Toulouse: cars, bicycles or scooters, we tell you which cause the most bodily accidents
Electric scooters and bicycles are often denounced as dangerous in the city. The accidentology figures go against this feeling of insecurity.
Electric scooters, bicycles, new public dangers in the city center? The feeling of insecurity of other street users seems shared, in certain areas. Rue d’Alsace-Lorraine, the space shared between pedestrians, bicycles and scooters is not really reassuring.
Rue Lafayette, between Wilson and Capitole, many bicycle delivery men often tumble too quickly. Ditto for scooters, of which a user even violently hit a young Toulouse girl a few days ago (read elsewhere).
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MAINTENANCE. “A Street Code is being developed in Toulouse, to facilitate cohabitation between users”
“Even if they don’t hit you…”
“Even if they don’t hit you, they come in front of you, and you have to change course, or stop to let them pass,” complains Sylvain, a bank employee who works nearby. The town hall of Toulouse “regularly” receives letters denouncing the dangerous behavior of users of bicycles, electric scooters, or illegal parking. “The cohabitation between street users, in the hypercentre, is a sensitive subject”, concedes Maxime Boyer, deputy mayor of Toulouse in charge of traffic. The town hall, for a time, imposed the introduction of prohibition schedules for two-wheelers, in the Alsace-Lafayette and Wilson sector, on busy days. An abandoned project. “But awareness-raising and verbalization operations take place very often”.
According to figures from the Métropole, scooters were involved in 2% of injury accidents in 2019
Electric scooters and bicycles, vectors of insecurity in the city center, have they really caused more accidents in recent years?
No, if we believe the official figures of Toulouse Métropole. Of the 452 injury accidents recorded in 2019, 80 involved a bicycle, i.e. 17.70% of the total, compared to 401 accidents which involved at least one car (88.72%), or 185 which involved a motorcycle or scooter (40.93%). Scooters? They were only involved in 7 personal injury accidents, less than 2% of the total…
A very high injury rate per trip, according to researchers
Do the figures hide a “hidden” accidentality of scooters, especially for themselves? This is what an American study, pronounced for 6 years, suggests. According to researchers at the University of California, the injury rate from electric scooters is 115 injuries per 1 million rides. This is well above the national injury rates for other modes of transportation: 104 per million motorcycle trips, 15 per million bicycle trips, 8 per million car trips and 2 per million trips on foot.
No self-service scooters in Toulouse
According to the study, before the widespread introduction of electric scooter sharing in 2018, there were at most 13 injuries related to this type of device per year in Los Angeles. Since then, 595 and 672 have been named respectively in 2018 and 2019. The City of Toulouse still refuses the deployment of such fleets of scooters on its territory. Maybe not a bad idea.