Reported road casualties Great Britain: e-Scooter factsheet year ending June 2021
Published 25 November 2021
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This publication is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casualties-great-britain-e-scooter-factsheet-year-ending-june-2021/reported-road-casualties-great-britain-e-scooter-factsheet-year-ending-june-2021
About this factsheet
This factsheet examines the main trends in collisions involving e-scooters and the casualties involved. Please note that we don’t distinguish between trial and privately owned e-scooters in this analysis.
The full datasets used to produce this analysis can be downloaded from the open datasets.
E-scooter users are one of the vulnerable user groups. They are not protected by a vehicle body in the same way car users are, and tend to be harder for drivers to see on the road. They are, therefore, particularly susceptible to injuries.
Things you need to know
Provisional figures
Figures in this factsheet are provisional and are based on data supplied by police forces at the 1st November 2021. Figures will change following updates from the police and the end of year validation process. There are some missing months of data for some police forces, and no imputed data has been used to adjust for this within this factsheet. This is unlikely to affect the national trends but will have a bigger impact on figures for some individual police force areas and it is likely that these figures underestimate the true number of e-scooter casualties as a result.
Severity adjustment
This factsheet provides an estimate of the number of personal injury road traffic accidents involving e-scooters, in Great Britain, in the year ending June 2021 using the STATS19 reporting system. The figures are based on adjusting figures reported by the police for slight and serious injuries to take account of changes in the reporting of injury severity by some police forces in recent years. These adjusted figures can reliably be used to compare trends over time across the country. They are based on what we estimate the totals would be if all police forces were using injury-based severity reporting systems. More information on the change and adjustment process is available in the severity adjustments section.
Main points
In the year ending June 2021:
- there were 882 accidents involving e-scooters, of these 173 were single vehicle accidents, this is around 20% of all e-scooter accidents
- there were 931 casualties in accidents involving e-scooters, of these 732 were e-scooters users
- of the 931 casualties, 3 were killed (all of them were e-scooter riders)
- our best estimate is that there were 253 seriously injured and 675 slightly injured casualties.
Reported accidents and casualties involving e-scooters
Table 1 shows the number of reported road casualties in accidents involving e-scooters in Great Britain in the year ending June 2021, by road user type. Excluding e-scooter casualties themselves the main other road users involved in accidents involving e-scooters are pedestrians and cyclists.
Table 1: Number of reported casualties in accidents involving e-scooters, by road user type, Great Britain: year ending June 2021
| Road user type | Killed | Serious (adjusted) | Slight (adjusted) | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| E-scooter user | 3 | 199 | 530 | 732 |
| Pedestrian | 0 | 37 | 94 | 131 |
| Pedal Cyclist | 0 | 14 | 22 | 36 |
| Car Occupant | 0 | 0 | 13 | 13 |
| Motor Cyclist | 0 | 2 | 9 | 11 |
| Van Occupant | 0 | 0 | 4 | 4 |
| Other Vehicle Occupant | 0 | 0 | 3 | 3 |
| Bus Occupant | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 |
| Total | 3 | 253 | 675 | 931 |
Chart 1 shows the number of reported casualties in accidents involving e-scooters from January 2020 to June 2021. There has been an upward trend in the last 18 months with 2 dips during the second and third lockdowns.
Chart 1: Reported casualties in accidents involving e-scooters by month, Great Britain: 2020 to 2021
Chart 2 shows the number of reported e-scooter user casualties, by age and sex in Great Britain in the year ending June 2021. There are more male than female e-scooter user casualties, especially amongst those aged between 10 and 39.
Chart 2: Reported e-scooter user casualties, by sex and age, Great Britain: year ending June 2021
Note: cases where the casualty age and sex are unknown have been removed from chart 2.
Chart 3 shows the number of reported casualties other than e-scooter users in accidents involving e-scooters by age in the year ending June 2021. Casualties are spread across all age groups with the 3 biggest categories being 30 to 39, 50 to 59 and 10 to 19, respectively.
Chart 3: Reported casualties other than e-scooter user involved in e-scooter accidents, by age, Great Britain, year ending June 2021
Note: cases where the casualty age is unknown have been removed from chart 3.
Chart 4 shows the number of casualties involved in e-scooter accidents by time of the day, in the year ending June 2021. There is an upward trend starting at 6am and ending at 4pm, followed by a downward trend from 4pm to 10pm. There are 2 peaks, the first one at 8am with 50 casualties and the second one was at 4pm with 100 casualties.
Chart 4: Casualties in accidents involving e-scooters by time of the day, Great Britain, year ending June 2021
Table 2 shows the number of reported accidents involving e-scooters by police force in Great Britain, in the year ending June 2021. The Metropolitan police reported over 53% of all casualties involving e-scooters in Great Britain, this compares to 22% of all casualties reported by the Metropolitan police. The rest of the e-scooter casualties were broadly spread proportionately across the remaining 43 police forces, with the highest percentage of e-scooter casualties being reported in West Midlands, Hampshire and Sussex police forces, nevertheless these percentages are almost at the same level as all casualties reported by these police forces.
