In addition to questioning the effectiveness of helmet laws, motorcycle activists sometimes suggest (in an argument that belies their professed agnosticism on the question of whether it's smart to wear a helmet) that helmets make accidents more likely because they increase fatigue and impair hearing, peripheral vision, and awareness of air pressure changes. Once an accident occurs, they argue, the added weight increases the risk of neck and spine injuries. James Baxter, president of the National Motorists Association and a former lobbyist on motorcycle issues, says the arguments suggesting that helmet laws cause injuries "have never been too well documented," but they "provided enough of an excuse for some legislators who wanted to get out from under the issue."
Another important factor that helped helmet law opponents was the decision by motorcycle manufacturers to stay out of the fight. Although a 2004 NHTSA pamphlet lists the Motorcycle Industry Council as a supporter of "universal motorcycle helmet laws," a spokesman for the group, Mike Mount, says it encourages motorcyclists to wear helmets but takes no position on whether they should be legally required to do so. "They are cowed into silence," says Chuck Hurley, executive director of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), who until this year ran the National Safety Council's Air Bag & Seat Belt Safety Campaign. "The most you'll get out of them is that helmets are a good idea."
If motorcycle manufacturers worry about antagonizing their customers, legislators worry about provoking single-issue voters with long memories. The key to resisting motorcycle helmet laws was convincing legislators they would pay at the polls for trying to force helmets onto adults. The laws' opponents did so in ways both dramatic and mundane. They rode into state capitals, thousands at a time, to protest existing laws or forestall new ones. They packed legislative hearing rooms. They met with legislators, wrote letters, and got involved in party politics. They campaigned for politicians who supported the right to ride without a helmet and against politicians who didn't.
The Minnesota Motorcycle Riders Foundation acquired enough clout to elicit a 1990 pledge from Gov. Arne Carlson to veto any bill extending the state's helmet requirement to adults. A couple of years later, a state legislator who had sponsored an unsuccessful helmet bill complained to the Minneapolis Star Tribune: "It's a case of not-so-subtle political intimidation. These [motorcyclists] are people who really feel negatively about something. They are the ones who'll get out and work very hard against you in your district and bad-mouth you."
Each year in Texas, where the legislature freed riders 21 or older from the state's helmet requirement in 1997, Texas ABATE brings several thousand riders in motorcycle attire to the state Capitol in Austin, where they walk the halls, knock on doors, and explain their point of view. Before 2000, when the Florida legislature narrowed the state's helmet law, ABATE of Florida members would ride into Tallahassee bareheaded, with a pre-arranged police escort, and ride out wearing helmets. "It was very orderly," says James "Doc" Reichenbach, the group's president. "This was done very professionally."
The example of Florida, where the helmet requirement for adults was in effect for more than three decades, suggests the importance of another trait: persistence. Opponents of helmet laws across the country "just kept pounding away at this issue," says Baxter. "I think a lot of legislators just felt it wasn't worth the trouble to them personally to get in these people's faces and have them camping on their doorstep, working against them in elections, supporting their opponents."
Buckle Up and Shut Up
As Melissa Savage, an analyst with the National Conference of State Legislatures, told the Chicago Tribune in 2003, "You don't see anything like this sort of well-organized opposition to seat-belt laws." In response to the first state law requiring adults to buckle up, which was approved by New York in 1984, a few defiant motorists wore T-shirts with seat belt straps sewn into them to create the illusion that they were complying. Others vented their objections in angry letters to legislators and Gov. Mario Cuomo, who dismissed them, in a 1985 interview with the Los Angeles Times, as "NRA hunters who drink beer, don't vote, and lie to their wives about where they were all weekend." Ballot initiatives, later reversed by state legislators, temporarily repealed seat belt laws in Massachusetts, Nebraska, and North Dakota. But generally speaking, says the National Motorists Association's Baxter, "there was no strong opposition. The legislators did not feel they would be affected by the consequences of their vote. There was no downside."
