A sweeping new national study has put hard numbers behind what emergency doctors have been warning about for months: children and teenagers are being hospitalized after electric bike and scooter crashes at a rapidly accelerating rate — and when they do crash, their injuries tend to be worse than those of kids on ordinary bikes.
The research, led by Stanford Medicine and published November 2 in the journal JAMA, drew on the medical records of more than 13,000 young people treated at six large U.S. pediatric hospitals. It found that e-bike injuries climbed roughly 33% every quarter across the study period, while e-scooter injuries rose about 15% per quarter — increases the authors describe as “exponential” and “substantially higher” than the rise in injuries from non-motorized bikes and scooters.
It is the largest, most authoritative look yet at a trend BikeTips has been tracking all year, from a 300% jump in youth e-bike injuries reported earlier in 2026 to a single-hospital study showing e-bikes hurt kids worse than e-scooters. This time the signal is national, and it is hard to argue with.
What Happened
Stanford Medicine researchers used PEDSnet, a research network that aggregates near real-time electronic health records from leading U.S. children’s hospitals. They examined 13,307 patients younger than 18 treated between January 1, 2023 and March 31, 2026 for injuries involving e-bikes, non-motorized bikes, e-scooters, non-motorized scooters and skateboards, then compared how often each group needed urgent care, an emergency department or hospital admission.
“Over that period, e-bike injuries increased by 33% per quarter, and e-scooter injuries increased by 15% per quarter,” said lead author Alan Schroeder, MD, a clinical professor of pediatrics who treats children in the intensive care unit at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford. “Those increases were substantially higher than comparable increases in injuries from non-motorized bikes and scooters.”
Because dedicated medical codes for e-bike and e-scooter injuries only appeared in 2022, this kind of trend has been hard to measure until now. National injury registries often lag one to two years behind; the PEDSnet data ran through March 2026, giving researchers an unusually current picture. Co-author Stephanie Chao, MD, a pediatric trauma surgeon and the trauma medical director at Packard Children’s, put it bluntly: “We’ve been seeing more and more kids on e-bikes, both on the street and in the hospital. These kids are coming in with increasingly severe injuries.”
Why These Crashes Hit Harder
The headline is not just that more kids are crashing — it is how badly they get hurt. High-severity injuries affected 8% of patients injured on e-bikes, double the 4% seen with non-motorized bikes. For scooters the gap was similar: 5% with e-scooters versus 2% with push scooters. The study defined “severe” as injuries requiring intensive-care admission, major neurologic, vascular or internal injuries, traumatic amputations, severe crush injuries, or fractures needing surgery.
Brain injuries were especially telling. They were roughly twice as common among motorized riders — affecting 10% of kids hurt on e-bikes and 9% on e-scooters, compared with 5% and 4% on the non-motorized versions. And 17% of all e-bike injuries ended in a hospital admission, the highest rate of any group in the study. The extra speed and weight of a motor, it turns out, changes the physics of a fall in ways a helmet alone cannot fully offset.
The Under-12 Problem
Perhaps the most alarming finding concerns the youngest riders. About a quarter of e-bike injuries, and nearly half of e-scooter injuries, occurred in children under 12 — an age group that, in many cases, is legally too young to ride the more powerful classes of e-bike at all.
“It’s crazy to me that a quarter of our e-bike injuries and almost half of our e-scooter injuries are happening in kids who are so young,” Schroeder said. “I honestly think that kids under 12 should not be riding any form of motorized vehicle.” The authors also flagged a problem BikeTips readers will recognize from our coverage of illegally fast machines seized by police: some e-bikes can be easily tampered with to exceed their speed limiter. “We should not build bikes where kids can do a little adjustment and up the speed to 40 miles per hour,” Schroeder said. “There should be safety guards you cannot undo.”
Why It Matters
Schroeder did not mince words, calling the trend “a serious public health emergency that needs a public health solution.” That framing matters because it shifts the conversation from individual bad luck to design, regulation and education. E-bikes are one of the fastest-growing categories in cycling, and the same features that make them brilliant for commuting adults — instant torque, 20-to-28 mph assistance, heavier frames — are exactly what make them dangerous in the hands of an unsupervised 10-year-old.
Regulators are starting to respond. A handful of California counties now restrict faster e-bikes to older riders: San Diego and Marin require riders of higher-speed models to be at least 16, and San Mateo County is piloting a rule limiting certain e-bikes to those over 12. The study’s authors argue those “common-sense” measures should be statewide — and the research gives lawmakers the evidence base to act.
What This Means For You
If there is a young rider in your household, this study is a practical checklist, not just a scare story. A few steps make a real difference:
- Match the bike to the age and the law. Know which class of e-bike you own and whether your rider is old enough to use it legally where you live. A Class 3 (28 mph) machine is not a kids’ bike.
- Buy the right helmet, not just any helmet. Chao warns that “many parents have no idea that e-bike riders might need different helmets than regular bike helmets.” Faster e-bikes call for helmets with more head and face coverage — look for a NTA-8776 (speed-pedelec) rated lid for higher-speed models.
- Lock down the speed. Don’t let kids defeat the limiter, and favor bikes whose speed settings cannot be easily altered. Tampering is directly linked to the most serious crashes.
- Teach the rules of the road. “Kids know a red light means stop, but they may not realize that, on an e-bike, they have to obey the same road rules as other vehicles,” Schroeder said. Treat an e-bike like a vehicle, because legally it often is.
- Supervise the youngest riders. With so many injuries in the under-12 group, the simplest intervention is also the most effective: keep motorized vehicles away from small children, and ride with them until they have the judgment to ride alone.
It is also worth keeping an eye on recalls and build-quality issues — as our report on the recall of nearly 20,000 Trek and Electra e-bikes showed, even a well-made machine can develop a safety fault that turns a routine ride into an emergency.
Key Takeaways
- A Stanford Medicine-led study in JAMA (Nov. 2, 2026) found youth e-bike injuries rising about 33% per quarter and e-scooter injuries about 15% per quarter.
- Motorized rides are more dangerous: 8% of e-bike injuries were high-severity vs 4% for regular bikes, and brain injuries were roughly twice as common.
- 17% of e-bike injuries led to hospital admission — the highest rate of any group studied.
- Around a quarter of e-bike injuries and nearly half of e-scooter injuries involved children under 12.
- Doctors recommend age limits, tamper-proof speed controls, proper high-coverage helmets and traffic-rule education to curb what they call a “public health emergency.”
Source: Stanford Medicine, reporting on research published November 2, 2026 in JAMA, led by Alan Schroeder, MD, and Stephanie Chao, MD, with the PEDSnet pediatric research network.
