There's a big difference between a helmet and a seat belt; the seat belt is part of the car; you have to carry the helmet, have it with you at all times, before and after riding. The net result is a drop in the number of riders, which has an impact on overall safety.

I came to this article thinking it would be BS but it turns out to be quite reasonable. Yes, helmets protect rider and all riders should wear one; but making helmets mandatory have unintended consequences which result, as a whole, in making bikes less safe for everyone.

Do you get reduced payments for orthopedic rehab if you play sports and get injured?

Do you get reduced payments for diabetes treatments if you're overweight?

The reasoning behind wearing an helmet on motorbikes is two fold:

- there are a lot more chances of being left disabled by the accident than dying, which is something you might not have thought about, but when you're disabled suddenly it's not your head anymore, you depend on other people to take care of your head and the rest of your body. There's a cost involved in severe head traumas and the monetary one is by far the less important.

- your head splattered on the asphalt is something other people might not want to watch. Some people might be even traumatized by that view. So please if you really want to risk it, do it when you're alone, in the middle of nowhere. Because you can still do it, you won't get arrested if you do it, simply fined.

but the real reason why I do not understand this "easy rider" alle cozze argument is: helmets are super cool! If professional bikers wear it, then why not?

Or, rather, I am happy that if you end up in hospital for any reason at all, the only thing on everyone's mind is treating you as best they can, and helping you to get better. No matter how you ended up there, or whether it was your fault or not, or how much money you have - if you're hurt, people will take care of you.

It's what I'd want to happen to me, it's what I'd want to happen to my family, it's what I'd want to happen to some of my friends who have somewhat more reckless hobbies than I do. And so I'm happy to have my tax money do the same thing for complete strangers, because they're somebody else's family or good friends. (And even if they're not, being alone is not a reason to deny someone healthcare.)

I trust people not to "take advantage" of this and be stupidly reckless simply because the healthcare is there, because... even with great healthcare that's available for free at the point of use, serious injuries suck. Having great healthcare doesn't make pain less painful, or physiotherapy to come back from injury less time-consuming, or less of a crimp in your whole goddamn life.

Or if they just don't have insurance, the hospital passes on the cost to recoup their care in the form of high rates for everyone.

You don't ride a bicycle in a vacuum.

I'm infinitely more concerned with the insane amount of government waste that happens where that money could go to schools or infrastructure or cancer treatments. I imagine that government waste is orders of magnitude more expensive than cyclists damaging themselves because they weren't wearing helmets, for example.

I had a motorcycle for well over a decade. We have helmet laws here and I carried that heavier helmet or placed it on my bike. It was fine. Part of the cost of having a bike.

It's another thing to make a law forcing everyone to agree with you, or else.

The paradoxical result shown in this article, which has been seen repeatedly, is that forcing people to wear helmets does more harm, by discouraging people from riding bicycles, than the benefit it creates by pushing some small number of the bicyclists who remain to take safety precautions they would otherwise have neglected.

The reasons for requiring this for the "greater good" are:

* Younger people are easily influenced and without such a law wouldn't use a helmet, seatbelt, etc.

* Costs of healthcare after a bad crash can be serious. Yes, my country like pretty much everyone outside the US, has single payer. We would foot the bill, regardless.

* It's proven that regulation and legislation can help. Regulation for seat-belts, airbags, crash testing, etc. has saved many lives. IMO this is what government is about, saving people. Sometimes from their stupidity and ignorance.

I did feel this aspect of the effect of regulation was not well addressed in the article at least. I think there's an implication that the effect of regulation has been to reduce cycling, and therefore the effect on youth has been more to discourage cycling altogether than to encourage cycling with helmets, but I don't think that's well established. IIRC, the positive effects of seat belt laws are generally much more pronounced after a generation or two.

> It's proven that regulation and legislation can help. Regulation for seat-belts, airbags, crash testing, etc. has saved many lives. IMO this is what government is about, saving people. Sometimes from their stupidity and ignorance.

There's also plenty of evidence of cases where regulation and legislation has harmed, or had no effect. Arguments that regulation & legislation intrinsically help or harm are, at best, specious. Regulation & legislation are tools that obviously can be helpful; the debate should always be about whether a particular regulatory/legislative approach is helpful.

So why not do that too?

We do also do that too.

