I’m not totally convinced that the helmets are the best value here, even if money was available to grant every American citizen a helmet.
What?? Beyond cars, riding something moving ~20km/hr is still super dangerous without a helmet. Slightly off the trail and hit a tree or post? Icy conditions and you wipe out?
Even something as simple as a road speed design change (ie just changing signs without changing ANYTHING else on the road) are ~500$ a sign. As soon as you get into more complex changes, but still on the easy side (ie Advisory Bike Lanes, where the only change is painting lines to allocate specific space for bikes) run ~$15/m for each line painted. On a typical advisory lane, thats 4 lines ($60/m) plus 500$ per sharrow symbol which are spaced every 75m in each lane.
Even at an expensive helmet ($100), Helmets are by far the cheapest method of personal safety you can do. ( For example, Toronto has~5397km of roads and a population of 2.93 million. To even do a simple repainting on those roads is ~$400mil. New expensive helmets for every single person in Toronto is $293mil.
I work in civil engineering. It’s not too hard to include bike design on new roads **when they come up ** (which is only every 20yrs on average) but arguing that its more cost effective? Definitely not true.
Not everyone there agrees with helmet less riding, though they do discuss the disagreement over the effectiveness of helmets for those, the stats say 1/3 of serious bike accidents involve brain injuries. That’s some huge numbers!!!
We wear helmets to do dozens of other activities for sport or leisure - ski/snowboard, skating, mountain climbing, spelunking, white water sports. Additionally, the article says those engaged in cycling for exercise or sport almost all wear helmets. Why is there such an aversion to wearing helmets while biking?
In my lifetime skiing I’ve seen an enormous change in people. When I was younger almost no one wore helmets. Now, it’s rare to see someone not wearing a helmet.
I said it was easy, doesnt mean its always implemented. Ive designed a handful of roads to have designated bike lanes or fully separated bike lanes. Every time we do any Active Transport, I’ve advocated for fully separated systems or physical barriers between. 90% of the time, the decision to cut them has come after resident input/discussion. Often the Townships I work with don’t have the resident/political backing to justify narrowing vehicle lanes to improve bike traffic - because that is what is required. Unfortunately we still don’t have enough public backing to push through these.
Hell, one job I’m working on is on a “designated bike route” and residents fought a separated path so much that the city scrapped it and went with the Advisory Bike Lanes.