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denton-scratch

> Mandatory helmet laws make the number of injuries associated with biking go down.

You can also reduce the number of cycling injuries by banning bicycles.

[Edit] /s

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You can also reduce the number of cycling injuries by banning cars

Doubtful if "cars" means motor vehicles, as most of the US has poor public transit thus cycling would be the closest best substitute readily available. The number of cyclists would explode.

There would likely also be lots of deaths due to weakness in the supply chain.

You seem to have missed the fact that cycling deaths NOT involving cars are negligible. Remove cars, remove deaths.

Agree but that said cyclists can still injure themselves without help from cars. We'd expect the absolute number of cycling injuries to rise with the number of cyclists. However, they will be much less serious injuries.

About 30% of cycling deaths are not traffic related, hardly negligible. If cars magically disappeared there would be a lot more than 3 times the current number of cyclists on the road.

Citation? If car traffic is pushing someone into the shoulder, and they hit a grate, was that counted as car related? If it is a hit and run (super common), and someone comes up to a person that was left for dead, is that counted? How exactly is that 30% computed?

I'll cite it with anecdotal evidence: I've broken a bicycle helmet twice, and neither time involved a car.

If you suffer an impact in a helmet, that is now an ex-helmet. That is, you can't repair them, and the only way to check they're still sound is destructive testing. (not trying to rebut your anecdata)

https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...

It does not say what counts as non-traffic incidents

Your reply made me check for the UK, so in 2016 we have

"For teenage and adult cyclists, accidents are more likely to involve collisions with motor vehicles, but about 16% of fatal or serious cyclist accidents reported to the police do not involve a collision with another vehicle, but are caused by the rider losing control of their bicycle." [1]

Not quite 30% but much more than I expected and obviously not negligible. Thanks for the rebuttal.

1. https://www.rospa.com/rospaweb/docs/advice-services/road-saf... (PDF)

I think he was saying that if suddenly cars were not allowed, there would be a class of people unable to get food or services and would die. Aka, you can't replace a fedex truck delivering food to a handicapped person with 500 fedex bikers delivering one box each. (and what about couch deliveries).

> The number of cyclists would explode. There would likely also be lots of deaths due to weakness in the supply chain.

In the short term, yes.

In the medium and long term, if you Americans would put all that money you spend on cars & car infrastructure into equivalent walking and cycling infrastructure and public transport, you'd probably leave even the Dutch behind...

Most bikes these days are "motor vehicles".

Not here; I live in Oxford, UK - one of this country's "cycling cities". The great majority of cyclists are not motorized. Cycle theft is barely policed, and an electric bike worth £2,000 is worth pinching (the cops don't treat electric bikes differently from cheap rusty crap bikes). Most people here ride throwaway bikes costing under £300 new.

It's frustrating that people think every problem needs to be solved via legislation and enforcement. Not every problem can, or needs to be.

Can, needs or should, I would add. My perspective doesn't seem to be very popular, however I could never understand how laws that are intended to protect us only from ourselves are compatible with the philosophy of law that we're supposingly embracing in the west.

The only rational argument for these laws would be the burden on the national-health system for injuries sustained on the head during riding a bike. This could be solved by allowing people to opt-out of the free national health system coverage explicitly in these instances of injuries, if indeed statistics show that there is a significant burden imposed on it. And still there is the counter-argument that this would be biased -what about people who are engaging into leisure activities with higher-risk, "extreme-sports" and such. I wouldn't be surprised if even the cost of treating normal sports-related injuries is higher than the cost of head-related injuries of bikers riding with no helmet. Why not enforce wearing full protective gear when engaging in every sport?

If we start with this mentality, it's only a slippery slope that would lead us in a place we don't want to be.

Same as with smoking taxes. It started with the justification that it's fair to counteract the increased cost that smokers have on the national health system. A perfectly fair reasoning. But by now these taxes have increased so much that this justification is no longer convincing -instead they are widely accepted as a sort of "luxury tax" that smokers pay, no longer to cover the cost of the medical treatment they are more likely to receive on average, but just "because that's how it is". This income is not even earmarked for the health system in many cases. They also started covering things that evidence don't support they pose any or as much of a risk as cigarette smoking (Vaping), and in some cases -Italy, IIRC-, even with official lawmaker justification that these products deprive the state from tax income that they would receive through the smoking tax. A completely illogical argument that I was surprised to see it made nobody blink twice.

So I think such laws are really a demonstration of government acting as a for-profit entity, squeezing money from whatever they think they can get away with.

Oh, there are scores of risky activities that can result in medical costs that some people (libertarians?) would prefer that we didn't socialize.

Incorrect use of OTC drugs; crossing the road while diddling a mobile phone; drinking alcohol; hell, pushing your toddler on a swing in a playground. Perhaps socialized medicine should refuse to treat people who have declined vaccination, or declined a bowel cancer screening. Maybe climbing a ladder should close you off from socialized medical care. Perhaps you shut yourself out if you ever hang out with sick people.

Obviously, I'm not serious.

For me, the big thing about socialized medicine is that it's universal. It's a massive benefit to everyone, if people with people with infectious diseases like TB, diphtheria and cholera can get treatment for free, without producing ID or proof of entitlement. And that's true whether or not they have legal status, as immigrants or whatever.

I agree, I was trying to follow the only line of reasoning I can think of that would rationalize the existence of such laws in a way that doesn't break the concept that we should be able to choose for ourselves the amount of risk we want to be exposed in (which is generally accepted in other cases of everyday life).

> doesn't break the concept that we should be able to choose for ourselves the amount of risk we want to be exposed in

I'm not sure that this right to regulate one's own personal risk environment is actually a thing. It sounds rather vague; you could use it to justify almost any act. "I think you're a threat; I choose not to expose myself to the risk you pose, so I eliminate you".

You can't eliminate risk. Living is risky.

Perhaps I didn't phrase it properly. I meant, "the concept that we should be able to choose the amount of risk we want to expose ourselves in". Which is generally accepted as a personal right, based on the premise that we, and nobody else, owns our body. But every now and then we see some laws that seem to break that (such as in this case). If we didn't accept this principle, then would have to agree to also punish suicide attempts, or a number of other things that would sound absurd.

And I think most cyclists would prefer a mandatory helmet requirement to a cycling ban

You might as well go all the way. Quite sure most of the bikes where I live don't even qualify as road safe because only road/city bikes are sold with the mandatory safety equipment (lights, bell, reflectors, ...) out of the box and the attachable variants of those are often not road legal either.

So if you want to protect cyclists from themselves lock them in a cell and throw away the key, it is the only way to be sure.

So you're saying there is a mandatory safety law for bikes on the books already and people haven't all stopped biking?

An outstanding result, if your only goal is to get people to ignore laws.

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