Study of the week

As startups like Lime and Bird have blanketed urban streets with motorized scooters, researchers have had little way of quantifying their safety. Now, a team of California researchers has published the first such study, which found 249 scooter-related injuries reported at two Los Angeles emergency rooms over a period of about a year. Most of the patients were riders, and most had fractures or head injuries. Keep in mind, though, that had LA's scooter riders instead been riding in cars or motorcycles during the duration of the study, some of them surely would have been hurt that way, too.