On a warm night last August, a 12-year-old boy named Shawn Dunkley took a family friend’s electric scooter out for a spin near his home in London, Ontario. It was a powerful machine, ordered from the Chinese online retailer Alibaba. Dunkley was barrelling—helmetless, despite his mother’s pleas—along the paths of his family’s suburban neighbourhood, only a two-minute walk from his house. He glanced at the scooter’s speed display: 69 km/h. Suddenly, everything stopped.
Two passersby found him five minutes later, lying unresponsive a few metres from the pathway. His eyes were open, his expression vacant, his hair streaked with blood. A dead raccoon lay nearby. The best anyone can figure is that it darted in front of the scooter. The passersby called 911 and, within minutes, Dunkley was being rushed to London’s Children’s Hospital. He’d suffered a traumatic brain injury, a skull fracture and spinal bleeding.
He was transferred to pediatric critical care in a medically induced coma. A tube helped him breathe, and two catheters snaked out of his fractured skull to monitor his cranial pressure and drain his pooling cerebrospinal fluid. His doctors weren’t sure if he’d live or, if he did, whether he’d walk or talk again. At her son’s bedside, Crystal Dunkley anxiously awaited the 72-hour mark: doctors had told her that if Shawn lived for three days, his long-term odds would shoot up. She hadn’t understood how dangerous e-scooters could be, or how fast they could go. “I thought they were toys,” she says.
Twelve days after Dunkley’s accident, doctors started bringing him out of his coma. First, he gave a thumbs-up. Then, a toe wiggle, which was a tremendous relief—no spinal injury. Then he nodded and shook his head. Finally, his breathing tube came out.
Dunkley’s injury was no anomaly. At Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital, e-scooter–related admissions jumped 600 per cent from 2020 to 2024. Pediatric trauma centres have been particularly besieged: SickKids hospital, also in Toronto, treated 46 e-scooter injuries in 2024, up from only one in 2020. At the Montreal Children’s Hospital Trauma Centre, the number of cases multiplied tenfold in only a year, between 2023 and 2024. When I asked one ER physician what could be done to make them safer, he quipped: “Turn them into bikes?”
Caitlin Walsh Miller’s article on e-scooters and e-bikes in Canada is worth reading. She makes 3 simple points –
(1) The adoption of e-bikes and e-scooters has been much faster than regulation has been able to keep up. Very few understand what is legal and what is not.
(2) These vehicles can go very fast. Coupled with the lack of clear rules, they are especially dangerous.
(3) e-scooters, in particular, can be easy to knock off balance – increasing risk to injury.
While her notes are primarily about city streets, we see this in our suburbs too and it scares me every time I see a group of teenagers zoom on the wrong side of the road alternating between the bike lane and the sidewalk.
I don’t understand how or why parents would want to enable this – especially because it reduces the amount of exercise and outdoors time kids get. It feels like a lose-lose-lose.
It always gets me reflecting about the hidden cost of chasing convenience.
A Learning a Day 