, I had read up on scooters with a a little bit and knew that you were not supposed to be on the sidewalk. So I grabbed the scooter. I went straight into the street and I took off. There was a bike lane on the street I was in, so that was fine. It starts off really quick. I was a little bit surprised by that.
And then it took me like a half a block or a block, and then I felt like I was cruising around pretty comfortably. Then I cut onto a street that didn't have a bike line and it was pretty narrow, and then I got nervous. The cars seemed very close and you really feel exposed. Yeah. One of the things I'd be afraid of it was someone opening up a car door and just knocking me out. Yeah. Absolutely. Um And for me, like, I had a backpack on, so that was fine. But I think people who are carrying
things might have trouble. Yeah. I feel like i'd struggle because I usually carry a handbag to work, and I was thinking if I was going to ride one on that kind of mile distance that I walk from the subway stop to the office, I don't know where i'd put my bag. Yeah, my my three year and a half year old daughter actually commutes to school on a scooter. It's not an electric scooter, but and she carries a bunny, obviously, and so we tie the bunny's arms around the handlebars,
and that works for her. Maybe that would work for your bags. It's so cute. So we have scooters in over a hundred cities around the world, and for most of the people I talked to, they believe that scooters are here to stay and that they're going to be a permanent fixture in our cities. Do you do you actually think that they're going to change the way we move? Yeah, you know, I do think that there is some something
to this argument. In San Francisco, where I wrote on them, there's this this distance about half a mile too, maybe two miles. It's too long to walk, you don't want to get in a car, Trains not going to take you there, And having these scooters all over the place, at least downtown, you could just jump on one and ride there in five minutes or whatever. It felt good like this was actually a practical way to get around
in a dense city center. So let me ask you, likes someone who hasn't been on a scooter and has just spent a while kind of really delving into how dangerous these things are, do you think that the fear of injury might keep you off of them. I think it was definitely a bad idea for me to talk to doctors about traumatic brain injuries where patients were unconscious for days before I even jumped on board a scooter.
I like the idea of them. I think that they would be really fun to ride, but I'm also an overly cautious person, so I feel like, after all these interviews, I'm definitely not going to get on board. So one less rider, one least writer, for sure. So let's get back to another scooter skeptic. David Peterson, the street performer who got hit on the Santa Monica Pier. He had a few ideas for measures his city should consider, and I think that the scooters should be required to have
license plates. When I was lying there on the deck looking up at the person who hit me, there was no way to identify him once they took off. The scooters should also have to make a little noise, like a hum or something, so you can hear them coming. Davy's right that pedestrians will have to learn to look out for scooters as they zip by, but ultimately the decision to jump on board comes down to the writer.
If people don't feel safe on scooters, that could be a big problem for the companies, no matter who is technically to blame. Would I get on any scooter again, or even suggest somebody else did, No way, not on a bet. I think I'll stick to skydiving. And that's it for this week's scripted Thanks for listening. Have you been in a scooter accident? We want to hear your story. You can email us at decrypted at Bloomberg dot net or I'm on Twitter at lib Carbo and I'm at
Joshua Breustin. If you're a fan of the show, please take a moment to rate and review us. It helps new listeners find the show. This episode was produced by Peter Gadkari and Magnus Hendrickson. Our story editor was Anne Vandermy. Thanks also to Brad Stone, Aki Ito, Emily Busso, and Liz Smith. Francisco Levi is head of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll see you next week.