The personal freedom to fly through your windshield, indeed.
If it is genuine, did you mean motorcycles without helmet enforcement?
I live in Florida, where motorcyclists are allowed to go unhelmeted while car drivers are required to wear seat belts.
Like I said: Most jurisdictions require motorcycle riders to wear pretty through safety gear, such as a helmet and protective clothing.
This is unless you believe the tests don’t really reflect reality, but then you are objecting science accepted by several regulatory bodies. You’ll have to give me more evidence than your word against decades of experiments and expert opinions.
Another commenter pointed out that unhelmeted motorcyclists contribute to the supply of organs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37027107), so I think it all works out.
I don’t get the impression that neither the commenter, nor the paper cited, thinks this is a good thing.
Regardless, the discussion has come a long way from:
Motorcycles should be banned if seatbelts are enforced
→ But motorcycles have safety laws as well to protect the rider
→ Not where I live
→ But in other places they do
→ Well I’ll imply—but not state—that those safety rules don’t protect the riders
→ But the safety gear does* protect riders*
→ And then something about organ harvesting of accidents.
This is a silly debate. You’ve convinced me of nothing, you had a point there somewhere, but it got lost in irrelevance. Both motorcycle riders and automobile drivers have safety gear for their own self preservation which they are required to use in most places. Yes there are exceptions to this (such as Florida; or riders of scooters/light motorcycles) but also to cars (New Hampshire does not have seat belt requirements to 17+; neither do many states in India; Bus riders don’t have to wear seat belts in many places; tractors don’t require seat belts; etc.)
29 have some age restrictions, where people under a certain age must wear helmets while riding, and only 3 have no laws requiring riders to wear helmets. I think Puerto Rico has a pretty strict helmet wearing law since 2007[1]. I haven’t found any data about the other territories.
1: https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/documents/812397...
Every country in Europe requires a helmet, so does Canada and Mexico.
While I always wear a seat belt and will not even move my car without ensuring that my passengers are wearing their seat belts, I don't feel I should tell other drivers what to do inside their cars.
I live in Florida, where motorcycle riders are not required to wear helmets while those riding in cars are required to wear seat belts. It is silly.
The person who blows their heart out at 53 probably costs a whole lot less VS what they put into society.
Not nearly as long as they live, sucking up healthcare resources.
"Unhealthy" people like smokers and the obese are more cost-effective, because they're nearly as productive per year and they die before needing the absurdly expensive medical care for old age.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230728192509/https://www.nytim...
And some informed folks have even argued that in modern vehicles airbags are so effective seatbelts could be worsening accident outcomes. (Elon Musk made this point in one of his podcast appearances re: Teslas)
If you want to make this argument, you can at least provide some data on how much some police departments make by collecting seat belt fines, and compare it to other fines and cost of operation. I doubt the seat belt fines are significant enough to warrant this speculation.
The airbag argument is even worse. Modern vehicles go through numerous safety standard tests, including real world experiments where test dummies are put in an actual car crash. If seat belts make the crash worse for the dummy than airbag alone, these tests would have shown it, and there would be publications about it in a peer reviewed science journal. If you are so confident, you should be able to find at least one such publication. I doubt you will.