Pedal Me bans staff riders from wearing helmets for safety reasons

Re:Pedal Me bans staff riders from wearing helmets for safet... by thayne on Sunday May 22, 2022 @04:38PM (#31472504)

Interesting you should bring that up. That was used as an example of unintended side effects of policy in my economics class, because when people started wearing seat belts, they drove faster and more recklessly, so while the seatbelts protected people inside the cars, the number of pedestrians hit by cars went up.

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation

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Re:Pedal Me bans staff riders from wearing helmets for safet... by mcguire on Sunday May 22, 2022 @06:06PM (#31473275)

Hmm.

Most states brought on mandatory seat belt laws in the mid-1980s--mid-1990s. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt_laws_in_the_United_S...)

1981 was the last year with motor vehicle fatalities over 3.0 per billion miles. By 2000 it was 1.53 and 2019 it was 1.10. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...)

I can only find pedestrian fatality numbers from 1994. (https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/road-users/pedestr...) It decreased from 5584 in 1995 to 4109 in 2009 and increased to 6272 in 2019.

In 1995, there were 2,423 billion vehicle miles traveled; in 2009, 2,957; in 2019, 3,248. Doing the division, that works out to 2.3 pedestrian deaths / BVMT in 1995; 1.4 in 2009, and 1.9 in 2019.

Interesting.

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Re:Pedal Me bans staff riders from wearing helmets for safet... by jeromegv on Sunday May 22, 2022 @07:21PM (#31473793)

Regarding pedestrian death: Size/weight of car have also dramatically increased.

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Re:Pedal Me bans staff riders from wearing helmets for safet... by ted_dunning on Sunday May 22, 2022 @09:03PM (#31474362)

I take it you didn't actually read that wikipedia page. It says that the supposed Peltzman effect for seat belts didn't pan out.

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