Dr. Erin Bristow’s first experience with e-scooters was idyllic. She was in Los Angeles while her husband, also a physician, participated in a training session. When he drove the car to work, Bristow spent the day zipping effortlessly around Santa Monica on two wheels.
At a dinner with colleagues, though, she got an earful about the newly ubiquitous rental scooters.
“We were out for dinner with some of the hand surgeons, the orthopaedic and plastic surgeons, and they heard that I was commuting through Santa Monica on scooters,” Bristow said. “They were horrified, because they were seeing all these injuries.”
Back in Edmonton and seven years into this city’s experience with e-scooters, Bristow knows first-hand what those California doctors were talking about.
An emergency department physician at the University of Alberta Hospital, Bristow treats dozens of injured riders each year with a startling array of injuries — many made worse by risky behaviours associated with the battery powered conveyances.
As statistics show, E-scooter injuries are on the rise across Alberta, with Edmonton now leading the way.
According to data from Alberta Health Services, 1,198 people were admitted to emergency departments or urgent care centres in Edmonton in the most recent fiscal year (April 1, 2025 to Feb. 28, 2026), up from 813 the year before. Many of those were children: 136 were admitted to Stollery Children’s Hospital, compared to 61 in 2024-25.
The number of e-scooter injuries Alberta-wide increased 33 per cent over the same period, from 2,282 to 3,049.
Injuries on e-scooters often go far beyond scrapes and bruises, said Bristow. According to a 2025 study she co-authored in the Canadian Journal of Surgery, of the 759 Edmontonians who suffered e-scooter injuries in the three years following their 2019 introduction, 62 per cent had more than one injury. Fractures (32 per cent) and head injuries (17 per cent) were among the most common.
The number of emergency department and urgent care centre visits provincially, broken down by zone, for e-scooter injuries by fiscal year. SOURCE: Alberta Health Services
The victims tended to be young, with a median age of 28, with a roughly even male-female split. Twenty per cent showed up in an ambulance — an indicator of both the severity of injury and the strain on medical resources.
“We don’t have enough ambulances,” Bristow said. “We’re always waiting for ambulances, so that’s a significant burden to the healthcare system.”
While just 5.5 per cent of those injured were formally admitted to hospital, 30 per cent required some form of follow-up care, while nine per cent needed surgery within a month of their visit.
“These are young, young people, sort of prime of their lives, having these injuries,” she said.
(In the sample Bristow studied, e-scooter injuries were the second most prevalent behind cycling injuries, ahead of dirt bikes and ATVs).
Bristow couldn’t say for certain why Edmonton saw such an increase in injuries over the past two years, but an increase in privately owned e-scooters — which tend to have higher top speeds than public rental options — could be one factor.
“The risk of injury with those is very, very high,” she said.
Bristow is not-anti scooter. Instead, she thinks there needs to be broader understanding of how serious people can be hurt on the devices. That could reduce risky behaviour, like riding without helmets or after drinking or using drugs. In the 2025 study, just two per cent of victims had head protection, while more than a quarter were impaired in some way.
“It’s not that I think we cannot use scooters,” she said. “I think that it’s just that we need to do it in a safer manner. Because the injuries that we’re seeing with these can be life-changing.”
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