Invisible Victims: Why Liability in the Micromobility Era Is a Legal Minefield

Walk through any American city today and you’ll see it: cars, bikes, scooters, pedestrians, and delivery riders all jostling for space. The promise of “micromobility”—e-bikes, scooters, and other lightweight transit—was that it would reduce congestion, cut emissions, and make cities more livable. But in the rush to embrace these new forms of travel, we overlooked a crucial question: what happens when they collide?

The answer, at least for now, is chaos. The law does not know what to do with micromobility. And because the law doesn’t know, neither do insurers, juries, or courts. That uncertainty leaves victims—often the most vulnerable road users—trapped in a liability no-man’s-land where fair compensation is elusive and accountability is blurry.

The Category Problem

The biggest issue is definitional. Is an electric scooter a vehicle? A toy? Something in between? States and cities have answered differently, and insurers follow suit. Some auto policies explicitly exclude scooters and e-bikes. Homeowner and renter policies often carve them out, too. Riders may think they’re covered until they discover—after an accident—that their policy treats micromobility like an uninsured motor vehicle.

Consider the everyday crash: a scooter rider swerves to avoid a pothole and collides with a pedestrian. The pedestrian suffers a concussion. Whose insurer pays? If the rider has no scooter-specific policy (and most don’t), the pedestrian may be left chasing compensation through the courts. If a car was involved, auto coverage kicks in. If not, the system shrugs.

The Proof Problem

Even when liability can be assigned, proving it is another matter. Cars have black boxes, police reports, and decades of accident-reconstruction expertise behind them. Scooters and bikes? Not so much. Many crashes go unreported. Many riders disappear before law enforcement arrives. Even when an app company has data, it may not be shared without litigation.

That evidentiary vacuum makes it harder for victims to establish negligence. It also creates a dangerous incentive: the less data available, the easier it is for wrongdoers to deny fault.

The Coming Storm: Autonomy Meets Micromobility

If today’s system seems confusing, tomorrow’s will be even worse. Autonomous vehicles are already sharing streets with human cyclists and scooter riders. When an AI-driven Uber collides with an e-bike, who is at fault—the software developer, the car manufacturer, the safety driver, the city that licensed the AV, or the cyclist who made a split-second move?

Traditional liability frameworks are ill-equipped to parse responsibility across such a web of actors. Without reform, injured parties could spend years litigating against multiple defendants while medical bills pile up.

Invisible Victims, Exposed Risks

The irony is striking. Micromobility is sold as democratizing transit—cheap, flexible, environmentally friendly. Yet its users are often left least protected when harm occurs. They are the invisible victims of a liability system built for another era.

And drivers aren’t faring much better. Many find themselves unexpectedly liable for scooter and bike injuries, even when visibility was poor and infrastructure inadequate. Insurance premiums rise, resentment festers, and the cycle of conflict deepens.

Toward a Future-Proof Liability Framework

We cannot wait for case law to evolve accident by accident. A patchwork of rulings will not give clarity to insurers, riders, or victims. What’s needed is a legislative rethink that anticipates—not merely reacts to—the future of shared streets.

That means:

• Clear Definitions. States should uniformly define what scooters, e-bikes, and other devices are—and how they’re insured.
• Data Transparency. App companies and scooter providers should be required to share crash and usage data, with privacy protections, to allow fair adjudication.
• Hybrid Coverage Models. Insurance frameworks must adapt to cover both traditional motorists and micromobility riders, perhaps through city-mandated pooled coverage or add-on policies.
• Future Readiness. Liability statutes should anticipate autonomous vehicles and AI-driven systems, ensuring that fault is assignable across humans and machines alike.

The Law Cannot Stay Silent

The streets of the future will be even more diverse than today’s. Autonomous cars, delivery robots, scooters, e-bikes, and pedestrians will all share space. Without legal clarity, every crash becomes a contest of who has the better lawyer, not who is actually at fault.

The role of the law is to ensure that victims are not invisible. Right now, in the era of micromobility, they are. Until we modernize our liability frameworks, the promise of safer, cleaner, more efficient cities will remain hollow. Because the people most injured in these street wars will also be the least protected.

Michael J. Epstein, a Harvard Law School graduate, is a trial lawyer and managing partner of The Epstein Law Firm, P.A., a personal injury firm based in New Jersey.