Somehow, in the blur of last week, I failed to link to this provocative Freakonomics post asking if bike helmet laws actually discourage bicycling.
While mandatory helmet laws have led to increased helmet use, and while helmet use has been shown to reduce bicycle fatalities, such laws also seem to lead to a decrease in actual bike riding, according to a new study.
The new working paper “The Intended and Unintended Effects of Youth Bicycle Helmet Laws" by Christopher S. Carpenter and Mark Stehr confirms what we already know: Helmet laws significantly reduce bicycling fatalities among youths under 15 by about 19 percent.
The paper further suggests “that helmet laws significantly increased youth helmet use by 29-35 percent.”
But there's a "but," as Freakonomics notes:
“There is also robust evidence for an unintended and previously undocumented mechanism: helmet laws produced modest but statistically significant reductions in youth bicycling participation of 4-5 percent.”
The authors offer three explanations for why this may be true:
1. The cost of helmets, both monetary and social — i.e., Helmets are uncool, so if I’ve got to wear a helmet to ride my bike, I’ll find something else to do.
2. “There is evidence that youths have suboptimally high discount rates (Gruber 2001), such that some youths might place too little weight on the expected gain in future utility from the prevention of injury or death relative to the costs of wearing helmets today.”
3. Bike-helmet laws lower the price of activities similar to biking — skateboarding, rollerblading, etc. — that do not require a helmet.
Freakonomics' Stephen Dubner goes on to give his take on the study.
Our take: Bicycle helmets have been mandatory for children under 16 in Oregon since 1994. Is there anyone out there who thinks bicycling has been on the decline here in the years since?
Of course, even in places where bike helmets are required, only about 54 percent of children always wear a helmet when biking, according to an Oregonian story from last year.