Two Thousand Scooters in Downtown San Antonio, and Nobody Is Counting the Injuries
Bird and Veo are each permitted to run up to 1,000 scooters in San Antonio, and most of them sit downtown, stacked along Commerce Street and the blocks around it.
If one of them puts you in an emergency room tonight, your injury will almost certainly never appear in any public number.
SAPD does not publish a scooter crash tally. Neither does the city. The region's trauma centers have published no study of their own.
We know a great deal about how these machines hurt people nationally. We know remarkably little about how they hurt people here.
The local picture is a blank
The one sustained attempt to measure this came early in the program, when the San Antonio Fire Department tracked scooter-related EMS calls and counted 148 riders hauled to hospitals in roughly eight months.
University Health's injury prevention director explained part of the problem at the time: there were no billing codes for scooter injuries, so hospitals could not reliably count them even when they wanted to.
A UT Health San Antonio plastic surgeon separately described treating riders with serious facial fractures, people who had gone over the handlebars and landed face-first. He had cases. He did not have a count.
Austin and Dallas have real published research. San Antonio does not.
A 2024 paper in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine tracked 194 admitted scooter patients at Austin's Level I trauma center and found injuries clustered on Friday nights, with 38 percent happening between 6 p.m. and midnight. A separate Austin study found 48 percent of injured riders had head injuries and fewer than 1 percent were wearing helmets.
Those are Austin's numbers. They get cited for San Antonio because San Antonio has not produced its own.
What the national data shows
The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission released a staff report in April 2026 covering 2017 through 2024. It counted:
- 533 micromobility deaths, rising from 5 in 2017 to 135 in 2024
- 206 of those deaths on e-scooters, including 15 from 11 lithium-ion battery fires
- An estimated 380,000 emergency room visits for e-scooter injuries over the eight years
A closer CPSC look at 173 e-scooter cases from 2024 found that 35 percent involved rental scooters, 54 percent of crashes happened on paved roads and 32 percent on sidewalks, and only 18 percent of riders wore a helmet.
Among 189 e-scooter incidents the agency investigated in depth, 88 involved fire and 40 involved brakes.
Texas context is grim in its own way. TxDOT recorded 3,769 traffic deaths in 2025, including 695 pedestrians. There was not a single day without a death on a Texas road, extending a streak that began on Nov. 7, 2000.
In San Antonio, a November 2025 city release reported more than 133 fatal crashes and 141 deaths for the year, 54 of them pedestrians.
The downtown rules most riders have never read
Riding a scooter on any San Antonio sidewalk has been illegal since June 30, 2019. Riders are supposed to use bike lanes where they exist and share the street where they do not.
Scooters are geofenced out of the River Walk, Alamo Plaza, Main Plaza and Market Square. The Pearl, which is private property, banned them outright.
Texas Transportation Code Section 551.352 keeps scooters off streets posted above 35 mph, though riders may cross at intersections. Texas sets no statewide helmet requirement and no minimum age, though Veo requires riders to be 18.
One rule that no longer exists matters as much as the ones that do. San Antonio repealed its 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. scooter curfew effective January 2020. Downtown riding after midnight is legal.
That is worth sitting with, because the published research on serious scooter injuries points directly at late nights. A U.S. study of 659 e-scooter emergency patients found 50 needed a neurosurgical consultation.
Among those 50, 74 percent were under the influence of alcohol, with an average blood alcohol level of 155 mg/dL.
A bar district, a legal 2 a.m. ride, and no helmet is the combination that fills trauma bays.
An attorney's view from inside these cases
We spoke with Joseph R. Echavarria, a San Antonio personal injury lawyer and founder of JRE Injury Law, who spent his first two years out of law school as an Assistant Criminal District Attorney in Bexar County, roughly 2007 to 2009.
A San Antonio native, he handles crash and injury cases across Bexar County and has recovered tens of millions of dollars for injured clients.
What do people get wrong about a scooter crash in San Antonio?
The deadline. Almost everyone has heard that you get two years to file a lawsuit in Texas, and that is true as a general rule.
But if a street condition had anything to do with your crash, a pothole, a broken curb, a construction plate downtown, you may have 90 days to put the City of San Antonio on written notice. Not two years. Ninety days.
Where does that come from?
San Antonio's City Charter, Section 150. It requires written notice to the City Manager or City Clerk describing when, where and how you were hurt, and what you are claiming.
The Texas Supreme Court enforced it in City of San Antonio v. Tenorio. The only way around it is proving the city had actual notice, and that means the city was subjectively aware of its own fault. Knowing that somebody got hurt is not enough.
By the time most injured riders think about calling a lawyer, a good chunk of that window is gone.
Is there anything else in that charter provision riders should know?
Yes, and it is a hard one. Section 150 also says the city is not liable for defects in sidewalks. For streets and plazas, you have to prove a responsible official actually knew about the defect with enough time to fix it.
So a road-condition case against the city is difficult on the merits even when you file notice on time. That is not a reason to skip the notice. It is a reason to send it immediately and then figure out the rest.
How does Texas handle it when the rider was partly to blame?
This is where Texas is harsher than a lot of people assume. Under Chapter 33 of the Civil Practice and Remedies Code, if you are found more than 50 percent responsible, you recover nothing at all.
