These two points essentially encompass my feelings on the matter.
In most states, bicyclists are subject to the same rules of the road as motorists. That’s what I’d rather see enforced. If I had a nickel for every cyclist I’ve nearly flattened as they ran a red light or a stop sign…
Maybe just common sense. From other sources we can learn that the homeless population in Seattle is about 1.5% of total population (2019 numbers). That’s all homeless, both housed and unhoused (housed homeless are those in housing that they are not paying for). And from the linked article we learn that 40% of citations are for homeless people. We don’t have figures on what percentage of homeless have or ride bicycles, nor how many of those wear helmets. I think the disparity of percentages is pretty clear anyway.
Sometimes things DO hit disproportionately, even with the best of intentions. I recall there being some grumbling that I personally heard when Texas started enforcing tighter automotive emission standards, and the grumbling was that it was going to hit minorities disproportionately hard, because they are disproportionately poor compared to the population at large, and thereby are both more likely to be driving older, junkier, non-compliant vehicles as well as to have trouble paying for the required repairs to ensure compliance.
I’m kind of torn in that I don’t think someone should get off the emissions hook because they’re poor, but at the same time, paying several hundred dollars to get your car’s emissions system fixed is a MUCH larger impact on a poor person’s finances than on someone of average income.
I sort of wonder if this helmet law is similar- it hits the homeless and minorities disproportionately because a $30 helmet is not a big deal to someone of average income, but might mean considerably more to a homeless or seriously poor person, and they choose not to buy the helmet and take their chances.
This is the real problem. What part of stopping some kids for a safety violation requires the accusation that they stole their bikes?
If it’s really about safety, write them a ticket, and maybe take them back to their parents so you can tell the parents directly that the kids are in danger. Stop using this as an excuse to accuse kids of crimes.
My cousin was stopped for riding his stingray on a neighborhood street without having his hands on the handlebars. He is not of a color or particularly shabby looking, but it appears that the officer was simply intent on making sure he would hate the police for the rest of his life, because he wrote a ten-year-old a ticket.
Or, alternatively, this happens when there is an election coming up, and the mayor is running for re-election. Then the cops go hog-wild writing up frivolous tickets and making arrests to juice up the mayor’s law-and-order cred. This was a thing in Berkeley 45-some years ago (and may still be, for all I know) when they would go on a binge of busting all the local whore-houses.
In the dark, all people are Black.
I forgot what I was gonna say now…
perhaps you were going to say “Cold-hearted orb that rules the night …”
My thoughts:
Every time one of these “but we can’t have law because minorities are disproportionately targeted” scenarios, I never see, including here, how many minorities are breaking the law as opposed to non-minorities. I think it’s because the truth doesn’t matter to people’s agendas. So minorities get cited at a rate 4 times that of whites. If the rate of minorities not wearing helmets is somewhat less than that, then maybe there’s racism involved. If minorities don’t wear helmet at a rate 4 times that of white people, there’s nothing going on but good police work. If minorities don’t wear helmets at the rate of 5 times that of white people, then there’s racism going on- against whites. Based on my own observations in Minneapolis the differential is a lot lower than 4X, but that’s not actual data and that’s not Seattle. Would be nice to actually know.
Punishing kids for riding to Middle School without helmets- Instead of all the existing bicylists magically deciding it’s cool to wear a riding helmet, a likely result is a large number of them are going to start begging for car rides from friends and parents rather than riding their bicycles so they don’t have to put on a helmet. No way would I have ever put on a helmet in Middle School even if it meant I couldn’t ride my bike, and even a lot of adults decide they’d rather not ride if it means putting on a helmet. Cyclist participation in New Zealand fell after the institution of mandatory helmet laws there.
Compulsory bicycle helmets in New Zealand.
The limitation of most of the studies is that they analyze “bicyclists that crash” not “bicyclists”, and don’t account for indirect effects like risk compensation, reduction in numbers of bicyclists due to them not wanting to have to wear a helmet reducing the safety in numbers effect, or more aggressive behavior from motorists towards bicyclists wearing riding helmets.
My personal observations about helmet use are somewhat problematic, though I can only speak for myself. Putting on a helmet made me feel a certain degree of protection, and when one is out there on the dangerous streets, feeling protected is not a net positive. Bicyclists need to be vigilant, and anything that results in any relaxation of that vigilance is a bad thing. Granted, some people are morons about traffic to begin with, but for an aware cyclist, the helmet can in and of itself be a problem.
The other issue is more troubling, because it involves physiology rather than psychology. It is that even the most well-designed helmet still traps heat next to one’s head. Going 25mph downhill, this much is kind of trivial, but going the other way, climbing the same hill at 5mph, it can be very non-trivial. My brain does not appreciate being bathed in excess heat. It tends to reduce my mental acuity, which is a thing I do not need less of on the dangerous streets.
In other words, my personal experience is that a helmet makes my ride less safe, and I greatly resent laws that compromise my ability to look after my own safety. I do not object to other riders choosing to wear a helmet, but I do object to being forced to make that wrong-for-me choice.
Fine. Then it is on the friends and parents when their kid grows up obese, and declining to follow simple, reasonable precautions. Sure - many parents seem to give up authority when the kid is still in the womb. But for most of us, there is a role for parents enforcing commonsense rules thru the kids’ preteen years.
I would think such a simple health lesson as “wear a helmet when biking” would be appropriate for a middle school curriculum.
Gotta say, that impresses this biker as a pretty weak argument. You sure you wanna stick with that?
I don’t have any heat related problems due to my bike helmet when cycling here in Arkansas in the summer heat.
Maybe things are different now, but my son is in middle school and he has no problem wearing a helmet while bicycling. All the kids around here do.
Possibly because they’ve been taught, since they could barely walk, that they must wear a helmet when riding anything with wheels.
That’s looking at changing rates of cycling, accidents, etc., over a ten-year period, without taking into account any of the many accompanying changes in society.
It’s meaningless to try to deduce a causal relationship from a correlation between two isolated phenomena in such a highly complex context.
No one likes to be too hot, but this is the first I’ve heard someone state that being hot and sweaty reduces their cognitive abilities. And I say this as someone who doesn’t like wearing bike helmets.
This is a rationalization for contrarianism, akin to “It’s hard to breathe with a mask.” It would be more straightforward to simply admit you don’t like being told what to do.
This is my personal experience. I very much do not like to have heat on my head when I am trying to be alert. It very well may be different for other people (I personally prefer, for instance, to breathe cold air), but it is absolutely not rationalization. This can be a problem for me even without a helmet, but a helmet definitely makes it worse. For me.
Type in “why don’t the Dutch…” and it will auto-fill “wear bike helmets.” A lot of valid reasons they don’t are presented.
I once took a header in a non-Dutch situation: a car edged me off the asphalt, my front tire went into a hole and I went over the handlebars like an arrow shot into the ground. If I hadn’t been wearing a helmet, and rolled with the flow, I’d be typing this by blowing into a straw.
I suggest that you reframe your narrative to make sense. If you had not been wearing a helmet, and you had survived the crash, it is likely that you would not have typed that at all, due to impaired mental function that slamming your head into a hard surface would have caused. But “typing this through a straw” is grossly inaccurate, because that describes a spinal trauma, and helmets do basically nothing to protect your spine.