Table 2: Reported casualties in accidents involving e-scooters by police force, Great Britain, year ending 2021
| Police force | Involving e-scooters | Involving e-scooters (% of GB) | Involving any vehicle | Involving any vehicle (% of GB) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Avon and Somerset | 21 | 2.3% | 2,382 | 2.0% |
| Bedfordshire | 13 | 1.4% | 1,434 | 1.2% |
| Cambridgeshire | 11 | 1.2% | 1,679 | 1.4% |
| Cheshire | 4 | 0.4% | 1,722 | 1.5% |
| City of London | 8 | 0.9% | 107 | 0.1% |
| Cleveland | 1 | 0.1% | 821 | 0.7% |
| Cumbria | 2 | 0.2% | 949 | 0.8% |
| Derbyshire | 11 | 1.2% | 2,042 | 1.7% |
| Devon and Cornwall | 10 | 1.1% | 3,695 | 3.1% |
| Dorset | 17 | 1.8% | 1,396 | 1.2% |
| Durham | 0 | 0.0% | 831 | 0.7% |
| Dyfed-Powys | 0 | 0.0% | 595 | 0.5% |
| Essex | 26 | 2.8% | 3,480 | 3.0% |
| Gloucestershire | 3 | 0.3% | 922 | 0.8% |
| Greater Manchester | 7 | 0.8% | 3,392 | 2.9% |
| Gwent | 1 | 0.1% | 763 | 0.6% |
| Hampshire | 35 | 3.8% | 3,474 | 3.0% |
| Hertfordshire | 14 | 1.5% | 2,042 | 1.7% |
| Humberside | 5 | 0.5% | 2,226 | 1.9% |
| Kent | 27 | 2.9% | 4,734 | 4.0% |
| Lancashire | 17 | 1.8% | 3,301 | 2.8% |
| Leicestershire | 14 | 1.5% | 1,425 | 1.2% |
| Lincolnshire | 0 | 0.0% | 1,916 | 1.6% |
| Merseyside | 0 | 0.0% | 2,228 | 1.9% |
| Metropolitan Police | 496 | 53.3% | 25,666 | 21.8% |
| Norfolk | 9 | 1.0% | 1,748 | 1.5% |
| North Wales | 1 | 0.1% | 855 | 0.7% |
| North Yorkshire | 1 | 0.1% | 1,557 | 1.3% |
| Northamptonshire | 10 | 1.1% | 1,025 | 0.9% |
| Northumbria | 10 | 1.1% | 2,247 | 1.9% |
| Nottinghamshire | 25 | 2.7% | 2,205 | 1.9% |
| Police Scotland | 5 | 0.5% | 4,872 | 4.1% |
| South Wales | 6 | 0.6% | 925 | 0.8% |
| South Yorkshire | 4 | 0.4% | 2,629 | 2.2% |
| Staffordshire | 1 | 0.1% | 930 | 0.8% |
| Suffolk | 1 | 0.1% | 1,292 | 1.1% |
| Surrey | 9 | 1.0% | 2,935 | 2.5% |
| Sussex | 31 | 3.3% | 3,986 | 3.4% |
| Thames Valley | 26 | 2.8% | 3,301 | 2.8% |
| Warwickshire | 2 | 0.2% | 1,106 | 0.9% |
| West Mercia | 6 | 0.6% | 2,009 | 1.7% |
| West Midlands | 36 | 3.9% | 5,834 | 5.0% |
| West Yorkshire | 4 | 0.4% | 4,019 | 3.4% |
| Wiltshire | 1 | 0.1% | 936 | 0.8% |
| Total | 931 | 100.0% | 117,633 | 100.0% |
Background information
“E-scooters” are not one of the designated vehicle types collected in a STATS19 reportable accident, as such they would be classed as other vehicle and can only be identified using a free text field.
The “Other vehicle” category was introduced in 2011 to replace the previously collected vehicle types Other motor vehicle and Other non-motor vehicle. A free text field was introduced at the same time to provide insight into what other vehicles were being recorded.
The description is mainly used by the department to assess whether new vehicle types need to be captured and to reclassify existing “Other vehicles” into one of the defined vehicle types. For example, even though mobility scooters have their own category, a number of these end up in the other category each year and are reclassified by the department.
The free text field cannot be automatically validated in the same way as the designated vehicle type data, and therefore not as robust as published vehicle statistics. Therefore, using this text does require some investigation and validation. Unfortunately, the word scooter is not exclusive to one type of vehicle and depending on the context used, it could be used to describe a variety of vehicles including some motorcycles (those that have a step-through frame and a platform for the rider’s feet to rest on); mobility scooters and traditional stand on scooters. Stand on scooters can also have different methods of propulsion (petrol, electric or physical effort). Guidance has been issued to all forces to ensure they capture more than just the word ‘scooter’ in the free text description when recording this.
It should be noted that there might be a considerable percentage of non-fatal casualties that are not reported to the police. Non-fatal casualties for e-scooter users are amongst the most likely to be under-reported in road casualty data since they have no obligation to inform the police of collisions. This should be borne in mind when analysing and interpreting the data.
More information about the strength and weaknesses and definitions related to road casualty statistics can be found in reported road casualties in Great Britain, provisional estimates: year ending June 2021
Feedback
We welcome further feedback on any aspects of the department’s road safety statistics including content, timing, and format, via email to the road safety statistics team
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