Every car is built with a fancy headrests and seatbelts and airbags -- the entire car is literally a helmet, and we require this on every new vehicle sold for decades. (And we require the seatbelt be worn too, legally enforceable by law in most areas)

We even check every single car sold to make sure the Helmet-worthiness of it is safe for the general public (see https://www.nhtsa.gov/vehicle/2019/CHEVROLET/VOLT/5%252520HB... as an example of a vehicle results)

When an occupant of the car is small enough such that the built-in helmet-worthiness of the car might be rendered insufficient, we also require they get extra helmet-like protections wrapped around their head/neck/body - see https://www.dmv.com/car-seats for specifics -- and even these are also legally enforceable by law in most areas

Of course all of this is simply to say, that there is a line, where the marginal safety gain is outweighed by the cost, both economic and otherwise. Different people and organizations are going to have differing opinions on where this line should be, but arguing purely on the side of harm reduction misses a great deal. This is aside from personal responsibility, liberty, etc.

It may be proven that regulation can help, in general, but it has also been proven that this specific type of regulation does more harm than good.

The key sentence in the article is: " Financial struggle for popular bike sharing systems"...

That's where the money is and that's who made up that nonsense. Lots of people die because of those terrible motorized bikes and scooters. They're trying to get cyclists to fight their regulatory requirements by making up fake science.

For me, however, this idea is old news. People have been investigating this issue for years and the results seem to be generally consistent. I have been reading reports about the link between helmet laws, reduced cycling rates, and reduced overall safety for at least five years now.

I live in Seattle, where the surrounding county passed a mandatory helmet law back in 1993. After decades of experience, this law was seen to do more harm than good, and the Board of Health decided earlier this year to repeal it.

I think it's entirely plausible that the article was written by a PR company, and that is one possible reason (though not the only) they were paid to do it.

I'll quibble with you on a few points though:

Much research only find correlation. Just because it's not conclusive about causation doesn't mean it's not research.

As much "those terrible motorized bikes and scooters" might have lead to people dying (I've heard the anecdotal horror stories, I've just not looked at the data, so I'm ignorant to the overall effect), there have been plenty of attempts (some successful) at non-motorized bike sharing systems. One could reasonably imagine that when those systems are successful, it is likely there's a net increase in cycling within the community, thereby increasing overall safety of cycling via the "safety In Numbers" effect cited in the article, not to mention a possible reduction in the amount of driving. It therefore follows that one could make an argument that improving the success rate of such systems helps improve bike riding safety (though I'd like to see THAT data). It might even be true (and again, I have not seen any data on this) that for all the terrible deaths from motorized bikes & scooters, that adoption of them still increases the safety for cyclists, because if the alternative is the same person being in a car/truck/SUV, then a cyclist being hit by a motorized bike or scooter, even if they get hit more often, might be far less dangerous.

I think we shouldn't presume any particular PR motive for the article necessarily means it is not in line with the interests of cyclists. Ad hominems aren't don't really undermine the arguments presented in the article.

Or do what happened in Australia and just don't bother riding a bike and drive your car instead.

I sound flippant but I'm just reflecting _what actually happened_, which is where conversations need to be grounded.

The amount of discomfort (psychological fear of theft or physical nuisance of carrying it) is very likely going to discourage its use. But then you're liable for a fine for not having a helmet, so you choose to not ride the bike.

Just don't require helmets for bike riders over some age.

The idea that use would be discouraged because of that is ridiculous when you consider the alternative: cars or public transport. Both are terrible options. Parking, traffic, etc.

I'm 47 and had a crash recently. How does my age have to do anything if someone suddenly jumps in my lane or a car runs into me?

If anything my healthcare bill will be higher.

The same argument applies to children of course - where do you put your helmet after you've cycled to school? Attach it to the bike loosely and someone will steal it, it's too big to carry in your rucksack all day, and you don't want to have to go back and forth to your locker potentially on the other side of school if you have one at all.

Also if it's locked to the bike you would break the lock and steal the bike. The helmet is the cheaper part. Helmets are often designed so locks can go through them.

Why not? A good bike helmet is several hundred dollars. That's not life-altering money of course, but it adds a decent percentage to the cost of replacing the stolen bike.

Unfortunately you can't glance at a cyclist and decide affirmatively that they're an idiot for riding without wipeout skills.

You don't need that helmet until you do.

Let me assure you, if you've decided cycling safety is a binary contingent on whether or not you're wearing a helmet, you're doing it wrong. It's no better than superstition. There are so many other variables.

* Avoiding the crash in the first place

* Knowing how to fall if you crash

* Helmet, and potentially other protection, when unable to execute crashing properly.

