10 kids died last year from e-scooter and e-bike injuries, data shows

TORONTO - New data highlights how dangerous e-scooters and e-bikes can be for children in Canada. The Canadian Paediatric Surveillance Program says 10 kids died from using these electronic devices in 2025, six of them in Ontario. Twelve more patients were admitted to intensive care units and 26 were treated in the hospital for more than two days.

The total number of severe e-scooter and e-bike injuries last year involving prolonged hospital stays, ICU admissions or death for paediatric patients was 57. The data was included in the CPSP’s annual report, jointly released by the Public Health Agency of Canada and the Canadian Paediatric Society Thursday. Researchers surveyed 800 physicians in the field to gather the information.

The report is one of the first to show the national scale of severe injuries for young people. It doesn’t include data from previous years, but Canadian Institute for Health Information data released a year ago shows hospitalizations involving e-scooters for kids between five and 17 years old had increased from 33 in 2022-2023 to 53 in 2023-2024. These disheartening results came as no surprise to doctors in emergency departments and trauma centers across the country who have witnessed a dramatic rise in injuries associated with these personal powered micromobility devices, which can also include e-skateboards, e-unicycles and hoverboards.

The age minimum for riders in most provinces is 16, yet almost 80 per cent of cases were reported in children under 16, highlighting the need for better policy co-ordination and public education to clearly communicate the laws, the report says. As a pediatric emergency physician at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, Dr. Daniel Rosenfield said he rarely works a shift without seeing an e-scooter injury, an increase that he says has been “essentially exponential” over the last few years.

And he clarifies, that’s not just for something like a broken arm. Almost half of the cases reported in the new data involved a head injury. That could result in a brain bleed, fractured skull or concussion.

Neurosurgery was the most common surgery. “I think we’ve just hit a tipping point where the availability of these devices and frankly, popularity of these devices has just eclipsed what we’ve ever seen before,” said Rosenfield, also chair of the Canadian Paediatric Society’s Injury Prevention Committee.