Call for more rigorous reporting of e-scooter collisions

A safety advisory group is urging the UK government to strengthen its reporting of e-scooter collisions and injuries.

The independent Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety (PACTS) says better reporting of collisions is required to tackle the continuing issue of unsafe e-scooter and opportunities for casualty data to be collected must be increased.

E-scooter datasets

The study, Comparing police and hospital e-scooter casualty datasets, builds on PACTS’ research into the safety of private e-scooters. In the report, PACTS points out that:

• records from the Government’s e-scooter rental trials, designed to “build robust evidence about the safety” cannot be readily matched with official data
• casualty data must be collected more rigorously during the trials, recently extended to May 2026, to increase understanding of the hazard and danger of e-scooter use.

It has investigated the extent of under-recording of injury collisions involving e-scooters by analysing data from two months in late 2021. It looked at 300 casualties recorded by hospitals across the UK, police records and data from the rental trials to identify matches between the different datasets.

“Transport is an evolving environment. With technological development, as well as incentives from other policy areas, mobility choice is changing”

Recording the number of people injured in road traffic collisions involving e-scooters means the risk of harm to the rider and the risk of harm to other road users can be better understood.

The official data for all road traffic casualties, regardless of type of mobility, are based on police records. It has long been recognised and accepted that when comparing the official data with the number of people presenting at hospital with an injury from a road traffic collision, there are discrepancies.