Date: August 31, 2025
Author(s): Milena Johnson
Abstract
The growing popularity of electric scooters (e-scooters) in urban environments has led to increased media coverage on their perceived danger both to the rider and to other users of the roadway. Media surrounding traffic collisions has long been criticized by safety researchers and activists for implicitly assigning blame to more vulnerable road users through the passive voice, and through framing roadway deaths as tragic accidents, rather than a systemic public health issue. In this paper, I analyzed recent news articles on e-scooter collisions in the United States to determine how e-scooters, a relatively new form of mobility, are described in collision narratives. Most articles discussing e-scooter collisions with vehicle drivers used the passive voice to remove explicit blame, but used the active voice when describing a collision between an e-scooter and a pedestrian. This pattern indicates a continued motor vehicle bias in social conceptions of traffic collisions and a potential new bias towards e-scooter riders.