When the New York law was passed, the idea of fining people for riding unbelted was controversial. A 1982 Gallup survey found that 75 percent of Americans opposed such laws, and a Gallup survey conducted two years later, shortly after New York's law was approved, found 65 percent were still against the idea. But the swing in public opinion continued as more states adopted seat belt laws, culminating with Maine in 1995. Today every state except New Hampshire requires adults to wear seat belts, and polls indicate a large majority of the public not only supports such laws but favors primary enforcement, currently permitted in only 20 states and D.C.
One reason for the nearly complete triumph of seat belt laws is the numbers cited to support them. NHTSA estimates that seat belt laws save thousands of lives each year, compared to a few hundred that could be saved if every state had a universal helmet law. "Those numbers are just so much larger than they are related to motorcycles that they get [legislators'] attention," says John Ulczycki, transportation safety director at the National Safety Council.
The people wielding the numbers have also made a difference. In contrast to the motorcycle industry's stance on helmets, automakers played an early and conspicuous role in the debate over seat belt laws, which they began pushing in 1983 as an alternative to the air bags the federal government was threatening to require. That strategy took on a new urgency in 1984, when Secretary of Transportation Elizabeth Dole said the federal air bag mandate would begin to take effect in 1986 but would be lifted if seat belt laws covering at least two-thirds of the U.S. population had been passed by April 1989. (As with the drinking age, which every state has raised to 21 because of a 1984 law that threatened to cut off highway funding if they didn't, the supposedly federalist Reagan administration did not hesitate to impose its preferred traffic safety policies on the states through indirect means.) The auto industry set up a lobby group, Traffic Safety Now, and invested some $100 million to push seat belt laws in the hope of meeting Dole's deadline.
Insurance companies also lobbied for seat belt laws, but they did not want the air bag mandate lifted. Ultimately the insurers got what they wanted: mandatory seat belts and mandatory air bags. Although seat belt laws covering more than two-thirds of Americans were passed by May 1986, the laws did not meet Dole's specifications, which included primary enforcement and a minimum fine of $25. In a 1986 ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld Dole's authority to issue the conditional air bag mandate but noted that "none of these [seat belt] laws...apparently complies with the secretary's specific requirements."
Although Traffic Safety Now no longer exists, the auto industry supports organizations such as the National Safety Council that lobby for primary enforcement of seat belt laws. Widespread seat belt use helps reduce automakers' liability for car accident injuries and deaths, including those involving air bags, which can be especially dangerous when used without belts. Insurers, always looking for ways to reduce claims, likewise support primary enforcement (which the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety hopefully calls "standard enforcement") and fund groups such as Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety.
As states move toward primary enforcement (which the transportation bill signed by President Bush in August encourages them to do with a promise of extra highway money), seat belt laws may arouse more resentment and concern, especially since traffic stops can lead to further hassles, such as interrogation and examinations by drug-sniffing dogs. Fear of racially tinged police harassment was the main reason New Jersey, the second state to adopt a seat belt law, did not follow New York's lead in allowing primary enforcement, and most states copied the New Jersey model. "Do I think racial profiling is an issue?" says MADD's Chuck Hurley, who lobbied for stricter seat belt laws when he worked at the National Safety Council. "Yes, I do." But Hurley doubts primary enforcement of seat belt laws will noticeably worsen the problem, and he argues that it makes sense as a matter of consistency: If you can be pulled over for a broken tail light, why not for failing to buckle up? One answer is that the broken tail light poses a potential hazard to others, while the unbuckled seat belt does not. But unless they want to repeal existing seat belt requirements, says Hurley, politicians who oppose primary enforcement are left to argue, rather implausibly, that it's "the Maginot Line between enough government and too much government."
It does seem unlikely that motorists who have become accustomed to wearing seat belts during the last two decades will suddenly rebel when enforcement becomes stricter. The national seat belt use rate (based on daytime surveys of drivers and front-seat passengers) gradually rose from less than 15 percent in 1984 to 80 percent in 2004. A desire to comply with the law and fear of fines no doubt had much to do with that trend, as did publicity about the potentially life-saving benefits of buckling up. Motorists who developed the habit as children copying their parents may not give any thought to the legal requirement, let alone harbor moral objections to it.
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