The dangers of riding electric scooters
Motorized scooters at Fresno State have been adopted into the school’s culture over the years.
People zoom through the sidewalks, streets and sometimes indoor areas of campus. Oftentimes, in places that are designated wheels-off zones.
These zones were put in place in high foot-traffic areas and places with tight corners in order to prevent collisions.
Scooter collisions are much more harmful than many may realize.
According to Janell Morillo, the associate vice president of student health and wellness at the Student Health and Counseling Center (SHCC), there have been over 120 scooter-related incidents since 2023.
There have been a variety of major injuries over the years.
“There have been students, certainly with broken bones,” Morillo said. “There was a student that broke a leg. We’ve had a student that broke their arm. Those are pretty serious. But even more serious is probably students that were hit and potentially hit their head.”
Head injuries can create long-lasting issues for students. Fabian Dominguez is a music education major who was an avid scooter rider.
One day he was involved in a serious collision. He doesnt remember what happened.
“It messed me up really bad, especially because of the concussion,” Dominguez said. “I could not think straight for a while. It just for a while I was doing really bad in school just because I was so caught up in everything and I was just so scared.”
This issues is being taken head on and in a preventative manner.
The Director of Medical services at the SHCC, Dr. Robert Mitchell, frequenlty attempts to persuade people to ride scooters in a safer manner.
“What we relayed to all patients that we encounter, accident or otherwise, is sometimes I just ask students, ‘do you have a scooter?’” Mitchell said. “And if they’re even coming in for a cough and cold, we may get into a conversation where I asked, ‘do you have a scooter?’”
These conversations often fall on deaf ears according to Mitchell and all that can be done is to keep spreading the word.
The trend of scooter collisions is subject to change though, following the campus-wide motorized vehicle ban.