Montreal Borough Bans E-Scooters From Parks After Injury Surge

A Montreal borough is drawing a line in the park, and electric-scooter riders are on the wrong side of it. Saint-Laurent has banned electric scooters and other motorized mobility devices from its parks, trails, and sidewalks after an Injury Surge among young riders that the local children's hospital says has multiplied roughly fourteen times since Quebec's e-scooter pilot began. The new rule, adopted this week, is the sharpest local rebuke yet of a province-wide experiment that doctors have been warning about for months.

What the borough actually banned

The amendment to the borough's road-safety bylaw prohibits motorized personal mobility devices in every public space under Saint-Laurent's jurisdiction. That covers city parks, multi-use trails, and sidewalks, the places where riders mix with the toddlers, joggers, and seniors the borough says it is trying to protect. Scooters can still be used on public roads where the speed limit is fifty kilometres per hour or less, as well as on bike lanes along those roads, since provincial rules continue to apply there.

City councillor Vana Nazarian said the bylaw followed a summer of incidents and near misses as the devices kept multiplying on borough paths. "We're not banning them, but we want to make sure that with the speeds that these scooters have, they stay more on places where vulnerable populations won't be at risk," she told CBC's Let's Go. She added that a borough full of young families and seniors should be able to use its parks and trails without fear of a collision, according to CBC's reporting on the decision. The borough's own announcement frames the move as a clear, easily enforced standard meant to cut down on conflicts and collisions, with details on the city's official page for the bylaw change.

There are carve-outs. Motorized mobility aids are still allowed, as are people walking a vehicle with its motor off, emergency responders, and activities the borough expressly authorizes. Those exceptions exist to protect universal accessibility and let utility crews do their work. The revised bylaw also gives borough council the power to designate specific places where the devices may return, under conditions it sets later, so the ban is less a final answer than an opening move.

The injuries behind the rule

The Injury Surge the borough is reacting to is not subtle. Deborah Friedman, the trauma director at the Montreal Children's Hospital, says e-scooter injuries at the centre have climbed roughly fourteen times since the pilot took effect in 2023. The hospital treated around eighty e-scooter-related cases in the past year alone, a caseload that would have been hard to imagine when the pilot began.

What troubles doctors most is who is getting hurt. Close to sixty percent of children admitted with serious injuries were under the legal riding age of fourteen, a figure that suggests the age floor is being routinely ignored on the street. The severity is climbing too: the share of victims needing hospital admission has nearly doubled, from about nine percent to roughly twenty percent. Brain injuries, facial trauma, fractures, and dental damage are the injuries clinicians describe, not the scraped knees people imagine when they picture a scooter crash.

Police numbers tell a similar story across the wider city. Montreal police recorded eighteen vehicle-e-scooter collisions in 2023, twenty-nine in 2024, and forty-eight in 2025, with one fatality and four serious injuries in the most recent year. Officers attribute most of those crashes to inattention and failure to yield rather than equipment failure, which is why the province keeps stressing behaviour over hardware. The pattern is a reminder that the latest Injury Surge is about how the machines are ridden, not just how many exist.

Why the province is being pulled in two directions

The borough's crackdown lands awkwardly against the province's own timeline. Just over two months ago, Quebec extended its e-scooter pilot project to 2028, keeping the minimum riding age at fourteen while introducing a new twenty-five kilometre-per-hour speed limit that took effect in July. Police can hand out a two-hundred-dollar fine to riders who exceed that cap. Doctors have called the extension a missed opportunity: the hospital's trauma centre argues the minimum age should rise to sixteen, matching most other Canadian provinces, and that slower speed limits would reduce how badly people get hurt.

The debate is not unique to Montreal. In Ontario, a town weighing its own e-scooter bylaw heard the same split testimony this month: residents described watching children ride without helmets, sometimes appearing younger than the legal age, while supporters argued scooters are practical, modern transport for youth, people without cars, and anyone with limited mobility. A proposed Ontario bylaw would let parents be fined when children under sixteen ride on municipal property, a penalty Quebec has not adopted.

For young riders in Saint-Laurent, the immediate reality is simpler. Helmets remain mandatory, riders must be at least fourteen, speeds top out at twenty-five kilometres per hour, and the same traffic rules as cyclists apply. No passengers, no phones, no headphones. What changed is where the ride can happen: the shortcut across the park is gone, and the ride to school now has to stay on the road. Borough officials hope the restriction pushes riders toward more responsible use. Doctors hope it pushes the province to finish the safety conversation it started when the pilot began. Parents, meanwhile, get something neither side offered before: a clear answer to the question of whether the trail is really the place for a motor that tops out faster than most people can sprint.

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