Personal injury lawyers throughout the Los Angeles area are licking their chops. A windfall of new tort cases, big and small, will be thrust upon them with the meteoric rise in the use and misuse of electric powered scooters around town on our city streets, sidewalks and bike paths.
These scooters – mostly Bird and Lime brands – are potential health hazards to their riders, pedestrians, cyclists, and other living creatures. The scooters are everywhere these days, and parked often indiscriminately, dotting L.A.’s major thoroughfares, including the likes of La Cienega, Lincoln, Pico and Venice boulevards.
Sooner or later some shoppers along these retail corridors will trip over a haphazardly parked scooter, take a fall and break a bone or two while exiting a clothing boutique or drug store or restaurant or movie theater.
Worse could happen when a scooter plows into someone or something – a wall, a car, a telephone pole – at 10 miles per hour or more. There are going to be broken backs, necks, and fractured skulls for some people for starters. Personal injury attorneys thrive on this sort of stuff around L.A. Their phone lines and email accounts are standing by waiting for the latest mishap.
The web of tangled civil lawsuits will escalate into the foreseeable future. Grandmothers, recently plowed into by mechanized scooters will sue those carelessly steering them. Retailers will be sued for having scooters indiscriminately parked on premises, causing falls and injuries to patrons. Scooter users will sue motorists for injuries occurring on streets, and vice versa.
Our city thoroughfares have enough problems to navigate without thousands of movable electric gadgets dodging in and around traffic. Compounding the problem is most scooter drivers don’t wear protective headgear, which will undoubtedly cause more and greater traumas.
Those injured will turn to lawyers and sue the corporations that own the scooters and their insurance carriers for medical bills, loss of wages and continuing health impairments.
Could the scooter companies simply be sued out-of-business and doors shuttered? Don’t bet against it.
And don’t think that some of the money to pay for claims on scooter-related injuries won’t come from Southern California municipalities that have allowed the scooters to propagate without strict ordinances and rules in place to safeguard the public from harm. Local governments are the likely place where personal injury lawyers will concentrate efforts to recover funds for harmed clients. The cities of L.A., Newport Beach or Santa Monica have much deeper pockets than the recent college graduate scooting around town.
There is no easy answer to the question of how to make scooters safe for users and the general public, but stiff and strong actions are needed to be taken by local governments to protect its citizens.
There’s no reason for scooters to travel fast on sidewalks.
There’s no reason for them being allowed on our bike paths, especially during these peak summer months of outdoor activities.
Look for tort lawyers to circle our sidewalks, streets and bike lanes for paydays until order is imposed on the scooters. The significant rise in scooter use around town has many legal offices ready to act on the misfortunes of would-be clients.
Let’s just hope your loved ones aren’t involved.
Ted Lux has been involved in real estate lending in the Los Angeles area for over 25 years, and is the author of Exposing the Wheel Spin on Wall Street.
