A young woman rides an electric scooter on the same road where a 12-year-old boy was injured earlier that same day when his electric scooter collided with a car, in Aspropyrgos, west of Athens, on Thursday, May 7, 2026. [InTime News]
There are simply too many incidents involving electric scooters to count – thankfully, not all of them fatal. What we do know is that in 2025 alone, 400 children and teenagers under the age of 16 were injured in such incidents. We also know that 17 accidents took place in the first two months of this year, which means almost one every three days. The recent death of a 13-year-old boy in Ilia in the Peloponnese, however, shocked the country and triggered reactions. And we don’t know how many of the incidents recorded have resulted in serious injuries that required hospitalization and which may have left serious, perhaps even irreversible, damage.
“Managing the issue of electric scooters is tricky. It is an environmentally friendly mode of transportation and we need to find a way for them to operate at a certain level of safety. The first measure to this end is a complete ban for minors,” Minister for Citizen Protection Michalis Chrysochoidis said on Friday.
Maybe it would be an idea to make the parents of youngsters using electric scooters answer for child endangerment
Until the measure goes into effect, therefore, children and youngsters will continue to be allowed to go around on electric scooters without a helmet and without any driver education. There is no need to go into how exposed riders are to a wrong turn of the wheel from a passing car and the elements, or the incredibly dangerous speed at which these vehicles can go at – well above the legal limit of 25 kilometers per hour – becoming all the more dangerous when they are being driven on central roads and avenues. Maybe it would be an idea to make the parents of youngsters using electric scooters answer for child endangerment.
How did we get to this point, yet again? How did something that was hailed as a flexible transportation option come so quickly (after the dangers were pointed out again and again from the very first day that electric scooters appeared on the country’s streets) end up adding so many injuries and even death to the long list of road accidents this country is already notorious for? We should know better – Greece is sixth on the European Union list of countries with the most road accidents and fatalities. Some progress is being made with the intensification of Breathalyzer tests and stricter implementation of helmet rules for motorcyclists.
But the same question keeps coming back, again and again, remorselessly: Why are the rules enforced when it’s too late? And especially in cases where you know, with absolute certainty, that not enforcing the rules will lead to death. Did anyone truly believe that all electric scooters would bring to Greece’s streets was a fun and eco-friendly way to get around?