One week after a D.C. official died in an electric scooter crash on Capitol Hill, police launched an outreach campaign focused on e-bike and e-scooter safety.
As officers stopped people riding bikes and scooters in Chinatown on Friday to hand out safety pamphlets, Interim D.C Police Chief Jeffery Carroll said the department will spend the remainder of the year educating e-bike and e-scooter riders about road rules.
“Because a lot of folks don’t know, right? They see the scooters there. It’s convenient. They jump on it to go here and there,” Carroll said.
The outreach will focus largely on busy areas, including Chinatown, U Street and Navy Yard, but will include other neighborhoods across the District.
There have been 34 traffic deaths overall this year, compared with 21 at the same point last year, a 62% increase, Carroll said.
Four of the fatalities involved e-bikes, two involved stand-up electric scooters and three deaths involved mopeds. A scooter and an e-bike were also involved in major crashes in which the victims were not killed.
Carroll also said the police department has recorded more than 70 traffic incidents this year involving e-vehicles such as bicycles or scooters. In some cases, police believed the riders were the perpetrators. In others, the riders were the victims, he said.
Talib Shakir, 50, who led the Mayor’s Office on Returning Citizen Affairs, died on Friday, Oct. 9, after colliding with another scooter rider at 8th St. and Pennsylvania Avenue SE.
Shakir’s death was a factor in the safety campaign, but not its sole cause, Carroll said.
Both scooters were traveling eastbound on Pennsylvania Avenue as they approached 8th St. SE, he said.
A woman who was riding a scooter in the right lane moved left to turn onto 8th St. She was in the lead, and Shakir was on a faster scooter going straight ahead, Carroll said. Their scooters collided at the intersection.
Neither rider was wearing a helmet, police said. The collision is still under investigation.
When it comes to riding e-bikes or scooters, Carroll reminded riders that the rules of the road don’t go away.
“What that means is, there’s a red light. Stop. If there’s other vehicles coming, yield to those vehicles. If there’s a stop sign, make sure you stop,” he said.
In Chinatown and the rest of the central business district, Carroll reminded riders that bicycles, e-bikes and e-scooters belong in the roadway, not on sidewalks.
Carroll said bicycle riders can receive a $25 ticket for running a red light or violating certain safety regulations, but he said e-scooters can fall outside those regulations.
Police are working with the mayor’s office and the D.C. Department of Transportation to consider updates to the rules.
And while riders ages 16 and over are not required to wear helmets on e-bikes or e-scooters in D.C., Carroll strongly encourages everyone to wear one.
“You may be riding a bicycle, or you may be riding a scooter down the road, and someone may not see you, could hit you, or you might just hit a pothole on the road, or something in the road you didn’t see, causing you to fall over,” Carroll said. “And that helmet may be the thing that saves your life.”
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