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As Teens Take to E-Bikes, Parents Ask: Is This Freedom or Danger?
(www.nytimes.com)
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this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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Technology
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As someone who grew up around doctors and knew a brain surgeon, I can say with 100% confidence that everybody who rides a bike should wear a helmet. I feel like the average person has very little idea of how fragile we are, how easy it can be to get a traumatic brain injury, and how much of a nightmare your life can become. (This applies even more if you need to ride on the street or if you plan to ride at high speeds.)
I agree and always wear a helmet, but helmets should not be mandatory. It discourages people from cycling which means they drive instead and make the roads overall more dangerous.
I'm sure people said exactly the same thing when seatbelts became mandatory in cars. "Oh, no, you can't make safety mandatory. It'll just discourage people from driving." Safety measures become normalised very quickly.
Discouraging people from driving is a good thing, although with the amount that's wasted on pointless expressways some governments haven't noticed yet.
Anyway, there's clear evidence from countries with mandatory helmet laws that it discourages people from cycling.
But back when seatbelts became mandatory (which was in the 1980s in the UK, IIRC), cars weren't seen as a bad thing. They were seen as a good thing, as bikes are now, yet no doubt there were still people complaining that mandatory seatbelts would discourage people from utilising the Good Thing.
Have there been any long-term studies into mandatory helmet laws? Or did they just look at the 3-6 months after the introduction of the laws, when people were still getting used to the change? What was the effect after helmet-wearing became normalised in that country's society?
I suppose the other solution is to not have mandatory helmets, and natural selection will do its thing. I tend to prefer not having a load of unnecessary deaths, however.
Sure. Australia has had mandatory helmets since 1990, and there's been endless studies and debates since then, it's still ongoing. I could find no clear evidence that helmet mandates decreased overall harm over any timeframe.
To quote a review I read from 2007
And their conclusion did not find a consensus other than
Given that, helmet mandates are a bad law that takes away our liberties for no proven benefit.
Fair enough. I do like evidence-based conclusions. :)
I'm definitely in favour of good road safety initiatives like traffic calming, enforcement of driving laws, and education for both drivers and cyclists. One of the things I've observed with cyclists is on average they're more unpredictable than other vehicles on the road, and I think education of both types of road user would help alleviate that. Cyclists need consistent signals for what they're going to do, and drivers need to be able to recognise what those signals are. So much of road safety is reliant on everyone being as predictable as possible, and people taking up cycling as adults often skip the cycling proficiency lessons that teach them how to behave predictably, while drivers are never taught to recognise what signals cyclists are taught to use in those lessons. (My "work-around" solution for this is "slow down and keep more distance", which works as well for cyclists as is does anyone else who is behaving unpredictably on the road. Indeed "slow down and back off" is an approach that's hard to go wrong with!)