Mandatory Helmet Laws For Car Drivers And Passengers?
Here’s the case, briefly:
- Driving a car is extremely dangerous - much moreso than cycling.
- Car accidents often result in head injuries.
- Helmets may help to prevent head injuries to drivers and passengers.
Therefore….automobile drivers and passengers should wear helmets. In fact, they should be required by law to wear helmets.
There are several outcomes that we might expect from such legislation:
- Many fewer people would drive their cars and trucks, or do so much less often, because nobody likes ‘helmet hair.’ We might expect this drop to be on the order of 30% - similar to cyclists.
- The drivers who continue to drive will do so now even more recklessly than they did before, because they will feel safer with their helmets on. They will not only endanger themselves more, but they will endanger all other road users more - other motorists, and of course pedestrians and cyclists. How many more people drivers will injure and kill? While overall injure and kill rates may go up on a per-driver basis - perhaps 10%, those injure and kill rates may actually fall overall, because there are 30% fewer drivers on the road.
Is this something we should pursue?
I’m only half-kidding. I like the idea of being on the offense. Generally speaking, we should pressure these people from every possible angle, with every opportunity we get.
NASCAR drivers wear all sorts of crazy gear to keep them alive in the case of an accident - including not only helmets but now HANS (Head And Neck Safety) devices. They go a bit faster than the cars on the streets of San Francisco (maybe), but they also have tons of extra safety gear - from roll cages and lots of car safety engineering to ’smushy’ racetrack walls. At some point, someone decided that not wearing these safety devices was crazy. And NASCAR drivers, as far as I know, don’t have to worry as much about the ‘weird’ types of accidents that occur all over San Francisco - getting hit from the side, for instance.
I might at least be interested in seeing a publicity stunt that highlighted the safety concerns of driving one’s car. Driving is so dangerous that responsible people and parents should not be endangering their own lives and the lives of their loved ones - perhaps unwittingly. They should either wear helmets and HANS devices and all drive Volvos, or they should use safer forms of transportation.
Incidentally, NASCAR cars are so dangerous to the ‘pedestrians’ on the track - the pit crews - that many of the pit crews now wear helmets, too.
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November 24th, 2008 at 10:53 am
Where did you get the stat that driving is more dangerous than biking?
November 24th, 2008 at 11:28 am
@Dustin - I just kind of ‘knew it’ from looking at stats over the past few months, but a quick google turns up lots of links - here’s one:
http://www.carectomy.com/index.php/Politics/Cars-Conjure-A-Fate-Worse-Than-Death
There are tons of research methods, ways to compare death rates (miles traveled vs. time traveled), etc., so I’m not sure if there’s any consensus on the question.
There are the other important questions that we need to address - maybe someone already has? That is, the risk of future death from getting fat by riding in a car vs. riding one’s bike.
There’s also the ‘risk of killing someone’ which appears to be stratospheric for the car - next to zero for the bicycle.