Some interesting stuff here, including links to more studies showing similar results in different countries.
The summary is that the reason motorists break more laws is that speeding is so common.
I don't think this is because motorists are all evil and cyclists are all saints. Probably, the reason motorists break speed limits is that it can be relatively difficult to keep cars below the speed limit. It's all too easy to absentmindedly speed up. It's also, perhaps becuase of this, widely seen as socially acceptable to break the speed limit (speaking anecdotally).
One interesting thing here, which may not surprise regular readers of Fuck Cars, is that better cycling infrastructure leads to less lawbreaking by cyclists. As is often the case, it's the design of roads and cities that changes behaviour, not abstract appeals to road users to be sensible!
@gowan @frankPodmore Why aren’t helmets mandatory in cars? If it saves just one life surely it would be worth it?
Bikes dont have airbags, restraints, or a large cage of structural metal surrounding them. If you are on a bike, your only protection is what you are wearing. With that in mind, wouldn’t you want to wear something to protect yourself when moving at higher speeds? Even a speed of 10mph can be fatal if you fall off and hit your head on the ground. You cannot fall off or out of a car if you are properly wearing your seatbelt, and the airbags and structure of the vehicle are your immediate protections.
Basically, helmets in cars aren’t mandatory and don’t make sense to make mandatory, because there are already safety precautions in cars. Bikes, whether manual or motorized, do not offer these or any protections.
But the safety precautions in cars are clearly inadequte, because many people still die. We didn’t look at cars and say, ‘No need for airbags, we already have a safety precaution in the form of seatbelts’.
Please tell me what exactly a helmet in a car will do for you, unless you are travelling well over 200 miles per hour? Seatbelts already hold the torso in place, preventing one from slamming their head into the steering wheel, dashboard, or windshield, and the airbags already absorb the energy and arrest the unrestrained body parts, such as the head.
You would have to be travelling fast enough to outpace the airbags, which typically deploy at around 200 miles per hour. You wanna know why professional race car drivers wear helmets? Because they don’t have airbags.
Because all those safety features don’t prevent cars from being the place you’re most likely to get a traumatic brain injury.
It’s quite illustrative how furious you are about this. If you read what I’m saying properly, you’d see that I don’t think people in cars should wear helmets. My point is that the arguments for doing so are just as good as they are for cyclists, i.e., not at all.
Because we don’t have a massive amount of data showing they would prevent injury vs being the cause of other injuries.
@gowan Really? Or has it just been misinterpreted?
Try finding a bunch of data on people driving with helmets on who are not racing the car.
The data isn’t there because no one has been gathering it.
I once read an article about a kid who was killed by falling masonry while sitting on a bench. Clearly, we should require bench-sitters to wear helmets in case of falling masonry!
@frankPodmore That rather depends on whether your objective is to deter beach sitting or not. Of course, if the real objective is to protect life and health, the place to start is removing the source of harm 😉
You’re right! Time to ban masonry!