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Comment by PopAlongKid | Hacker News Reader

Another comment mentioned pros and cons for the user of the ebike.

As a frequent pedestrian on the nearby heavily-used trails, I see a number of cons for everyone else:

Despite a prohibition on motorized vehicles on these trails, they exploit a loophole for handicapped users, and the agency in charge refuses to do anything to fix it.

Even if it makes sense to allow these motorized vehicles, the 15 MPH speed limit is frequently violated. Many of these people (especially scooters) don't wear helmets and speed recklessly, zipping between walkers, joggers, people pushing toddlers in strollers, etc. I saw a scooter user painfully wipe out just a few weeks ago. I'm sadly awaiting the first case of serious injury or fatality (to the user or others) caused by an uninsured speeding e-bike or scooter.

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In my home town we already had several pedestrians badly injured, and one killed by a "small" motorized vehicle driving on sidewalks, back in 2012.

The same driver was involved in all of the incidents, she was elderly and the vehicle in question was classified "mobility aid", though it looked just like a small car.

I am adamantly of the opinion that any vehicle that shares trails, sidewalks, etc. with pedestrians MUST be speed-limited to walking speed. That includes mobility chairs, scooters, and similar.

Unfortunately, the handicapped community vehemently opposes such speed limits.

Why do you care if they don't wear helmets?

Because if they suffer a serious injury they are going to drain hospital resources from people who did not cause their own disease/injury, possibly become a permanent disabled person on the public dole, and in general raise the cost of health care.

You can make this point about a lot of activities, sports, drinking, smoking, drugs, eating too much.

And a helmet doesn't prevent broken bones, spines, so they will still drain hospital resources.

This is far less likely in a world where people don’t use their cars to drive 2 minutes to the grocery store.

It’s not quite that simple. Helmets are deterrents - Melbourne is a fantastic example where cycling is less common than it should be and public bike schemes keep failing specifically because of the requirement to wear a helmet. Companies like Lime try to solve this by attaching a helmet to the scooter. 90% of the time the helmet is missing. Yeah I could spend 30 minutes walking to every scooter in the area trying to find one I can ride legally, or I can just get an Uber.

When people are deterred, they take less eco friendly forms of transport, and are less active. This has negative health consequences, although difficult to measure and compare. But it’s not black and white.

The entirety of Europe gets by perfectly fine with public healthcare and no helmets. So I don’t buy the argument that this is truly a problem for healthcare.

> The entirety of Europe gets by perfectly fine with public healthcare and no helmets.

Yes and no. The Netherlands is seeing some second-order effects of this:

https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2023/16/more-traffic-deaths-in...

Eastern Europe. My sister works at ER and they are calling cyclists without helmets "organ donor wannabes". The point is that unlike bikers, many of these cyclists don't end up as organ donors and/or "fatality" in statistics. They only manage to cause permanent damage to their head/brain.

Sorry if this sounds harsh, but people who work in ER have skewed opinions because they’re only dealing with the people who end up with serious injuries.

You need to look at the bigger picture - first of all what’s the probability of having an accident, then within that probability what’s the difference between wearing a helmet or not. That then needs to be compared against the risks of staying sedentary. It’s complicated.

Of course the have their biases, but they actually only ones who see the cases mostly not covered in statistics and they are the ones who can say whether helmet would save someone or not. The problem is that our culture is biased against fatalities. Even in this discussion there are mostly links to graphs about death rates. But these people in ER are the ones who see a lot of cases where death would be better outcome. Looking at my neighbours taking care of almost completely paralyzed son (accident not related to transport), I tend to agree.

Imo it's the opposite))) a helmet can protect from fatal injuries, meaning hospital does not need to treat the rest if the person dies. Having a helmet means less chances to die bc of head injury but more chances hospital will treat your broken bones. Anyway, helmet helps only for light accidents, with most car accidents ppl will die regardless, there are even some stats that with car accidents a helmet somehow gives green light to autodrivers to drive more aggressively

Helmets prevent a particular type of injury - traumatic brain injury This is true for all types of transportation including driving.

Traumatic brain injury is a common outcome of an automobile collisions - yet we don't see people with the same concern for introducing mandatory helmets in day-to-day driving.

Where I live we get delivery cyclists racing down pedestrian precints at scary speeds. And I've similarly thought "someone's gonna get killed here one day, and possibly not the rider". This was true even with ordinary pushbikes or lighweight electric-assist bikes, but in the past couple of years most of the full-time riders seem to have moved to thick tyred and heavy motor-only bikes, which carry a lot of momentum down those busy shopping streets

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