E-bike Injuries Are Rising. What Are the Numbers Not Telling Us?

Public safety conversations often begin with numbers, and in Oregon the numbers are difficult to ignore.

KPTV FOX 12 Oregon reported that state injury counts involving e-bikes and e-scooters rose from 211 in 2021 to 509 in 2025. The same report described a steep increase in Portland 911 calls involving these devices.

Those numbers are useful because they show scale. They help hospitals, families, schools and policymakers understand that the issue is growing.

But every data set has a boundary.

What happens inside the 911 call?

A count of 911 calls can tell us that someone asked for help. It cannot tell us what the caller actually knew about the injured person.

Was the caller a friend, or a stranger who happened to stop?

Did they know the rider's name?

Could they reach an emergency contact?

Was there information the rider had chosen in advance that could help the person making the call or the responders who followed?

Those questions describe a different kind of safety problem.

The Information Gap™ is difficult to count

We use the term The Information Gap™ for the period when someone cannot speak for themselves and the person trying to help has little or no personal information to work with.

The gap may last only minutes, but those minutes can involve a surprising amount of uncertainty.

Scan If Hurt™ was designed around that narrow problem. A scan can provide access to information the person chose to share, including identity, emergency contacts and a Message to EMS. Location is only captured when someone chooses to use the location feature. There is no continuous tracking.

Better safety questions create better preparedness

The rise in e-bike injuries deserves continued attention to helmets, training, age rules, road behavior and enforcement.

It also gives us a reason to ask a second set of questions.

When an incident happens anyway, what does the first person helping actually know?

That question will not appear in an injury count. But for the person on the ground, the stranger calling 911 and the family waiting to hear, it can matter enormously.

Source: KPTV FOX 12 Oregon, Spencer Schacht, August 25, 2026.