The study, by Laureen Kalvet, a pupil at the Tallinn Saksa Gümnaasium high school, identified different age categorization when reporting accidents requiring hospitalization to the Health Insurance Fund, as compared with the data provided to the Transport Board.

Outdated codes are also used, Laureen's paper found.

Electric scooters have become a highly common sight in urban traffic in Europe, including in Tallinn, Tartu and in other Estonian towns. Since 2017, the number and frequency of use of e-scooters in Europe has grown exponentially.

Bolt was the first to start offering the service in Estonia, rolling out its green e-scooters in 2018, and was later joined by other providers including Tuul and Citybee (the latter now operates in the short-term car rental market and doesn't offer e-scooters – ed.).

In addition, privately owned scooters are seen on the roads; these are often more powerful than the rental variety.

In the understanding of the Estonian Traffic Act, an e-scooter is a light vehicle, a concept that was itself enshrined in law in 2021. At the same time, many aspects related to e-scooters remain unregulated.

As the number of scooters has increased, so too have the number of traffic accidents involving this type of transport.

The goal of research by Laureen Kalvet, a pupil at the Tallinn Saksa Gümnaasium high school, was to examine statistics on injuries sustained in e-scooter accidents. According to the Police and Border Guard Board (PPA), the number of accidents involving light vehicles has fallen.

However medical professionals have not confirmed this. With cases that result in hospitalization, hospitals must notify both the Health Insurance Fund, which reimburses treatment costs, and the Transport Administration, according to academic publication Akadeemiake board member and State Agency of Medicines (Raviamet) specialist Pille Säälik.

Rise in accidents involving young males

Initially, Laureen planned to conduct a study covering all of Estonia. However, obtaining representative and reliable data from across the country proved too challenging.

The reason was that the version of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) used in Estonia does not distinguish accidents involving e-scooters from those involving other specially constructed motor vehicles — such as electric skateboards, balance scooters, or monowheels.

Since there is no national consensus on how to classify electric scooter accidents under ICD-10, healthcare providers in different locations do so in very different ways. In Pärnu County, for example, the coding of e-scooter accidents under ICD-10 has been most clearly standardized.

With that in mind, Laureen chose this county as her research area.

She found that over a two-year period (2021–2022), cases of people injured in e-scooter accidents in Pärnu County requiring medical assistance by presenting at the Pärnu Hospital emergency department (ER) happened 97 times.

The majority — 68 percent of the total — of injuries from riding e-scooters involved males. A significant share, 20 cases, involved males in the 5–14 age group.

In addition to notifying the Health Insurance Fund, hospitals are required also to submit data on accidents to the Transport Administration. However, in the course of the study, it was not possible to make a very precise correlation with the data that reached the Transport Administration. One key reason for this was that the Transport Administration uses different age group categories in its database.

Despite this, Laureen was able to conclude that, according to the Transport Administration data as well as that of hospitals, the largest group of injured persons were younger men — specifically those in the 18–24 and 25–34 age groups. Even younger age groups did not appear so prominently in the Transport Administration's statistics, however. The author therefore concluded that accidents involving younger males, ie. minors, are for whatever reason strongly underrepresented in the Transport Administration's data.

Methodology for handling injuries is outdated

Hospitals are required to report data on persons injured in traffic accidents to the Transport Administration under the Traffic Act's implementing regulation No. 54, which states: "The procedure for registering, determining circumstances, and recording traffic accidents, and the rules for maintaining the traffic accident database."

During communication with the Transport Administration, made in the course of publishing Laureen's study, in the student science journal Akadeemiake, it emerged that this regulation has not been updated for some time. It also does not list electric scooters as a separate type of vehicle. This finding may, among other things, lead to inaccuracies in hospital data submissions.

An analysis of the injuries recorded in e-scooter accidents at Pärnu Hospital revealed that most injuries were minor and superficial wounds — these occurred in 46 percent of cases. This would include abrasions, contusions, bruises, and injuries, without open wounds.

Next, in 27 percent of cases, came bone fractures. The most common among these were forearm fractures, in seven cases, followed by wrist and hand fractures, in six. There were five reported cases of heel and foot fractures, four of skull and facial fractures, and three fractures of the shoulder area. The third most frequently seen overall category, with 12 treatment cases, were open wounds, with a large share being head injuries.

Of those injured, 13 had to remain under hospitalization. The average hospital stay for such patients was 6.3 days, though the range varied widely. While most patients required relatively short hospital stays, the longest recorded stay was 33 days.

Over the two years studied, the direct treatment costs for people injured in e-scooter accidents in Pärnu County totaled €47,560. The mean cost per case was €485, while the median was €49. In other words, half of the treatment cases cost less than €49.

Since the median here is much lower than the mean, this indicates that a few serious and consequently very costly cases significantly hiked the mean cost of treatment.

With the 11 most serious cases, treatment costs exceeded €800 each, totaling €40,417. These involved intracranial injuries, shoulder and upper arm fractures, and forearm fractures. The author notes that wearing a helmet would certainly reduce the severity of electric scooter accident injuries, and would have reduced the extent of these specific injuries.

Laureen Kalvet's student research project "Injuries associated with e-scooter accidents: A case study from Pärnu County" also received the 3rd prize in the 2025 national student research competition at secondary school level, and a letter of appreciation from the board of rectors of applied higher education institutions. Supervisors were teacher Liisa-Marie Lääne (Tallinn Saksa Gümnaasium) and Jane Idavain (National Institute for Health Development).

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