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Permalink Reply by ketoguychicago on December 30, 2019 at 5:43pm

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/sep/22/bicycle-helmet...

The auto industry went through their anti-seatbelt phase for a while too.  Certainly they have their limitations when facing a bridge abutment.  But since they're now mainstream, from what I gather, few people wearing either make an effort in the last seconds before impact to remove them.  Same/same for helmets.  The motorcycle folks have their staunch opposition to helmets too, and everybody's got dueling studies, both of our links included.

As we're sort of touching on, much of the anti-helmet campaigning is often a "point the finger at someone/something else" campaign (e.g.cars, SUVs, or politicians) in an effort to make changes with those spheres, but at the cost of the opportunity to promote helmets and safety elsewhere.

So, mandatory helmets? Sort of depends on our view of a free society.  Mandating them certainly isn't very laissez-faire, although nor is society has to pick up the hospital tab for an injured driver/cyclist/motorcyclist.  

Elsewhere there'd been a great cycling helmet that had a face/chin guard, but it wasn't rated for downhill/mountain biking or some such rating, so it was taken off the market which was unfortunate.  

Back to NY, the state veto wasn't to victim-blame, just to get the helmet thing in with the scooters.  Essentially, NY (the state) views eScooters like mopeds, like motorcycles.  Sort of the way Illinois views an e-car like a Tesla as a car, with no carve-out for registration or seatbelts.  

https://dmv.ny.gov/registration/register-moped

My hunch is if only the helmet thing had stayed in place (just as for motorcycles) the bill might have been signed, although as I'm reading elsewhere, there's actually a totally unrelated spat with one of the eScooter bill's sponsors that lead to some of the veto too, which is unfortunate.  

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Permalink Reply by ad on January 2, 2020 at 12:21pm

Does this apply to all three class levels of e-bikes, and if so, what impact does that have on the City's bikeshare system since Citibike was I though already rolling out Class 1 e-bikes?     

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Permalink Reply by ketoguychicago on January 2, 2020 at 1:53pm

That's what they were going for - to address all three classes of them anyhow and try to true-up the regs state-wide. From the bill itself: 

SUMMARY OF SPECIFIC PROVISIONS:  This legislation authorizes 
three classes of electric assist bicycles and electric scooters 
to operate in New York State, 
subject to local regulation. (more details in the bill)
Here's the NY Senate version of the bill
https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2019/s5294

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Permalink Reply by ketoguychicago on January 2, 2020 at 5:24pm

Some additional information on the tremendous importance of bike helmets with respect to safety/injury from The New England Journal of Medicine:

 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM198905253202101

Here's the crux of it for NY State:  A motorcycle in NY requires a helmet (right or wrong, it's understood that there's debate about the wisdom of that if we set aside the link above).  Just as a car with an electric motor still requires seatbelts (the Tesla example) a motorcycle rider still requires a helmet, even if the motorcycle motor is electric.  The vetoed bill would have dropped the requirements to register a slow-ebike version (think citi-bike state-wide) and would have dropped the requirement to have insurance as well, and the governor would have signed it if only the helmet thing was kept in. 

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