(Edit: Changed ’security’ to ’safety’)

I got three stiches in my chin. I lost two teeth; one was driven through my lip, and I had 13 stiches in that lip (there are three layers in a lip: outer skin, muscle, inner skin). I needed two root-canals. I fractured my mandible, which is now joined to the maxilla on only one side. I was concussed, and wound up sleeping about 15 hours a day for the next 3 months. I couldn't chew for ages.

A motorbike helmet might have helped; but not a bicycle helmet.

Of course, the helmet is only 10% of cycling safety. But it's for that important 10% when your head crashes into the ground. Suggesting that it would never come in handy is naive.

Since you seem to believe in the power of personal anecdote, I am an experienced cyclist and have crashed directly on to my head before. It was just once, but it prevented a serious head injury.

We went through this same nonsense with motorcycles. Stop acting like it's the end of the world to put a piece of foam and plastic on your head for a little bit.

If someone asked me to wear a helmet while running, I would find that ridiculous. Same thing when riding my (non-road) bike.

Bike speeds > 20km/h are normal and easily achievable for the untrained on flat ground. Downhill, you'll quickly go past 30km/h. This isn't something that you're doing while running for longer periods of time while you're still half-asleep.

Helmets annoy me too, but "the fastest runners can peak at speeds higher than what I reach every other day on my bike and they don't wear helmets" is a weird argument.

For rides where I go faster, I will take my road bike and wear a helmet.

For rides where I go slower, I would prefer not to wear a helmet, but mandatory helmet laws don’t make that distinction.

As you alluded, even between bike trips, I weigh the risks differently when I think about a casual spin down a protected lane or a recreational trail as compared to an aggressive commute inches apart from vehicle traffic.

My local bike share program has started blurring things even more for me lately as they introduce progressively zippier e-bikes. Any more, it’s trivial for me to move with traffic on these huge heavy clunkers of bikes, while to my impulses it still feels like the low-effort casual kind of ride I’d instinctively rate as not warranting a helmet.

Still, I’m glad to be judging for myself how to mitigate the specific risks of a specific ride.

Tying a helmet to a bike can result in theft and weathering (rain).

The article goes to describe that it is the secondary effects that are important. Ie, it's better to have 100 cyclists on a road with 50% helmet usage, than it is to have 3 with 100% usage.

I've seen campaigns and memorial stickers asking drivers to watch for motorcycles. So it is not dissimilar for pedal bikes, except the safety effect for driver awareness is even more important for non-motorized bikes. Which is essentially the non-intuitice conclusion of the article.

Yes, but that additional cost does discourage people to use a bike. And many countries want to encourage rather than discourage bike use, for several reasons:

* bikes don't endanger other road users the way cars do

* bikes pollute less

* bikes take up less space

* bikes put less strain on the road

* bikers get more exercise and are therefore healthier

All of these are important positive effects, so a lot of countries would prefer to stimulate bike use rather than discourage it. They don't have the same reason to encourage car or motorbike use, so having the extra cost there is fine. The alternative for a car is likely to be better for society, so it's fine to discourage their use. The alternative for a bike is likely to be worse.

You need it when you're on your bike, riding it. I commuted by bicycle for 19 years and biked (or walked) almost everywhere (Arlington, VA - Washington, DC). When I rode to the store or to meet someone or to get something to eat, the helmet usually stayed with the bike. I never thought someone would steal just my helmet. I didn't bother to lock it up, although you can get a wire to pass through the helmet and lock it up with the bike.

But I agree that making it mandatory will do more harm than good, for the reasons stated in the article.

I don't see how adding friction does not lead to a reduction in cycling?

Unlike helmets, seat belts are one size fits all and they're built into the car. I'm not putting on someone else's sweaty and gross helmet.

But you've hit on the right issue: helmets would be far less necessary if car drivers could stop hitting people. There aren't a whole lot of people just falling over all alone in a bike lane and outside Tour De France recaps, bike-on-bike crashes are also uncommon and uneventful. Remove the 3 tons of metal whizzing by and helmets would probably be reserved for winter conditions, rain, or sport activities.

The solution isn't in changing biking. It's in changing driving.

Your post is compelling, in comparing it to seatbelt laws. That said, you probably don't know those as well as you think you do. For an easy example, public transit that is often targeting lower income areas often does not require seat belts. Indeed, I've never been in a bus that required them. Even car seat laws often have carve outs for cabs.

