Every day, Cottage Hospital’s Emergency Room sees anywhere from three to six individuals involved in an e-bike accident of one kind or another. To date, Cottage ER has not dealt with any fatalities caused by e-bike accidents, but the injuries are serious — bone fractures, facial fractures, head injuries, internal organ injuries, and all the usual lacerations, contusions, and abrasions that result from a flying faceplant over the handlebars.
According to Denise McDonald, Director of Emergency and Trauma Services at Cottage, about 50 percent of the e-bike riders wheeled into the ER were not wearing helmets. About 40 percent of those injured were 18 years old or younger; 60 percent were adults.
E-bikes first popped onto Cottage’s ER radar in 2024, but beginning in 2025, e-bike injuries surpassed the number of those sustained by riders of traditional bikes. That’s the year Cottage began coding its admission report documents to statistically track the prevalence of e-bike injuries. While that tracking adds a higher level of specificity, AMR medics typically don’t have the time to distinguish just what kind of e-bike the injured rider was riding. Was it one that traveled at a top speed of 17 miles per hour, the Class II bikes that top out at 28 miles per hour, or the electric motorcycles equipped with ornamental foot pedals that zoom at speeds up to 50 miles per hour and terrorize pedestrians on State Street and the Obern bike trail connecting Santa Barbara with UCSB?…