I’ll start putting this in MPSIMS, although I reckon it could fit in many categories and it is probably neither mundane nor pointless, but it seems the most harmless category to me. Here is the NYT article, link is a present, so it should not be paywalled (no idea how often a present can be viewed or how long it lasts):
Is this a sensible policy? Reducing everybody’s safety because applying the rule is too unsafe for a minority is so strange to me, I cannot even fathom what it is like to be the victim of this abuse. Cite from the article:
Ms. Shannon’s nephew was just 8 years old when he and three friends were stopped by an officer a few blocks from their houses for not wearing helmets, Ms. Shannon said. She said the officer accused them of stealing the bikes.
“Until this day my nephew doesn’t ride a bike,” Ms. Shannon said. “He’s never forgotten that.”
This just makes me sad.
But the article also raises some doubts in my mind. I wonder whether, and if yes under what circumstances all this statements (from the article) can be true simultaneously. For a parallel discussion:
Since 2017, Seattle police had given just 117 helmet citations, over 40 percent of which went to people who were homeless. Since 2019, 60 percent of citations went to people who were homeless.
Black cyclists were almost four times as likely to receive a citation for violating the helmet requirement as white cyclists. Native American cyclists were just over twice as likely to receive one as white cyclists.
Helmets reduce the likelihood of serious head injury by 60 percent, […] In cases where it was known whether cyclists were wearing helmets, 79 percent of those who were fatally injured in bike crashes between 2010 and 2017 were not wearing them.
Helmet use in the city is as high as 91 percent among private bike riders
Access to helmets is a particular challenge for low-income people […] people in the lowest income bracket were about half as likely to wear a helmet for all rides as people in the highest income bracket.
If the sample size was 117 helmet citacions in five years it is too small to draw firm conclusions and the numbers don’t seem add up.
I also note that this is one of the NYT articles that does not allow a discussion. What are they afraid of?
Seems reasonable to me. If there were only 117 citations in five years, the law was tremendously underenforced. Tons of people fail to wear a helmet while cycling. Underenforced laws are really toxic to civil society and policing.
If there’s a rule, or a law, it should be enforced. Seeing a bunch of people ignoring rules and laws makes people think the rules are meaningless. Worse, rarely enforcing it gives police the discretion to use it as a tool to punish arbitrarily.
Maybe they should only enforce the rule against people who could obviously afford a helmet – people in nice new bikes, decked out in the latest gear. Leave the poor and homeless alone – they rely on bike transportation way more than everyone else anyway.
Can you instruct police to enforce a rule only against certain people? And will they comply if they feel closer to those people than to the ones they like to enforce the rule against? I doubt that.
Not wearing a helmet reduces safety. Not requiring helmets doesn’t necessarily reduce anyone’s safety, let alone everyone’s. Where I live, helmets are only required for those under age 18, but I and every other bike-riding adult I know always wear them. If there are any people in Seattle who currently wear a helmet only because the law requires it, repealing that law may arguably reduce their safety, though the responsibility should ultimately lie with the person who makes that choice. There’s a valid argument for requiring helmets given the costs of treating head injuries, especially given that emergency rooms can’t turn those people away for their inability to pay, and those unpaid bills indirectly affect us all. But you can’t seriously claim we’re all less safe because we have the choice to be stupid without being cited for it.
Is the helmet law being used like the one requiring working bulbs to illuminate auto license plates? In other words, as an excuse to stop people whose behavior is deemed suspicious for other reasons?
Unfortunately, some laws don’t exist for the safety of the public, they exist to give the police a pretext to detain someone and go fishing for a “real” crime. Asking the police to stop using these laws to make rights-violating-searches into perfectly-legal-searches is a waste of time.
117 citations since 2017. Why not just hand out helmets at the rate of 2-3 a month? They’re made of styrofoam with a plastic shell and nylon chinstraps.
There is a middle school at the end of our block. I’m regularly amazed at the low percentage of bike-riding kids who wear helmets. I would think it appropriate for school personnel to periodically man the bike racks, and hand out some punishment for non-helmet wearers. In the interest of education.
I think bikers (and the parents of biking kids) are stupid if they don’t wear helmets, but I’m not sure how significant the risks are to warrant state helmet mandates. How does it compare - say - to savings from seatbelt usage?
The cited statistics refer to citations only, not to people who were stopped under that pretext and accused of other crimes. Can we be clear about that?
I agree that brain injuries from bike accidents can be a drain on society. That being the case, why weren’t there more actual citations? Could it be because the cops don’t care about saving peoples’ brains from injury as much as they do about having an excuse to stop someone they don’t like?
The citations are mostly against homeless people, which is probably another form of biased enforcement and harassment. Maybe they can’t afford a helmet, maybe they’re homeless because they are mentally disturbed, probably they can’t afford a citation. It’s easy for the cop, and no consequences for the cop either.
I think Seattle did the right thing for now, until a better solution comes up.
The statistics also refer to how much helmets improve safety: they reduce “serious head injury” by 60%. But if 79% of those who were fatally injured (not exactly the same, I know, but a good proxy, as a broken leg is seldom fatal) did not wear helmets, and helmet use is “as high as 91%”, then it seems to me that wearing a helmet improves safety by more than 60%. Right?
But if those other injuries not related to the head are so frequent how come “79% of those fatally injured did not wear a helmet” is relevant, considering that only 9% or bikers do not wear helmets?
You should always wear a helmet. You’re an idiot if you don’t. That’s good enough, and we need to teach people to wear helmets, and not criminalize anyone via authoritarian power trips.
When you have a statistic like “use of helmets reduces serious head injuries by 60%” it should refer to cases where all other things are equal.
This is a very different thing from the other statistic: “In cases where it was known whether cyclists were wearing helmets, 79 percent of those who were fatally injured in bike crashes between 2010 and 2017 were not wearing them.”
Some differences: First, “In cases where it was known whether cyclists were wearing helmets” – we don’t know how many cases that is, but this factor is not included in the first statistic; Second, “fatally injured” is not the same as “serious head injuries.” People can survive a serious head injury, even if they are permanently affected; Third, “Helmet use in the city is as high as 91 percent among private bike riders” – note carefully the qualifiers, “as high as” and “among private bike riders.” Those qualifiers are not mentioned in the other statistics.
These are the kinds of reasons why all those statistics can be true at the same time, and why you have to be careful to note all the qualifiers and conditions before drawing conclusions. “79% of fatalities happened among the 9% who didn’t wear helmets” is not a valid conclusion, and we have no way of knowing how far off it is.