Worse, though, your post is ultimately a false dichotomy. There is no need to pick one. We should reform police to be less "us versus them," we should make better traffic calming choices. All the while we should encourage helmets. This article even does that. The claim is not to make it criminal and not to weaponize enforcement. Because they have strong evidence that that doesn't work.

Statistically, you are much more likely to die or be injured in a car crash than on a bike, so surely we should mandate helmet use in cars, right?

That is very faulty logic.

In a modern car with a person seat belted in, there is very little for a person to strike their head against (which is what a helmet protects against). The airbags are there to protect you from striking your head against the steering column or the side of the passenger compartment.

On a bike, there is nothing protecting you from striking your head against something.

When I was doing neurosurgery, I saw lots of head trauma. The head trauma for bad car accidents was more diffuse axonal injury caused by rotational or deceleration forces that a helmet would not protect you against (your head isn't slamming into anything). Whereas with bicycle accidents it was more impact trauma and skull fractures and resulting brain injury (which a helmet would have protected you against).

Source: Neurosurgery resident at a Level 1 trauma center.

Arguing on this line is pointless. You can use this line to justify any number of mandatory safer features. The goal should be to drive an adoption of clean, non congestive, personal transportation, and the primary drivers for this is cost and convenience. Mandatory laws requiring stuff is counter to this.

The simple fact is, in every place where cycling is normalized and not a deviant behavior for weird lycra-wearing dentists or people with DUIs, almost no one wears a helmet.

Mandating helmets is a failed policy if the goal is to reduce reliance on cars, and to make cities safer for everyone.

That's not the goal. The goal is to reduce head injuries. Mandatory helmet laws are effective at achieving that goal. If part of that reduction is simply discouraging people who would not ride a bike safely from riding a bike, that's not necessarily out of line with the goal.

…in the short term.

In the long term, if they prevent cycling from ever becoming a viable alternative to driving, then they’re still worse.

If someone is interested in trying a bike from one of those sharing locations, but they don’t have a helmet, they won’t try the bike in the first place. Especially if a city law makes a bike-sharing app “validate” that you’re wearing a helmet, to enforce the law, before giving you a bike.

Fewer people try the idea of riding a bike around their town, so there’s more pushback against improved cycling infrastructure because “it would never benefit me”, so there’s less infrastructure investment.

Continued ad nausium, cycling is less safe due to the limited number of people who are willing to advocate for safer infrastructure in the first place, which makes a much larger difference to safety than helmets.

That’s the idea.

There's resistance to improved cycling infrastructure because there's resistance to improving any infrastructure, no matter how critical, and the overwhelming majority of people don't see a massive rework of the entire transportation system to shift away from cars as a realistic possibility even in the moderate to long term.

If most cyclists wear helmets, why do you need to mandate it?

If most people refrain from stealing, why do we make theft illegal?

If most houses never burn down, why do we require smoke detectors?

2. Because it causes disproportionate harm to other people

3. I’m pretty sure that law isn’t universal and probably depends on city codes.. Regardless, if studies showed that requiring smoke detectors was burdensome enough to decrease the amount of new construction, to the point that it could be detrimental to society, then we should reevaluate that law.

"Pre-law surveys counted 6072 child cyclists in NSW, 3121 cyclists (all ages) in Victoria; and over 200 000 cyclist movements on two key routes in Western Australia. Equivalent counts a year after enforced helmet laws showed declines of 36% (NSW), 36% (Victoria) and 20% (Western Australia). Sunday recreational cycling in Western Australia (24 932 cyclists pre-law) dropped by 38%. Increases in numbers wearing helmets, 1019 (NSW) and 297 (Victoria) were substantially less than declines in numbers counted (2215 and 1110)."

In other words, Victoria started with 3121 cyclists, gained 297 helmets and lost 1110 cyclists.

Are you sure you didn't misread that 4% figure from a source that actually said 40%?

Needless to say, a 20% reduction in head injuries from a 40% reduction in cycling doesn't seem like a very good deal to me.

[1] https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/9/4/380

Nope, 4%

> As far as killing bike share systems, look no further than Seattle, Washington. After they implemented similar policies, their bike share system floundered. The same has been seen in cities across Australia.

The hills don't help, either.

Helmets are way down the list of reasons not to bike there.

If you can't give the cyclist that much space, slow down and wait until you do.

If I had a penny for every time someone's squeezed through between my wing mirror and the kerb in start/stop traffic with just an inch or two to spare...