In a pure comparative fault state, somebody 90 percent at fault still collects 10 percent. Not here. Cross that line in Texas and you are done.
That matters enormously for scooter cases, because the defense is always the same story: you were on the sidewalk, you had been drinking, you were not wearing a helmet. Each of those gets argued as a slice of fault, and they are trying to push you past 51 percent.
Does a rider's auto insurance help?
Sometimes, and it depends on wording nobody reads until it matters. Texas has no no-fault system, so there is no automatic benefit that kicks in.
A scooter is not a motor vehicle under the Transportation Code, which means nothing requires it to carry liability coverage. Whether your own PIP or uninsured motorist coverage reaches you while you are on a scooter comes down to how your policy defines a pedestrian and whether it excludes injuries while occupying a motorized vehicle with fewer than four wheels.
In hit-and-run cases, and we see those, uninsured motorist coverage is often the only real source of recovery. It is worth pulling your declarations page out before you ever need it.
And when no car is involved at all?
That is most scooter injuries, honestly. A solo fall, a brake that gave out, a wheel that caught an edge.
Then you are looking at a product or negligent maintenance claim against the operator or manufacturer, or a road condition claim against the city, with everything we just discussed attached to it. Preserve the scooter ID and the ride receipt, because that is how we identify the specific vehicle and request its maintenance history.
The app made everyone agree to a waiver. Does that end it?
No, and I would not want anyone to assume it does. Texas has strict rules about this.
Under the express negligence doctrine and the fair notice requirements our Supreme Court laid out in Dresser Industries v. Page Petroleum, a release has to say in specific terms that it covers the released party's own negligence, and it has to be conspicuous enough that a reasonable person would notice it. A clause buried in a scroll-through can fail both tests.
Texas courts have also been reluctant to let anyone contract their way out of gross negligence. If a scooter had a brake problem that was reported and never fixed, that waiver is a much weaker shield than it looks.
What is the biggest mistake you see?
Waiting, and assuming the clock is longer than it is. Between the 90-day city notice and the way surveillance footage downtown gets overwritten within days, the first two weeks decide more than most people realize.
The second mistake is giving a recorded statement before talking to anybody. In a state with a 51 percent bar, a few casual sentences about how fast you were going or what you had that evening can do real damage.
The deadlines that decide these cases
| Deadline | What it applies to | Authority |
|---|---|---|
| 90 days | Written notice to the City of San Antonio when a street or sidewalk condition contributed | City Charter Section 150 |
| 6 months | Notice to other Texas governmental entities, unless a charter sets a shorter period | Civil Practice & Remedies Code Section 101.101 |
| 2 years | Filing a personal injury lawsuit | Civil Practice & Remedies Code Section 16.003 |
| 2 years | Filing a wrongful death claim, running from the date of death | Civil Practice & Remedies Code Section 16.003 |
If you go down on a scooter downtown
- Get checked out. Head injuries dominate this category, and symptoms often surface a day or two later.
- Photograph everything, including the scooter's ID number, where you landed, and the road surface itself.
- Get the SAPD report number. Ask for it at the scene.
- Screenshot the ride receipt in the app. It ties you to a specific vehicle and timestamp.
- Send the city written notice within 90 days if a road or sidewalk condition contributed. The city posts a Notice of Claim form online.
- Pull your auto policy and look at the PIP and uninsured motorist definitions.
- Talk to an e-scooter accident attorney before you give any recorded statement, to an insurer or to the rental company.
San Antonio capped its scooter fleet, pushed riders off the sidewalks and fenced them away from the Alamo. What it has never done is count what happens when they crash.
Until somebody does, riders are the only ones keeping score, one hospital bill at a time.
How to get in touch with JRE Injury Law
JRE Injury Law
931 Basse Road, San Antonio, TX 78212
Phone: (210) 272-0101
Toll-free: (844) 702-0350
jreinjurylaw.com
Free consultations. No fee unless the firm wins.
Sources
| Source | Reference |
|---|---|
| CPSC, Micromobility Products-Related Deaths, Injuries, and Hazard Patterns: 2017-2024, April 2026 | cpsc.gov |
| TxDOT, Texas Motor Vehicle Traffic Crash Facts, Calendar Year 2025 | txdot.gov |
| San Antonio Report, fire department scooter injury data | sanantonioreport.org |
| KSAT, San Antonio scooter hospital transports | ksat.com |
| UT Health San Antonio, e-scooter facial injuries | news.uthscsa.edu |
| Rix et al., American Journal of Emergency Medicine, Nov. 2024 | doi 10.1016/j.ajem.2024.08.021 |
| "Neurosurgical Consequences of e-Scooter Use," Neurotrauma Reports | doi 10.1089/neur.2022.0073 |
| Texas Transportation Code Section 551.352 | statutes.capitol.texas.gov |
| Texas Civil Practice & Remedies Code Sections 16.003, 33.001, 101.101 | statutes.capitol.texas.gov |
| City of San Antonio Charter Section 150; Notice of Claim form | webapp1.sanantonio.gov/NoticeOfClaim |
| City of San Antonio v. Tenorio, 543 S.W.3d 772 (Tex. 2018) | txcourts.gov |
| Dresser Industries v. Page Petroleum, 853 S.W.2d 505 (Tex. 1993) | casetext.com |
| City of San Antonio dockless vehicle program | sa.gov |