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As Teens Take to E-Bikes, Parents Ask: Is This Freedom or Danger? (www.nytimes.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

The following general principles should have widespread support: (1) Any legislation (including helmet laws) should not be enacted unless the benefits can be shown to exceed the costs. Ideally, the benefits should be greater than from equivalent ways of spending similar amounts of money on other road safety initiatives.

And their conclusion did not find a consensus other than

A majority of brain injuries >AIS2 are caused by bike/motor vehicle collisions. Traffic calming, enforcement of drink-driving laws, cyclist and driver education, or other measures to reduce the frequency and severity of bike/motor vehicle collisions, may therefore represent more cost-effective ways of reducing serious head injuries to cyclists than helmet laws. Indeed, countries with the lowest fatality rates per cycle-km also have the lowest helmet wearing rates

Given that, helmet mandates are a bad law that takes away our liberties for no proven benefit.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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!)