If you have a strong disregard for your own health and safety, you are free to express it in all sorts of ways. You can gorge on fast food five times a day. live among bears in Alaska. You can stagger through the worst part of town at 2 a.m. become a trapeze artist. You can join the Marine Corps. federal regulators get their way, you will not be able to ride a motorcycle without a helmet. That's already the law for all riders in 20 states and theOther states require head protection only forAnd in three states—Illinois, Iowa, and New Hampshire—all riders are free to feel the sun on their scalps and the wind in their hair. This small zone of personal autonomy causes great annoyance at the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), a federal agency. Last week, it urged that "everyone aboard a motorcycle be required to wear a helmet." Polls indicate most Americans agree. The reasons are obvious enough. From 1997 to 2008, the number of

motorcycle fatalities more than doubled, while total traffic deathsTwo out of every three bikers killed were not wearingSaid NTSB Vice Chairman Christopher Hart, "It's a public Oh, no, it's not. A public health issue arises when masses of people are exposed to illness or injury by dangers beyond their control—contaminated water, sooty air, natural disaster, maraudingdirt bike tires san antonio bands of hyenas—or when I get a serious disease that I may pass onchopper motorcycles for sale cyprus to you against your will.2008 ducati 848 motorcycle for sale In these cases, government action is necessary. motorcycle helmet speaker mod

legitimate for governments to regulate pollution, build levees, and require people to get vaccinations. But riding a motorcycle without a cranial cushion poses no danger to anyone except the rider. Skull fractures are notThe public is not at risk if I decide to mount a Harley with nothing but a pinwheel hat on my head. The mandatory helmet crowd, however, insists there is a threatmotorcycle shop mcgraths hill to the public: the threat of being forced to cover the medicalmotorcycle helmets melbourne costs of bikers who are injured or disabled. Institute for Highway Safety, "Only slightly more than half of motorcycle crash victims have private health insurance coverage. For patients without private insurance, a majority of medical costs are paid by the government."

Under the new health care law, of course, everyone will have toBut even then, the premiums of healthy people will have to cover the costs of motorcyclists' injuries. The complaint has a point, but it considers only the costs of motorcycle accidents, not the—yes—benefits. At the risk of sounding macabre, let me note that a 50-year-old biker who dies in a wreck saves us money, since he won't be around to collect Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid in his old age. fatality may yield a harvest of excellent organs for patients Besides, the argument on safety and medical costs is one thatBrain buckets reduce the chance of being killed in a wreck, but federal data indicate that most of those who die in motorcycle accidents would be killed even with a helmet. safe to assume that most of those seriously injured would be laid up in the hospital either way. The real danger is not from riding a motorcycle without a helmet, but from riding, period.

If you crash a hog at 70 mph, your head is only one of the body parts that will come out much worseIf we're justified in requiring helmets to save medical expenses, why not simply outlaw motorcycles entirely? prevent a lot more death and injury. It's also hard to see why we single out motorcyclists for the sin of saddling everyone with higher health care costs. patients suffer from self-inflicted ailments—lung cancer from smoking, liver damage from drinking, diabetes from eating unhealthy foods, AIDS from unprotected sex. Yet we don't ban theseBecause we retain a respect for individual freedom and choice—even in matters of life and death, even when individual choices have collective costs. Motorcycle helmet laws are an unwarranted exception to our normal, sound approach, which can be summarized: It's your life, and it's your funeral.Lawmaker who opposed universal helmet law dies in motorcycle crashChat with us in Facebook Messenger.

Find out what's happening in the world as it unfolds.Peter Pettalia was elected to Michigan's legislature in 2010He had voted to repeal helmet laws for motorcycle ridersIn 2012, he voted to repeal universal helmet laws for all motorcycle riders over the age of 20. Michigan is one of 28 states that do not have laws requiring all motorcyclists to wear helmets, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.Response: If true, this would be a serious drawback of helmet laws. Anyone who has observed the difference in riding in a city or country with many, many bicycles on the road understands how increasing the number of riders improves safety. The cyclic trend reducing bicycle use that began here in 1999 was related to fashion, to the rise of other forms of exercise and to safety concerns as car traffic was becoming worse. We had a decade of experience prior to that with states and cities passing helmet laws, and did not observe declines in cycling related to the laws. The decline that did take place was not limited to the areas that had helmet laws, and the subsequent recovery in cycling and sharp rise in bicycle use when gas prices spiked in 2008 was not related to helmet laws either.

In urban areas there has been a change in the attitudes of parents, who are concerned about traffic and crimes against children, and no longer allow their children the freedom to roam that bicycling used to facilitate. In addition, our helmet laws are so spottily enforced in most states that there would have been minimal effect in any case. In the last ten years the cycle has reversed. The current boom in bicycles for both transportation and sport use has coincided with trends in urban living, changes in attitudes toward car ownership, emphasis on fitness and improvements in bicycle facilities. All of this growth in bicycling in the U.S. has occurred in the presence of the bicycle helmet laws passed between 1987 and 2010, most of them not including adults. Cost is not much of an obstacle to acquiring a helmet here, since our market supplies helmets at very low prices. We require seatbelts here in most of our states, but drivers do not stop driving because of that requirement. People do not move out of their homes to another state when smoke detectors are required by law.

There is no statistical evidence that large numbers of motorcyclists quit riding in states that adopt mandatory motorcycle helmet laws, although it is certainly clear that some individuals in that group are extremely resentful. On the other hand, the Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute found indications that helmet laws can reduce cycling there in some age groups: see this abstract of their study for more info. But a research project in Toronto before and after their law came into effect showed that "although the number of child cyclists per hour was significantly different in different years, these differences could not be attributed to legislation. In 1996, the year after legislation came into effect, average cycling levels were higher (6.84 cyclists per hour) than in 1995, the year before legislation (4.33 cyclists per hour)." We are convinced that the answer to the question will lie in observational studies, and most of them will be local. In 2009 a paper published on the Web site of the University of California at Irvine's School of Education used statistical analysis of national data to reach the conclusion that helmet laws resulted in a ridership decline of 4 to 5 per cent in the age group they covered.

They do not seem to have realized that cycling overall declined in the US during the measured period. The data was collected from parents in telephone conversations, and we don't think that method is valid for helmet use studies. They did not control for traffic increases or parents' crime concerns in the states with laws, and those included California, New York, Pennsylvania, Florida and others where traffic grew the most. And some states have many local laws instead of a state-level law, skewing the comparison. Fortunately, you can read the entire paper, titled Intended and Unintended Effects of Youth Bicycle Helmet Laws on the Web and judge for yourself. A 2010 Canadian study showed that bicycle usage remained constant after helmet laws were adopted in two provinces. For the latest assessment from Queensland, Australia, see this study. We cite its conclusions below. This Australian study concluded that there is no evidence to support the contention that helmet laws discourage cycling.