Escapade results in fractured elbow

All it took was a leg up in the air and a bit of momentum — the next thing e-scooter user Crystal Thompson was being hurled off the machine and thrown to the ground.

Thompson is now nursing a fractured elbow and is covered with abrasions over her body after the tumble recently.

While she doesn’t want to “criminalise” the e-scooter initiative, she believed more could be done to help keep first-time users safe when they hit the streets.

But Thompson isn’t alone in crashing off her e-scooter, with the number of ACC claims for e-scooter related injuries almost tripling in the past week with a total of 38 claims since the scooters launched in New Zealand.

The number of claims has risen by 24 since last Wednesday, when the Herald reported there had been 14 claims since the October 15 launch in Auckland and Christchurch.

Twenty-seven of the now 38 claims have come from users in Auckland with the rest in Christchurch.

Thompson told Newstalk ZB she was riding along a cycling path in Morningside with friends when the accident happened, but was now querying the effectiveness of the machine’s brakes.

“To be fair I was playing around with the scooter where I was lifting one of my legs and just pointing it up in the air, which I had done quite a few times, but on this one occasion I was doing it, was speeding, or riding towards my friend, and it started wobbling.”

She then realised she had a bit of speed behind her, being able to feel the e-scooter’s force as it zoomed on ahead.

“At that point I knew that I was going quite fast, I could feel the power and the force but I couldn’t actually slow it down.

“I did actually exercise the brakes but it didn’t slow down. I used one of my feet to slow down the scooter but that didn’t help and from that point I got flung and hurtled towards the ground and ended up scraping the side of my head.

“Apparently I tumbled, I don’t know if I tumbled, but the left side of my body was damaged in that I fractured my elbow.

“And now I’ve got a bunch of scrapes all over my body as well.

“I still could be statistically rare but after my experience I can see that there probably needs to be information on how to control speed . . .”

She believed a video tutorial could be helpful for first-time users of the e-scooters showing tips for basic skills including how to slow down and handling.

But as for whether she’s keen to get back on one, if she did, she wouldn’t be doing it in a hurry.

“At the moment no, because I’m traumatised.”