Atlanta Experiences Its First E-Scooter Death; Highlights Need for Infrastructure Changes

ATLANTA, GA – According to an online report at atlanta.curbed.com, Atlanta experiences its first e-scooter death.*

Atlanta experienced its first e-scooter death, which highlights the need for infrastructure changes. Specifically, a twenty year old man was exiting a parking lot of the West Lake MARTA Station when he was hit by a Cadillac SUV and later succumbed to his injuries, according to the Atlanta police.  The twenty year old was aboard a Lime e-scooter when he was struck by the vehicle.

The company Bird introduced e-scooters in Atlanta last year.  Since then, one local hospital has administered medical treatment to approximately eighty to one hundred scooter individuals who were injured as a result of being involved in e-scooter accidents, per the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

This past March, the Atlanta City Council adopted an ordinance that requests records of e-scooter related injuries from area hospitals so that it can examine how to appropriately regulate these dangerous vehicles.

How to regulate these vehicles has been the subject of great debate. One recent regulation enacted by the Atlanta City Council was to ban e-scooter operators from riding and parking their e-scooters on the city’s sidewalks.

One area of West Lake Avenue where the twenty year old was killed does not have any bike lanes.  It simply has two passenger vehicle lanes going southbound, which was the direction that the Cadillac was supposedly going

The accident involving the twenty year old not only highlights the need to more heavily regulate the use of e-scooters, it also suggests that the design of Atlanta’s streets and how vehicle operators use them should be further examined.

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Source:https://atlanta.curbed.com/2019/5/20/18632353/e-scooter-death-infrastructure-improvements-complete-streets