lines in the sand

For Pro-Choice Bikers

A great T-shirt for bikers who like to ride without a helmet.  Available from the National Organization for Women.  The caption on the product page works well, too:  Laws should protect our liberty, not infringe on our right to make decisions for ourselves!

Hat tip to Coyote Blog, whose post is actually about universal health care but is related to the helmet issue, especially when he quotes The Economist:

Well, when, by force of law, you externalise responsibility for providing a good, such as health care, then the effects of all individual choices that affect the cost of providing that good for the individual are thereby transformed from internal to external effects. If you, like Mr Dubois, are in the grip of the blithe assumption that reducing negative externalities by raising the cost of the behaviour that causes them is simply what government does, then obviously my gluttony and sloth are public problems. Because public policy made them public problems! So, obviously, it's up to the government to fiddle with prices to manipulate our behavior in order to minimise its impact on the tax-financed national budget.

Nannie's arguments usually include a reference to increased costs for taxpayers, when that only happens because the taxpayers, through their representatives, insist on paying them.

With helmets, when the manipulation is not through outright mandate, it's through the price of compliance with requirements like Florida's additional insurance or the just passed (but unsigned as yet) Michigan law creating a $100 annual permit.

Horn Tooting

I posted this letter on helmet laws after giving up on the Ledger actually printing it.  They did yesterday.

Wind In The Hair - what's it worth?

The PIRE presentation I referred to before has another interesting argument on slide 17, "analyzing" the costs and benefits of motorcycle helmets,  which I'll summarize here:

Costs of wearing a helmet:
Purchase - $200
Discomfort & inconvenience - $1,000

Benefits of wearing a helmet:
Medical - $200
Work - $1,400
Quality of Life - $2,300

Net benefit per rider: $2,700

As long as we're quantifying things like discomfort, inconvenience and quality of life, let's talk about Wind in the Hair, or WitH.

Of course, the value of WitH varies from rider to rider, but each must consciously or subconsciously decide whether it is worth more or less than, say, $2,700 to them.  And since they are "risking their lives", it must exceed that amount by a pretty significant margin.

There is another group of people who want WitH and we can see very easily what they are willing to pay for it:  a Mustang driver who wants it will pay a $5,000 premium for his convertible.  For a BMW it's $10,000 extra and this one can run $100,000 over a comparable sedan.  For some, that means another cost of wearing a helmet could be: Loss of Wind in the Hair - $5,000-$100,000.

Plainly, wind in the hair vs. enclosed riding can have a high value to many people.  Those of us who don't ride (no, I don't) have no basis or right to say that their personal valuation is wrong.

A lot of people try to compare headgear to seat belts and wonder why helmet laws are such a big issue.  I don't believe that either belts or helmets should be legally mandated, but there is a difference:  doffing the hat changes the riding experience much more than unbuckling the harness does.  Convertibles are a better comparison.

Fact Checking Exercise

The editorial my previous post linked to contained the following paragraph, which averaged 1.5 factual errors per sentence:

At last year's hearing on helmet usage, the Pacific Research Institute told the Safety Board that nearly 65 percent of riders involved in crashes in 2005 wore helmets and incurred $5 billion in medical expenses. The riders without helmets incurred medical expenses more than double that amount - $12.5 billion.

1.  When I contacted the Pacific Research Institute about support for some numbers that seemed out of line, they said they had "(n)ever communicated any such thing to the NTSB."   Googling revealed that the quote was probably from this presentation by the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation. 

2.  It looks like the $5b and $12.5b were from slide 7, which prominently feature $5.0b and...oops... $12.2b.  Well, I've fat-fingered things once or twice, so let's let them slide on this one.  Call it rounding.

3.  But notice that slide doesn't say these are medical costs.  Go back to slide 4 and you see that medical expenses are only 15% of the total.   The other components are Lost Work - 29% and Quality of Life(?) - 56%.

Wasn't that fun!  I don't question what I read in the media because I think it might be biased - I question it because I think it might be wrong.

Helmet law won't solve much

Year	With Helmets	No Helmets
2002	107	197
2003	174	191
2004	214	202
2005	272	205
2006	334	216
Increase	227	19

Last weekend the Lakeland Ledger called for Florida to bring back madatory motorcycle helmets.  I responded with the following letter (but without the table):

Returning to mandatory helmet laws would do little to curb Florida's soaring motorcycle death rate.

The year 2000, when the legal requirement went away, did see the worst increase to date as fatalities rose by 81 over the previous year.  Sixty percent of that increase was among those not wearing headgear.  The following two years were milder with net increases of only thirty and twenty-eight.

Then the killing began in earnest as the annual number of cycle deaths, as reported by the Florida Department of Transportation, climbed from 304 in 2002 to 550 by 2006, an increase of 246.  The shocker is that helmetless deaths only rose by 19 during that period while the "protected" body count more than tripled, from 107 to 334.

Certainly, motorcycle fatalities are rising too rapidly, but going hatless appears to have little to do with it.

Bad News for Nannies

Florida's new numbers came out this week.

For every 200 helmet wearing bikers who crashed in Florida during 2006, eleven died.  For those  with bare heads only ten didn't make it.

You may not hear about it from the NHTSA, the media or others, but this is the third year in a row that helmeted riders have died at a higher rate than the helmetless. That could be one reason the nannies usually go back to 2000-2003 for their stats.  Some years go one way, some the other.

Here are the numbers for the past ten years with the winning team in green and losers in red:

Year	With Helmets			No Helmets
	Crashers	Deaths	Rate	Crashers	Deaths	Rate
1997	3,385	139	4.1%	1,215	24	2.0%
1998	3,783	154	4.1%	1258	19	1.5%
1999	3,745	143	3.8%	1,382	22	1.6%
2000	3,737	175	4.7%	2,149	71	3.3%
2001	3,114	118	3.8%	3,616	158	4.4%
2002	3,092	107	3.5%	3,848	197	5.1%
2003	3,890	174	4.5%	3,838	191	5.0%
2004	4,271	214	5.0%	4,262	202	4.7%
2005	5,304	272	5.1%	4,084	205	5.0%
2006	5,980	334	5.6%	4,250	216	5.0%
Totals	34,321	1,496	4.4%	25,652	1,089	4.2%

Over all, the hatless bikers have a .02% advantage, not much difference at all.  And that is precisely the point, that wearing a helmet has less effect on the outcome than most think.