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this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2024
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micromobility - Ebikes, scooters, longboards: Whatever floats your goat, this is micromobility
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Ebikes, bicycles, scooters, skateboards, longboards, eboards, motorcycles, skates, unicycles: Whatever floats your goat, this is all things micromobility!
"Transportation using lightweight vehicles such as bicycles or scooters, especially electric ones that may be borrowed as part of a self-service rental program in which people rent vehicles for short-term use within a town or city.
micromobility is seen as a potential solution to moving people more efficiently around cities"
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It's a tricky subject on account of the levels of victim blaming stemming from car drivers.
I wear a helmet while bicycling as well, and I recommend that others do while cycling.
Simultaneously, I understand that mandatory helmet laws are a net negative, and that helmets have lower priority in the harm reduction pyramid when it comes to protecting the lives of cyclists. We must also push back against car drivers who blame cyclists who get injured or killed by car drivers if they happen to not be wearing a helmet or hi-viz.
I've read that twist a few times on Reddit about 'victim blaming', but suggesting mandatory helmets for bicycles it nothing about blaming anyone for anything. There is a problem on hand and there are are various solutions to improve it. Some solutions are more complex, some are simpler, some are projects with decades runtime to maybe achieve something.
Suggesting mandatory helmets is simply looking for the simplest and cheapest solution of them all, which has also the potential to achieve good success.
It's just numbers, nothing to do with blame.
Pushing for higher diver education, better infrastructure, better technology on vehicles to avoid missing cyclists in the dead corner etc. is all good and important as well. But it's all a lot more effort, way more costly, way longer time frame and the success is hard to judge for some ideas.
One of the weightiest arguments against mandatory bicycle helmets is that it's a distraction from anything and everything else that can be done to improve the situation. That is, the discourse on "personal responsibility" or comparisons to seat belts is taking up a lot of air in the room, for relatively little gain. And for the indifferent or malicious, it serves their purposes well, since it avoids having to defend against the most effective measures to improve bicycle safety: slower road design speeds, allocating dedicated space for bicyclists, and prioritizing intersections for people throughput, not vehicle throughput.
In economic terms, mandatory helmets would mean a cost borne by every probable bicyclist in the country, plus enforcement costs. Compare this to redesigning a road which was already due to be repaved anyway, where the US federal government is already chipping in 50%, and where other roads already exist for motorists to go around but allow bicyclists to take the direct route, I'm not totally convinced that the helmets are the best value here, even if money was available to grant every American citizen a helmet.
Re: vehicle technology, I also think that's also a distraction, like how self driving cars will supposedly stave off traffic; induced demand would like to have a word, and I foresee more driver automation simply discouraging drivers from practicing safe driving habits.
What?? Beyond cars, riding something moving ~20km/hr is still super dangerous without a helmet. Slightly off the trail and hit a tree or post? Icy conditions and you wipe out?
Even something as simple as a road speed design change (ie just changing signs without changing ANYTHING else on the road) are ~500$ a sign. As soon as you get into more complex changes, but still on the easy side (ie Advisory Bike Lanes, where the only change is painting lines to allocate specific space for bikes) run ~$15/m for each line painted. On a typical advisory lane, thats 4 lines ($60/m) plus 500$ per sharrow symbol which are spaced every 75m in each lane.
Even at an expensive helmet ($100), Helmets are by far the cheapest method of personal safety you can do. ( For example, Toronto has~5397km of roads and a population of 2.93 million. To even do a simple repainting on those roads is ~$400mil. New expensive helmets for every single person in Toronto is $293mil.
I work in civil engineering. It's not too hard to include bike design on new roads **when they come up ** (which is only every 20yrs on average) but arguing that its more cost effective? Definitely not true.
I loathe to use the almost-cliche urbanist refrain as a starting point in bicycle discourse, but in this case, I really do have to point to the Netherlands. Somehow they seem to be a mostly helmet-less society and aren't dying en masse.
GoTransit's Burloak Drive grade separation project would disagree, as it features a painted bike lane at level with auto traffic, despite having built an elevated sidewalk. You'll excuse me if I don't agree that such paltry consideration for bicyclists are "designing for bikes".
Not everyone there agrees with helmet less riding, though they do discuss the disagreement over the effectiveness of helmets for those, the stats say 1/3 of serious bike accidents involve brain injuries. That's some huge numbers!!!
We wear helmets to do dozens of other activities for sport or leisure - ski/snowboard, skating, mountain climbing, spelunking, white water sports. Additionally, the article says those engaged in cycling for exercise or sport almost all wear helmets. Why is there such an aversion to wearing helmets while biking?
In my lifetime skiing I've seen an enormous change in people. When I was younger almost no one wore helmets. Now, it's rare to see someone not wearing a helmet.
I said it was easy, doesnt mean its always implemented. Ive designed a handful of roads to have designated bike lanes or fully separated bike lanes. Every time we do any Active Transport, I've advocated for fully separated systems or physical barriers between. 90% of the time, the decision to cut them has come after resident input/discussion. Often the Townships I work with don't have the resident/political backing to justify narrowing vehicle lanes to improve bike traffic - because that is what is required. Unfortunately we still don't have enough public backing to push through these.
Hell, one job I'm working on is on a "designated bike route" and residents fought a separated path so much that the city scrapped it and went with the Advisory Bike Lanes.
I don't think it should be mandatory. I'd probably apply that to seatbelts too though I'm pretty sure that such mandate does increase safety. I just don't think it's the government's job to decide such things. It's not illegal to hit oneself in the head with a hammer either.
Here in Finland it recently became mandatory to have lights on your bike when riding in poor visibility and I think that's actually a good thing. Not because it increases the safety of cyclists, though it does, but because I as a driver don't want to deal with the burden of killing/injuring an irresponsible cyclist/pedestrian that I didn't see untill it was too late. It's unreasonable to put the full responsibility on drivers. Especially outside of cities.
Not wearing a seatbelt makes you more likely to harm others in the event of a collision. And there's a little bit of necessary nanny-state of making parents do the smart thing and protect their children.
How? The way I see it is that not wearing a seatbelt only makes it more likely to harm yourself with the exception of rear-seat passengers possibly injuring front-seat passengers but I think that's on the driver's responsibility to make sure they're all buckled up. My car doesn't move if the passengers doesn't have their seatbelts on.
I'm a light fender-bender, there's not much danger. In a full-speed collision, an unsecured person becomes a blunt force projectile. An unsecured person can move with enough force to be thrown out of the car. Imagine that same force thrown at a passenger instead.
As I mentioned. Other than that I don't see what the danger is. You got to be insanely unlucky to be hit by an unsecured passenger that was thrown out of a vehicle.
Not an unsecured passenger that's thrown out of the car, an unsecured passenger being thrown into another passenger who is in the car.
If the driver becomes dislodged in what would have been a minor collision had they been strapped in. Much more likely to lose control of the vehicle and crash into others.
Do you think seatbelt laws have a negative effect on mode share for cars?
Then ask yourself the same question about helmet laws.
I'm not advocating for neither