‘Exponential rise’: Canadian pediatricians document severe e-scooter injuries, deaths in children, teens

As e-scooters become increasingly common across Canada, pediatricians, emergency physicians and other experts warn that injuries — often severe and involving younger people — are rising, while regulations struggle to keep pace.

Dr. Daniel Rosenfield, a pediatric emergency physician at SickKids hospital in Toronto and chair of the injury prevention committee for the Canadian Pediatric Society (CPS), says he has seen “a complete exponential rise” in every type of injury that can result from an e-scooter crash — from minor scrapes to major brain injuries and death. 

Bad injuries used to be “once in a blue moon,” he told CBC News. Now, “anytime we get a call from EMS that says, ‘E-scooter trauma inbound,’ we’re prepared for severe injuries,” he said.

E-scooter injury cases at SickKids rose from 26 in 2023 to 46 in 2024 and 107 in 2025, Rosenfield said.

“And this year we’re likely on target for more than that.”

The experience is mirrored across Canada and around the world. A CPS survey of Canadian pediatric specialists, conducted from late 2025 to early 2026 and published Thursday, documented 10 deaths, 12 ICU admissions and 26 hospitalizations lasting more than two days over the previous 12 months as a result of e-scooter crashes. Head injuries were present in about half the cases.

“The vast majority, if not all, are unhelmeted,” Rosenfield said.

The most severe injuries tended to involve boys between 10 and 15 years old, he said.

The CPS survey records the experience of pediatric specialists rather than providing a rigorous quantitative analysis. But a separate study published Tuesday in the Emergency Medicine Journal provides multi-year hospital administrative data from three U.K. hospitals that closely aligns with what Canadian pediatricians are seeing.

That study found e-scooter cases at hospitals in Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield rose from fewer than 10 in 2019 to almost 150 in 2024. Head injuries were among the most severe, and fewer than two per cent of those injured were wearing helmets.

From 69 km/h to a critical care unit

That U.K. data mirrors what Canadian families are experiencing firsthand.

Just over a year ago in London, Ont., Crystal Dunkley’s son Shaun was not wearing a helmet when he took a family friend’s e-scooter out for a ride one evening, as he had done many times before.

That evening, Shaun, then 12, hit a raccoon as it ran across his path.

“He believes he was going 69 kilometres an hour when this happened,” Crystal Dunkley recalled in a video interview Wednesday.

An ambulance rushed Shaun to the Children’s Hospital in London, where he was intubated and admitted to the Pediatric Critical Care Unit with a fractured skull. He was in a coma for over a week.

“The doctors told us that with the brain bleed they determined he had, there was a possibility he would not make it, and if he did, then he would likely be very disabled,” Crystal said.

Shaun ultimately recovered completely after 34 days in Children’s Hospital and more time at a rehabilitation facility in Toronto. Crystal said he now approaches people riding e-scooters on the street and tells them to wear a helmet. 

“Not a day goes by that I don’t see multiple young children riding them without helmets, sometimes two or three to a scooter,” Crystal said. “Some of these scooters can go … like I said, the one he was on was going 69 kilometres an hour.”

‘Anything but toys’: Why regulation is lagging behind

Most parents are surprised by the extent of their child’s injuries, Rosenfield said.

“And to be fair to the families, these devices are often marketed as toys,” he said. “And as a device that can go zero to 40 kilometres an hour in a number of seconds, I will tell you they’re anything but toys.”

The CPS survey also notes that younger people may be less familiar with road rules, less risk-averse and at greater risk of injury because of their developmental stage.

But it also argues there are problems with rules and laws, describing them as “unclear and made up of a patchwork of regulations, varying depending on the province/territory.”

The minimum age for riding an e-scooter varies by province, while some cities have banned the devices altogether — though those bans are often ignored. Several provinces, including B.C., Ontario and Quebec, cap e-scooter speeds at 24 or 25 kilometres per hour.

“I can tell you for sure people go faster than that,” Rosenfield said.

Rosenfield is not advocating for an e-scooter ban, pointing to their utility to complement public transit and reduce automobile traffic. 

“I do think they have a use in an urban environment,” he said. “I just think we need to figure out what that looks like and how to make those devices safe.”