Re: Helmet efficacy test

On 3/31/2025 10:33 AM, Roger Merriman wrote:

I do wonder how and why
countries have devoted time to making it a law!

Here's my impression of how enacting helmet laws became popular (for a time) in the U.S.
It seemed to start in the late 1980s. Key players were the team of Thompson, Thompson & Rivara at the Harborview Institute in Seattle, who were three physicians who somehow decided to devote a LOT of their professional energy to helmet promotion. I don't know what triggered that, but they began promoting bike helmet use through a local insurance group, they began surveying how many local cyclists rode with and without helmets, etc. and ultimately they produced their most famous work, a "case-control" emergency room study that claimed helmets prevented 85% of bicycle head injuries. All this was done with the assumption that bicycling was a tremendous and very unusual source of serious TBI.
That "85%" claim - still never corroborated! - was used heavily in publicity. Bell Sports made "generous donations" to Safe Kids, Inc., a national (now international) do gooder society intended to protect kids from any and all accidents. At various times, Safe Kids said kids should _never_ play outside without adult supervision, said no child under 10 should be allowed to cross a street unaided, etc. etc. (Safe Kids has now moved on to treating kids' car seats as the world's most important problem.)
It became a top priority of Safe Kids to push for mandatory helmet laws for kids. They distributed helmet promotion brochures and videotapes to their hundreds of local chapters, and asked them to do presentations to other local organizations. (Our bike club was one such local organization.) They (and Bell, and perhaps others) composed model laws that were presented to sympathetic legislators in probably all 50 states, which is one reason so many state laws are carbon copies. When legislative hearings for MHLs were held, Safe Kids chapters organized large teams of proponents to testify at the hearings.
It was a well organized and apparently nationwide push. I don't know how much of the expense was covered by "generous donations" from Bell and other helmet companies, but I'd bet it was significant. I'm sure that once key players at Safe Kids Inc. were pulled on board, that other income sources were also used by Safe Kids.
I was aware of a lot of this by being introduced to the president of the local Safe Kids chapter - a lovely and sincere lady. I remember her saying "Frank! It's so simple! 85%!!" as in, nothing else needed done to save kids from tragedy. I remember her showing her ~10 minute video at a health conference, where I pointed out that her video left less than 20 seconds to a super-fast rundown of how to avoid crashing in the first place - brief statements like "ride on the right side of the road. Stop for stop signs. Use lights at night. Make sure your bike works well..." delivered at lightning speed.
I saw her again when she was among a team of about 30 testifying at a hearing for a statewide mandatory helmet bill. One sincere proponent after another described the horrors of falling off a bike as the panel of legislators dozed. Then two of us gave opponent testimony, with explanations and data, to legislators that suddenly woke up.
At the end, several proponents came over to us and said they had never considered the points we raised, and asked for more information from us. And the helmet bill was voted down in committee. Ohio still has no statewide mandatory helmet law.
In recent decades, no statewide mandatory helmet laws have been enacted. The ones that exist are largely ignored.
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- Frank Krygowski