eScooter costs
There’s a story at Stuff saying the ACC have paid out more than $200,000 across 655 e-scooter related injuries. If you don’t regularly work with ACC data it’s hard to get a feel for whether that’s a lot or not.
Two comparisons I saw on Twitter, and a bonus one
- From Stuff: in the 2016/7 year, “[s]ome 3517 horse-injury claims added up to $6,867,869”, a decrease from previous years
- From the Herald: “The number of injuries involving avocados has increased over the past three years, with the nutritious fruit costing ACC just over $800,000.”
- From the Herald: “Last year more than 4000 New Zealanders were injured on Christmas Day alone, accounting for $3,628,574 worth of ACC claims.”
First we need to look at time frames: the e-scooter data are over three months; the horse and Christmas data over a year; the avocados over three years. Annualised, we’d have $0.6 million/year for scooters, $3.6 million/year for Christmas, $6.9 million/year for horses, and $0.26 million/year for avocados. Avocados aren’t in the running, but horses are looking strong.
There are a lot of horses in New Zealand, though. Apparently, over 100,000! They won’t each be ridden with the same frequency as the average Lime e-scooter, but it wouldn’t take that high a usage rate for scooters to be more dangerous than horses. What we can see, though, is that horse injuries are more severe on average: the headline statistic gave five times as many injuries from horses and over 30 times the cost. (Avocados look even safer if you count number of injuries rather than cost).
Since e-scooters are new and only cost a few dollars to try, there will be a lot of inexperienced users right now. You’d assume that over time the typical user will become more experienced and probably more risk-averse, and so the risks should go down a bit. Also, there will probably be an increasing number of people who have their own scooter and are a bit more careful with it.
The obvious comparison, though, isn’t horses or avocados or Christmas: it’s cars. ACC paid out $264 million for driving-related injuries in 2017-18. Spread out over 3 million cars or 4 million motor vehicles that’s still less than half the cost per vehicle that we’re seeing for e-scooters (assuming most e-scooter use is the Lime rentals). However, the ACC figure doesn’t attempt to count the cost of 378 road deaths last year. At the Ministry of Transport’s cost-of-life valuation of just over $4 million, that’s another $1.5 billion.
Cars, um, win?
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
ACC has 4 types of claims which could be related to these sorts of accidents.
1) GP visit or similar eg physio
2) Ambulance call if required
3) Hospital ED or ward stay
4) Loss of wages – if you are working- after the 1 week injured.
As the GP handles the paperwork , these claims are mostly invisible for people who go just to the doctor and arent aware they have made an ACC claim.
Same goes for hospital or ambulance.
I would be surprised that ACC has a category for ‘Scooter, Lime’ as opposed to general scooters of this type. Better comparison than horses might be bicycles ( pedal and electric)
6 years ago
I like the comparison against the car because it’s the alternative transport (if the intent is for people to get out of cars). It would be interesting to look at ACC costs for suburban driving (i.e. roads with footpaths where lime scooters could be used as an alternative).
Although, it’s still an interesting comparison against the bike – which is safer if you’re going to get out of your car? However, I suspect lime scooters would cause more injury to non-lime -scooter drivers than bikes would.
6 years ago
Its early days yet for e-scooters. Annualising 3 months of early rollout data is prone to risks. You have annualised it by multiplying the current numbers by 3 with no justification for why [assuming a tail off in injuries?].
But why should it just be 3 times the current level on an annual basis? When its just as likely to be at least 4 times (4 x 3 months = 12 months). Especially given the rollout of these e-scooters is barely underway.
And most of the longer term ACC costs are ongoing rehabilitation and earnings compensation. That is over many months even years for some injuries.
So while right now the present level of $200K for ACC costs for the 655 Lime injuries looks light. It is mostly the initial injuries incurred, not the longer rump of rehabilitation and compensation.
This time next year, the ACC numbers won’t just be 4 times bigger for costs. Even if injuries are only a few times more times more than they are now.
Sure, cars are more dangerous, but then car drivers have a separate ACC levy to cover that part of the cost. Which is supposed to be self-sustaining over the medium/longer term.
Lime and e-scooters do not have such separation/isolation.
Right now they get a mostly free ride under the ACC system as they are relying on general taxation to cover the ACC costs for riders and bystanders injuries. As it will also be the case for privately owned e-scooters or other forms.
The comment about riders being inexperienced is true, but there is no guarantee that the experience level will go up over time as the roll out of Lime through out NZ is still in its early days and each location where Lime operates has a less than optimal number of scooters for hire. So the market is constrained.
Once Lime gets the go ahead they will no doubt flood the market with a lot more e-scooters resulting in even higher availability than the mainly central locations they operate in now.
