A peer-reviewed study of 914 patients at NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue found micromobility crash cases jumped from 7.9% of trauma admissions in 2018 to 55% by 2023. Jamaica Hospital reports a similar surge — from 30–40 patients a year to more than 100.

In 2018, roughly 1 in 13 trauma cases arriving at NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue in Lower Manhattan involved a micromobility device — a pedal bike, an e-bike, or a scooter. By 2023, the proportion had crossed 55%. That five-year climb is the central finding of a peer-reviewed study published in April by researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, who analyzed 914 patients treated at Bellevue over the period.

"When we broke it down by year, in 2018, we only saw 7.9% accidents that involved any sort of electric bike or scooter, and it went up to 55% by 2023," said Dr. Hannah Weiss, a neurosurgery resident at NYU Grossman and a co-author of the study, in comments to amNewYork, which reported on the findings Monday. Overall, nearly 7% of all trauma admissions over the study window involved micromobility collisions.

The injuries physicians described — brain bleeds requiring emergency surgery, spinal trauma, skull fractures — are not confined to riders. The Bellevue study found that pedestrians hit by e-bikes and scooters suffered worse medical outcomes, on average, than the device operators themselves.

Jamaica Hospital Medical Center, which draws from a different patient pool in Queens, is tracking the same direction. Dr. Danielle Defoe, the hospital's associate trauma medical director, told amNewYork that Jamaica went from treating 30 to 40 micromobility-related patients per year in 2021 and 2022 to more than 100 in the past year. Fractures and traumatic brain injuries are the most common presentations; patients range in age from teenagers to people in their 70s.

The clinical picture arrives amid a live enforcement fight at City Hall. Mayor Mamdani earlier this year directed the NYPD to stop issuing criminal summonses for e-bike violations, citing the impact on the city's largely immigrant delivery workforce — a policy that drew a lawsuit from crash victims seeking to restore enforcement, as The Dissent reported in June. The hospital data does not resolve that dispute, but it puts a case-count and a trauma-admission percentage behind the injuries that advocates have been citing in court.

NYC DOT owns the street design and Vision Zero data; neither the agency nor the MTA commented in the amNewYork report. The Bellevue study figures represent one hospital, and trauma-admission share is not the same as total citywide crash volume. But as the delivery economy has pushed e-bike use onto every corridor in all five boroughs, the ER intake numbers at two hospitals on opposite ends of the city are pointing the same way.