This really gets pulled out every single time someone points out the proper distance required for passing a cyclist and it’s wrong.

First, passing a cyclist with a car and passing a car with a cycle are asymmetric things. The cyclist needs space to actually go a straight line, the path of a bicycle is never straight - and it sways more at slower speeds.

The cyclist also needs space in both directions to make a turn, for example to avoid an obstacle. If you take that space to one side, they cannot even safely turn the other direction.

Cars have a significantly higher draft than cyclists. They’re bigger, heavier and scarier. If the cyclist twitches as you pass them, you were too close.

Cars just don’t fall over. Cyclists do. Slippery patch on the road, whatever. And when they fall, they need space.

The car driver passing the cyclist has no idea how skilled the cyclist is. And unskilled cyclists need more space to maneuver - or make mistakes when scared and fall. See above. The cyclist passing the car knows their skill. And even unskilled cars do not randomly fall over.

The danger is asymmetric. A car even slightly touching a cyclist is likely to end up with a major injury or death. A cyclist slightly touching a car is a dent and a scratch.

This is why in many places, there’s a mandatory minimum distance when for a car passing a cyclist, but none for cyclist passing a car.

I'm saying the cyclist still needs that space even when they are moving faster than the cars around them, because they are still in danger even when they are the fastest moving thing in the vicinity.

Cars have blind spots, and cyclists that overtake with insufficient clearance fit precisely into them. Cyclists can still wobble, fall or slip even when they are the ones doing the overtaking, and they still get hurt. Danger is present even when the motorised vehicle is only moving at low speed, because parts of the cyclist and/or bike can still get snagged on parts of the motor vehicle if the cyclist wobbles or falls into it.

I firmly believe insufficient clearance between cyclists and cars is a situation that we can and should avoid with sensible design of cycle paths, roads and junctions. In the sad absence of such, enough clearance has to be maintained to avoid collision if either party stops suddenly or the cyclist wobbles or falls.

In slow or start/stop traffic, the car is generally trapped between other cars and has nowhere to move to; the cyclist is the only party with any control over the situation.

Squeezing by cars in start/stop traffic is one of the more debatable ones. There's also rampant red light running. Driving without lights at night, wearing dark clothes, is the one where I see absolutely no upside for their behavior.

Where I live, this is called "filtering", and it's encouraged by both cycling organisations and motoring organisations. If the ICE traffic has stopped, then the worst that can happen is that you misadjust some motorist's wing mirror, and they have to wind their window down to fix it.

> Driving without lights at night, wearing dark clothes, is the one where I see absolutely no upside for their behavior.

Agreed! If you dress up as a piece of tarmac and proceed down a tarmac road made for cars, without lights, you should expect cars to treat you like a piece of road, because that's what you look like.

I had no idea it had a name.

> and it's encouraged by both cycling organisations and motoring organisations.

This shouldn't really come as a surprise. It's much safer for the cyclist to get ahead of traffic.

It's a very nervy situation to have traffic slowly start moving again and you being on your bike squeezes near this accelerating train of cars.

Even worse is to be between 2 cars. If the one in front of you suddenly breaks and you can't break on time, you hit them. If you do break on time, you run the risk of getting rammed by the car behind you and squashed into the car in front of you.

There are a lot of psychos out there with a straight up violent hatred for cyclists and a way too many people justifying it because a cyclist was a danger to themselves at some point.

In any case, the car behind you honking and flashing their headlights was likely not putting your life in danger.

Thank you for doing the right thing and being patient with the cyclist though. Rest assured your behaviour is appreciated.

If the cyclist changes bikes, then even the cyclist doesn't know. And cyclists change bikes quite a lot, because cycle thieves. You have to get used to a new bike; each machine has different steering geometry and balance.

If I feel the breeze as you pass me, you were too close. Actually I think that's quite a good metric, because it ties together your speed and closeness.

If the hammer is on the table, and I put my hand next to it, there is really no reason for anyone to be angry. I didn't hurt the hammer. And I'm not a hypocrite, as in this case the chance of hurting myself was zero.

This is the same argument as "Guns don't kill people; people kill people" and it is the same level of technically-true-but-if-you-need-to-say-it-you-are-probably-wrong-in-practice"

As a regular bike rider of 20 years, a helmet has protected me on exactly 2 occasions: once when I was training for racing and once actually in a race. So technical/fast conditions that most riders don't encounter.

The biggest danger to a leisure or commuter rider are car drivers running them over. Helmets do nothing to stop a multiple ton steel object hitting your body at 30+mph and don't protect the parts that get hit.

