Children's E-Bike Injuries Rose 33 Percent a Quarter at Six US Hospitals, With Twice the Rate of Severe Harm
A JAMA research letter from Stanford-led researchers tracked 13,307 under-18s treated for bike, scooter and skateboard injuries and found electric riders far more likely to suffer brain injuries.
Tuesday, November 3, 2026/2 min read
Electric bikes and scooters are sending American children to hospital at a rate that is climbing every quarter, and the injuries are worse than those from the pedal-powered versions. That is the finding of a research letter published in JAMA on Monday by a team led by Stanford Medicine, which analysed 13,307 patients under 18 treated for bicycle, scooter or skateboard injuries at six US paediatric hospitals between 1 January 2023 and 31 March 2026, Stanford said.
Over that period, e-bike injuries rose 33 percent per quarter and e-scooter injuries 15 percent per quarter, both faster than injuries from non-motorised bikes and scooters. The data came from PEDSnet, a research network of children's hospitals housed at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
How much worse are e-bike injuries than bicycle injuries?
High-severity injuries were recorded in 8 percent of e-bike patients against 4 percent of those hurt on ordinary bikes, and in 5 percent of e-scooter patients against 2 percent on kick scooters. Brain injuries followed the same pattern: 10 percent of e-bike and 9 percent of e-scooter patients, compared with 5 percent and 4 percent for the non-motorised equivalents. Seventeen percent of children injured on e-bikes were admitted to hospital, the highest rate of any group in the study.
The ages are the detail parents will notice. About a quarter of the e-bike injuries and almost half of the e-scooter injuries were in children under 12.
What do the researchers want changed?
The lead author, Alan Schroeder, a clinical professor of paediatrics who treats children in intensive care at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford, called the trend a public health emergency needing a public health solution. He said he thinks children under 12 should not ride any motorised vehicle. His co-author Stephanie Chao, the hospital's trauma medical director, said the children arriving are more and more severely hurt.
Their proposals are concrete: minimum ages for electric riders, speed caps on e-bikes, tamper-resistant controls so those caps cannot be undone, and full-face helmets designed for e-bike speeds. They point to local ordinances already in place in California, where San Diego and Marin counties require riders of faster e-bikes to be at least 16 and San Mateo County is piloting an over-12 limit for certain models, and argue that statewide laws should follow. The letter itself, published online in JAMA, lists ten authors including Frederick Rivara of the University of Washington and Christopher Forrest of PEDSnet.
What the data cannot tell us
The study counts injuries treated at six hospitals; it does not know how many children are riding, so it cannot give a risk per ride or per rider. Some of the rise simply reflects more e-bikes on the road. The severity comparison is more robust, since it is a within-sample contrast between electric and non-motorised riders presenting to the same hospitals, but helmet use was not reported.
This article is reporting on a published study and is not medical advice. Decisions about whether and how a child rides, and about treatment after any injury, belong with the family and a clinician who knows the child.
The policy conversation is already moving. California's county-level age limits are the model the authors want copied, and with injury counts rising every quarter, state legislatures that return in January will have fresher numbers than these to work with.
Published in The Outspoken Digest
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