Then there is the tourist factor to consider – many of those tourists may never have ridden e-scooters in a NZ context before, don’t know the road rules or even general courtesy rules, aren’t used to driving of passing on our sides of the road, and just as important, probably don’t care about the rules. So their level of skill and care will be less than regular e-scooter users, but there will be an endless stream of tourist “newbies” keen to take the plunge and ride one. As the entry cost in terms of rules, cost and safety equipment is minimla. And for which of course ACC picks up the tab under its no fault, universal coverage.
There are potentially as many tourists to NZ each year than the likely e-scooter “possibly able to ride an e-scooter” [even if they never do] NZ resident population. And the tourists tend to be where the Lime scooters are [so are proximal to the risk] and have time and inclination to try one out. So all they are more likely to “give it a go” than most locals – even if their skillset is not up to it.
Queenstown alone could be a real goldmine [or disaster] for such e-scooters when they launch there. Given some 3 million tourists a year frequented or passed through it in 2017 according to a Stuff article on the expansion of the Queenstown Airport published in August 2018. (https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/105768339/its-crunch-time-for-queenstown–let-tourist-numbers-double-or-shut-the-gate)
So while it pays to have a sense of perspective. That advice cuts both ways.
It is relevant to note that it is very early days for e-scooters of all stripes in this country.
6 years ago
I see todays Herald (https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=12194343)
Says ACC reports a jump in e-scooter injuries and claims.
“In the New Year, the Accident Compensation Corporation said the cost of injuries since Lime’s mid-October NZ launch was $228,364.
Today, the agency said $322,046 in e-scooter costs had been racked up as of January 21 as the number of claims jumped from 655 to 845 (see more details in the tables below).
The figures below do not include the cost of emergency treatment at public hospitals, which is bulk-funded”
So in a little over 3 weeks ACC has reported up to another $100K in costs and 200 more recorded e-scooter claims.
So if we extrapolate that a bit – thats now a little over 3 months (Mid October to Mid January), even doubling that figure to annualise would certainly exceed the authors “$600K” annualised estimate the author suggested it would be a week ago. On the present trends, even allowing for some “slow down” in claims I think we are likely to go higher than that and likely to exceed $1 million – based on what we have seen for the 1st 3 months of the “trial” and small scale rollouts.
And it seems, ACC now admit that Hospital visits are not counted, ‘cos they’re bulk funded at the DHB level, so those initial costs fall solely onto the DHB’s to account for [if they even bother]. It’s only if there are injury reports lodged and/or further ACC claims made that ACC will even become aware in their system of the e-scooter injuries.
So even the present level ACC reports above, are likely to under-estimate the actual injury level.
But given all that, we are now tracking it appears, at about 250 claims a month. And Lime has not even started its rollout proper, with their ideal level for Auckland being 20,000 e-scooters.
So the average cost per claim figure is now about $381 per ACC claim, and will no doubt continue to rise over time as downstream ACC costs begin to build up relating to earnings compensation and rehabilitation.
Noting that under ACC employers cover the initial period of any earnings compensation before ACC payments kick in proper – even if the employee was not injured at work.
I note the Herald mentioned that Christmas day alone had an average level of claims of around 4000 and cost per claim of $1000. Of course, any medical treatment required on Christmas day will be expensive – at least double the cost of any other day. It being the one day of the year when most people are not working so medical centres are paying staff huge fees to work those days and so the ACC claim costs will be inflated as a result.
As for Deaths and Serious injuries are concerned, since this original post, we’ve had two major Lime scooter accidents where two (adult) e-scooterists were very seriously or critically injured. I trust these Lime riders make full recoveries in time and wish them both speedy recoveries. But I do fear they will both have long and difficult recoveries ahead of them. With ACC helping them recover. The full lifetime recovery costs for those two accidents could easily exceed the total ACC costs made to date when they are all fully compensated and rehabilitated. And so you can see how ACC costs are difficult to annualise, especially of a small base and after only a few months. However a trend is developing that is clear.
You don’t need to draw too long a bow to imagine that in the next year there will unfortunately be some deaths from e-scooters. And it would not take many of those to turn e-scooters from a “relatively safe” or benign form of transport (ACC-wise) into being “a lot more dangerous than cars” – especially given the orders of magnitude lower kms and hours of riding covered by e-scooterists compared to cars. So even 2 e-scooter deaths would completely swamp the “cars, umm, win” argument. Yes cars in an absolute level will swamp ACC claims, that because of the sheer number of them. Doesn’t mean we should give every other danger a free pass as a result.
I note Lime is offering some sort of token “ACC levy payment” per ride – if they get a long term operating license in return. It seems to me that any level of contribution by Lime will not likely cover the true level of claims they have. Lime is clearly leading the rest e-scooter pack in claims being the only commercial kid on the block (and apart from privately owned e-scooters, the only kid on the block). Expecting a corporate hand out of a license in return for acting as a good corporate citizen strikes me as unacceptable. But that’s a separate story.
As I said last time, its early days yet. We have a long way to go on e-scooters until this has run its course.
6 years ago