Reply to Why are there no safety rules regarding children on bikes?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The vast majority of bicycling injuries and deaths under the age of 20 could be prevented by wearing a helmet. Yet I routinely see children on bikes or, even worse, ebikes with no helmets.

"An average of 247 traumatic brain injury deaths and 140,000 head injuries among children and adolescents younger than 20 years were related to bicycle crashes each year in the United States. As many as 184 deaths and 116,000 head injuries might have been prevented annually if these riders had worn helmets. An additional 19,000 mouth and chin injuries were treated each year."

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8909479/[/quote]

I wear a helmet and my kids wear helmets (so far).  I also wonder how many of those injuries would be prevented if someone didn't drive into them.[/quote]

100 percent of them would be avoided if parents didn't put their kids in harm's way. [/quote]

Do you also not let your kids swim or bathe?  Think of the drowning risk![/quote]

I'm confused.

I thought you said the roads of D.C. are incredibly dangerous because everyone is going 70 mph and no one obeys any traffic rules and drivers are complete sociopaths with no regard for human life and police don't enforce anything and it's all just a complete free for all.

Now, you're telling me that allowing children to venture into all of that is no more dangerous than taking a bath? [/quote]

[b]The answer is that when bicyclists want the city to radically increase congestion and spend a bajillion dollars on bike lanes, then the streets are extremely dangerous.

But when bicyclists want to take their three year old on their bike for whatever reason, then the streets are not dangerous at all.[/b] [/quote]

Addendum: The streets are also not dangerous when cyclists are asked why they aren't required to wear helmets. [/quote]

So basically the fact that some bicyclists don't want to wear helmets or don't want to be required to wear helmets means there can be no road safety improvements for any bicyclists, even those of us who always wear helmets and always make sure our kids are wearing helmets. Got it.[/quote]

I’m a cyclist who ALSO judges people who don’t make their kids wear helmets (if an adult doesn’t want to wear one, that is their bad choice to make fir themselves).

I worry about kids who aren’t being protected while biking but since my own child wears a helmet and is very closely supervised while biking, the danger of cars doing illegal things is a much bigger deal to me. I see cars doing things that would kill a child on a bike who is wearing a helmet, every day. Driving 10-20 mph over the speed limit through residential neighborhoods. Making illegal turns without signaling. Blowing through lights and stop signs. Veering into other lanes or even into oncoming traffic suddenly and aggressively. These are behaviors I see from drivers DAILY in my residential neighborhood in NE DC that is full of families with kids on foot, scooters, bikes, and in cars.

I think all kids should wear helmets but when it comes to keeping kids safe, it’s clear to me that poorly enforced traffic laws and roads that support or encourage dangerous driving pose a much bigger threat, so that’s my focus. People on this board who concern troll about kids wearing helmets but then throw a giant fit when we suggest reducing traffic lanes or or installing traffic calming measures, or cutting into available parking or traffic lanes to widen sidewalks for pedestrians or installing protected bike lanes are playing a little game and I’m not interested.

If you actually care about child safety, you’d support measures to protect kids from being hit by cars, full stop. Not selectively get upset about the things parents could do to protect their kids while blowing down Florida Avenue doing 55mph and changing lanes and getting mad about the suggestion that we widen the currently narrow sidewalk and improve the bike lanes that are *terrifying* to ride down because you want to treat an urban street like a highway and have an allergy to using public transportation for your commute.[/quote]

If the streets are that dangerous, why on earth are you allowing a child on a bike to venture into that? [/quote]

"If we can't solve the whole problem all at once, why on earth are you trying to make it even slightly better?"[/quote]

Person 1 (hyperventilating): The streets are death traps! They're soaked in blood!

Person 2: Ok, then why do you let your kids ride bikes there?

Person 1 (still hyperventilating): We're trying to make them eventually less death trap-y! We're pushing for changes that over time we hope will reduce the blood soakedness!

Person 2: Ok, well, in the meantime, why do you let your kids ride bikes there?[/quote]

Person 1: (stops biking completely)

Person 2: "See! There's no demand!"[/quote]

Person 2: Ok, so you deliberately put your children in life threatening situations because you think that will advance the cause of biking?[/quote]

Everything has to be an absolute binary with you, apparently?

The streets can be both (a) far more dangerous than they should be and (b) still safe enough to let kids ride on them. I don't let my kids ride in the street on Connecticut or Wisconsin, but I do let them ride in the street or on the sidewalk, whichever they feel more comfortable on, in our neighborhood. It's not that cars don't run stop signs and speed in the neighborhood, but it's still significantly safer on the side streets than on the bigger ones.

You make similar risk judgements, I suspect: You drive your kids in the car, even though the risk of an accident is higher than it should be, and you probably let them swim in swimming pools, even though they could drown.

What most bike advocates here are saying is that there are steps we should take that would lower the risk -- not eliminate it. You seem to think that if we don't eliminate all risk, we're endangering our children by letting them use the streets at all. And yet you also oppose any steps to mitigate the risk short of "keep your kids off bikes."

If what you're really saying is "the current level of risk is acceptable because the tradeoff in convenience for drivers is not worth the proposed changes," that's a fine position to take (though one I disagree with). But then it seems a little much to also accuse anyone who wants to use the streets in the current, risk-unmitigated status quo of playing Russian roulette with their children's lives.[/quote]

Person 2 here. The difference is that I don't go around trying to spread hysteria about the dangers of swimming and then turn around and ask my kids, "hey wanna go to the pool?" [/quote]

People asking for bike lanes and traffic-calming measures aren't "trying to spread hysteria" about the dangers of biking. In this analogy, they'd be trying to make sure there are lifeguards before taking their kids to the pool.[/quote]

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