E-scooter driver hit by car died in Istanbul

ANKARA

Dilara Gül, a 23-year-old woman dancer, who was hit by a car while using an electric scooter on her way home, lost her life on July 12.

Gül was seriously injured by being thrown onto the road and was taken to hospital but couldn’t be saved.

Hakan Akçelik, the driver of the vehicle, was detained.

“I was driving in the left lane. There was a crashing sound all of a sudden,” Akçelik allegedly said in his statement.

Akçelik was arrested on the charge of “causing death with negligence.”

İlknur Akkaya, a 40-year-old woman, who was driving an e-scooter on Oct. 25, was thrown onto a busy road when the door of a car she passed by suddenly opened.

The woman abruptly fell in front of a public bus that was moving on the side lane and died in the hospital she was taken to despite all medical interventions.

The bus driver was detained after the accident but was released later while the driver of the car that opened the car door unsafely was arrested.

With the increase in e-scooter travel on the streets of metropolitan cities and even on highways in recent years, a serious increase has been observed in the patients who apply to the emergency services of hospitals due to e-scooter accidents, according to the officials.

“Injuries occur mostly in the head or neck. There is no mirror to control left and right, no cage to protect the body,” said Semih Bağhaki, a doctor from Istanbul University’s Cerrahpaşa Medicine Faculty.

A regulation on the use of e-scooters, which has prohibited driving more than two e-scooters side by side in a lane of a road, making reckless movements, parking in a way that disrupts public order, being more than one person on the e-scooter at the same time and carrying non-personal items on the vehicle, entered into force on April 14, 2021.