Safety of Micromobility: Regulations, Data and Stakeholders 

Introduction

The goal of this research is to provide general guidance and relevant information to improve safety for micromobility riders, particularly on e-bikes, and e-scooters. The objectives include: identifying regulatory and data gaps, quantifying injury patterns, mapping policies across states and gathering stakeholder priorities. This work emphasizes the need for regulation alignment among federal, state and local ordinances and establishing data sharing standards to prevent riders’ injuries, expand access and adopt scaled educational programs for the safer operation of micromobility devices.

Methodology

This project followed four primary research tasks: literature review to synthesize prior findings, a 50-state regulatory scan and interactive policy map documenting legal variation, a multi-source data analysis linking crash data and unstructured crash narratives, parsed with Large Language Models to hospital discharge records in Tennessee to recover undercounted micromobility incidents, and stakeholder engagement via focus groups with planners, operators, federal agencies and advocates to surface regulatory and operational barriers. Findings were summarized at the end of each chapter to produce policy, data, and infrastructure recommendations.

Key Findings

Findings suggest that while micromobility offers a sustainable alternative to traditional car travel, its safety benefits are currently compromised by outdated infrastructure, fragmented regulatory definitions, and severe data underreporting.

• The proliferation of high-speed, aftermarket-modified devices has outpaced the existing three-class e‑bike classification, creating a grey market of Out-of-Class vehicles.
• Demographic analysis reveals a notable injury skew: while males aged 18 to 34 represent the highest frequency of incidents, older adults (65+) experience a disproportionately higher severity of head, neck, and torso trauma. Across all cohorts, the lack of standardized reporting codes leads to frequent misclassification of devices as bicycles or pedestrians.
• The regulatory gap is a primary driver of the emerging youth safety crisis, as parents often purchase high-speed devices for minors without understanding the road safety implications.
• Safety improves drastically when riders are removed from mixed-traffic environments and placed in physically separated lanes. However, a divergence exists between shared-use (rented) and privately owned models; rented devices frequently congest sidewalks, while private high-speed devices lack a designated legal operating space.

Read the full report for policies and regulations, data linkage methods and recommendations to help cities, state agencies and operators create safer micromobility systems.