Do mandatory helmet laws reduce the number of kids who ride bikes? The Freakonomics people seem to think so. By tying together research from several different studies, their recent column in the New York Times seems to nail down three things, with some degree of certainty:
- Helmet laws reduce youth cycling fatalities by about 19%.
- Helmet laws increase the amount of actual helmet wearing that takes place by 29-35%
-- and the perhaps surprising third conclusion --
- Where mandatory helmet laws are in place, the number of kids riding bikes drops 4-5%.
Why is this? The authors offer a few possible reasons:
- Helmets are an additional expense and can discourage participation.
- Wearing helmets can seem uncool, so rather than ride a bike and looking like dork or risk a ticket, some kids forgo cycling altogether.
- Requiring helmets makes bike riding seem like a dangerous activity, causing parents to discourage their kids from participating.
I thought this article was pretty interesting. You might too. Accurate? Perhaps. Your comments, welcomed, of course. This discussion among cyclists about wearing or not wearing helmets is like the argument about bike lanes -- it never really goes away.
Read the whole article here: Freakonomics --- Do Mandatory Helmet Laws Reduce Youth Cycling?
Comments
After watching my son glide gracefully into a concrete post on his scooter, there’s no way I’m going to let him straddle up high on a bike without some head protection! I don’t care what freakanomics, or Europeans say.
‘Health and safety assessment of state bicycle helmets laws in the USA’
A UK report takes a close look at the issue of bicycle helmets and comes to some surprising conclusions. It documents that cycling reduced for 7 –11 age group by 29.9% from 1998 to 2007 and relates children gaining weight to fewer children cycling.
The health benefits of cycling are considered in detail and with the use of a WHO formula for quantifying the health gains and comparing to the loss from accidents, it concludes that helmet promotion and legislation may have resulted in 1020 – 2040 premature deaths per year in the long term.
It investigates cycling fatalities in 3 parts and considers the force of impact in such instances is so significant that most protection would fail. States with helmet laws are compared to states without and it finds little difference in reduced fatalities. By comparing the size of a bare head to one helmeted it deduces that helmets could increase the number of impacts by about 125%.
The report will be presented in the UK at the University of Bolton on the 30 March as part of a conference on ‘Promoting health through cycling’.
For a copy of the report, contact:
Email Colin@vood.freeserve.co.uk