A Bad Head Case
We returned to the homeland over the holidays. Lugged skis and snowboards to the land of 3.2 beer, special garments, and the "Greatest Snow on Earth" only to find they had half the snow base compared to what we have here. Everything seemed backwards.
We picked up the local weekly, which feels smarmily like Seattle's version as so many do (albeit, sadly, the SLC web version makes the Weakly look divine). And what do people argue about in a town that is hardly a third of the size of Seattle and already has infinitely better rapid mass transit than we do? The totalitarianism of bicycle helmet laws. Bass-ackwards indeed. You might not expect it, but the land of LDS is aggressively libertarian--it comes with the territory when you make up a whole new religion that contradicts other peoples (potentially also made up) religions.
The article made a passing reference to Seattle early on, as one of the few cities in the country that has an all-ages bicycle helmet law (King County has had one since 1994, but Seattle didn't follow along until 2003). Further in the article, we are told that "Some studies suggest helmet laws reduce the number of bike riders." We'd put air quotes around "Some studies" if we could. Even the Salt Lake mayor (a notorious liberal, amazingly) asked his bike advisory committee to consider whether the law would "cut against the group’s mission of increasing the numbers of bicycle riders"--a sentiment that seems more likely to come from big tobacco than bike advocates. Just get those numbers up!
But we're not interested in getting mired in what many call the "helmet wars" mostly because the arguments are spurious at best (fewer cyclists! people will take more risks! helmets don't really help in a bad crash!), and based on "data" that are difficult to obtain in the first place and plagued by cause/effect shenanigans. What gets our hair up is the "its our choice" argument. Yeah, we grew up in the big ol' Wild West too, but early on we realized that choice doesn't exist in a social vacuum. Cracking your skull open is gonna have some repercussions for more than just little old you--just ask this guy. If we're going to try to buck this one, we should repeal seatbelt laws and hell, why not go all the way back to undoing public health advances too--let us drink shitty, cholera-infested water if we want to! It's our choice.
Certainly this post will provoke some form of "nanny state" commentary (cough, Seth) and someone else is going to call us out on the obvious hypocrisy in relation to our previous post about how we should rescue people who do crazy shit outdoors...but: the issue is not really whether adults will wear helmets (though the health costs of dealing with traumatic head injuries are not small) but it all comes down to the fact that we want kids to wear helmets. As Pete Lagerway in Seattle's Bicycle Safety program told us over the phone: like blog commenters, kids can smell hypocrisy a mile away. If adults don't wear helmets, kids don't see the point either (Lagerwey points out that laws aimed only at minors get little traction in communities where parents don't get involved and help set good examples for their kids). Just try to get your kid to put a life jacket on in the boat when you aren't wearing one, and you'll see what we mean. And so, in the end, it comes down to the children (and there's a whole lot of them in Utah). Salt Lake City, won't you think of the children?