> In the meantime, we need to implement better traffic calming and separation of automobile and cycling/pedestrian traffic. Kids die every year because in many areas, they have no choice but to bike on the side of a road that has cars whizzing past 60+ mph with less than 12 inches of separation in between.

100% this is the answer. The only thing helmet laws and discussions do is let people feel good about themselves while doing literally nothing to prevent vulnerable users.

That's their purpose, protect you when you need it, which is on average a couple of times in a lifetime.

If the helmet had protected you hundreds of times, probably you should have stopped riding a bike (or your friends and family should have stopped you).

If you heard someone say "the seat belt saved my life at least 30 times" would you or would you not think that that person is dangerous and should not drive?

Helmets protected me in bike racing where they're already mandatory.

They do not protect most riders at all.

> They do not protect most riders at all.

This is a textbook example of non sequitur.

I would also add that it's so obvious that it hurts, because, simply, most bikers have never raced and never will, so to them what is cruise speed for a professional biker is where the risks are.

I too have been a professional car driver in (very) minor leagues, that doesn't mean that what protected me while racing cannot protect my dad that never like driving and has always been very bad at it.

Mandatory helmet laws say to people "Look Out! Bicycles are DANGEROUS! No matter how careful or experienced you are or where you're cycling, you could get your head smashed like a bowl of eggs at any time"

If that's not an anti-cycling message, what is?

Even with a helmet, biking in US looks fucking scary.

I've got hundreds of thousands of miles in my legs and I won't get on a bike without a helmet on even going around the block.

On the infrastructure yes, agree. I'd be happy with simple stuff like ubiquitous bikes lanes and 10 foot wide shoulders...

Manufacturers however do warn that they aren't designed to mitigate dangers it vehicular collisions, and studies show that vehicle drivers are kinder to cyclists without helmets. Sources here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2020/07/10/bicycle-...

[1]It the modern "think of the children", but instead, "think of the minorities" but worse because there are adult voices in minorities who can speak for themselves and most also want safety. That said in many places there are racist policies against one group or another, but I don't think the above is that.

That's a straw man. Nowhere in the article does it use the word "prevent". What the article cites are studies indicating that the behavioural effect of the laws was a reduction in bike riding.

> "Lastly, we know these “quality of life” laws are disproportionately enforced in communities of color and in lower income communities." - what the hell?! Yes, helmet and safety laws are the reason why police officers disproportionately enforce various laws against communities of color.

Again, that's a straw man argument. The laws aren't the reason why police officers disproportionately enforce said laws against communities of colour, but an observable effect of said laws is that they are disproportionately enforced on communities of colour. Sure, you can work on police enforcement reform, but until you get that problem fixed, the disproportionate enforcement is an observable effect.

> To deal with bike safety, we need to make everyone wear bike helmets until we reach critical mass in cycling adoption. /Some/ protection is better than nothing at all.

That contains the kind of poor logic you're critical of. There's a presumption that to reach critical mass in cycling adoption we need to "make everyone wear bike helmets", despite evidence cited in the article that the blunt instrument of legal mandates appears to reduce cycling adoption.

The article agrees with you (as does most everyone else) that "some protection is better than nothing at all". It's not a question of whether wearing a bicycle helmet is a good idea or not. Just because something is a good idea doesn't mean that a legal mandate for it is also a good idea.

> In the meantime, we need to implement better traffic calming and separation of automobile and cycling/pedestrian traffic. Kids die every year because in many areas, they have no choice but to bike on the side of a road that has cars whizzing past 60+ mph with less than 12 inches of separation in between.

Again, the article agrees with you on this point: "Right now, with nearly 40,000 people killed on American roads every year, that means we need to keep our leaders’ attention focused on structural reforms like complete street redesigns, which are proven to make our public spaces safe for everybody, whether they are walking, biking, taking transit, and yes, driving too."

Non-recreational biking (e.g. using a bike to get around) with a helmet is a giant pain in the ass. I have to find a place to store my helmet securely or carry it around all day. It messes up my hair, so I have to perform extra effort to be presentable at my destination.

Within my city, I travel by bike a decent percentage of the time; with a helmet law, I would basically never do so.

This is an absurd comparison.

Mandatory helmet wearing makes bike-sharing programs almost completely unworkable. In my city, I see more people riding bikes from bike sharing programs than I do riding privately owned bikes.

Everything needs a DEI angle, these days.