Wednesday, 12 June 2013

You have got to be freaking kidding me

So New Zealand put in mandatory bicycle helmet laws a few years back. Every study on this kind of law winds up showing strongly negative effects on the number of people who choose to cycle. And so it wasn't surprising that school-kids flipped over to using scooters instead. Scooters have existed for a long time, but I never much saw kids riding them until they mandated bike helmets. I'm not sure I trust my observational ocular least squares here, but it would be fun to study.*

Our five year old got his first scooter about a month ago. He rides it every morning from the parking lot near his sister's daycare over to Ilam School; I walk with him as my office is next door. Then I get to borrow it for the day for runs across campus. It's great.

And, predictably, when somebody sees kids having fun, we have to get a freaking movement to ban it.
Safekids director Ann Weaver said requiring children to wear a helmet would reduce the risk of serious head injuries.
"We do want children to go out and have fun and learn and develop and take risks but we want them to do that safely and the issue is, once you damage your brain you can't get it back. There's only one chance."
A Safe2Scoot campaign will be rolled out in August, providing a template safety policy for schools and urging them to introduce a "no helmet, no scooter" rule.
The call has been supported by research conducted by Waikato University social science student, Trish Wolfaardt.
Her report - Scootering on: an investigation of children's use of scooters for transport and recreation - recommended amending the cycle helmet legislation to include "all wheeled recreational devices, irrespective of the age of the rider".
It also recommended introducing a minimum age for scootering to school.
"Wearing protective gear will not exempt children from injury, but it will minimise the harm," the report said.
WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!? Absolutely nothing stops Ann Weaver from bundling her kid up in a helmet and padding if she wants to. The DSM really screwed up by failing to include this particular kind of impulse to ban things in their new catalogue of mental illnesses.

At least MoT and the Police have been sane so far:
Ministry of Transport land transport safety manager Leo Mortimer said it was unlikely that legislation would be changed.
"In the same way that we have not considered compulsory helmets for skateboarders.
"Scooter riders must comply with all the rules applying to other road users, however, unlike cyclists, they don't need to wear a helmet or use a light at night."
...Waikato acting road policing manager Inspector Rob Lindsay said there had been an obvious increase in children using scooters but it hadn't become a safety issue.
Meanwhile, in Canada, some half-wit's suggested mandatory helmets for playing soccer. SOCCER. Where the biggest injuries are from people hurting themselves while pretending to have hurt themselves. Andrew Coyne re-tweeted a few dozen submissions of the things folks my age got up to when we were kids. I don't endorse each and every one of these, but I sure as hell prefer the world where these things are POSSIBLE to the one where we force kids to wear helmets when riding scooters and playing soccer. Here are some of the most fun ones from the list. Note that Monte Solberg, who has a particularly interesting submission, is a retired Member of Parliament.

First, the sad state of the current world:
I can't believe they're making them wear helmets for curling. It's whisky that should be mandatory for curling, not helmets. For those 16 and up.
We had massive snowball wars in elementary school. The school dumped all the town's collected road snow in the school yard. We dug tunnels all the way through them, hauled dozens and dozens of buckets of water from the school to the tunnels, and iced the down-tunnels. There were pop-up spots throughout. Then, snowball wars with Viet-Cong tunnels.

This is the world Ann Weaver is helping to bring into being. I moved here to get away from people like her.

But now for the better ones:

NO it wasn't bad. Parts cars out in the pasture were hella-awesome.
We built rafts at my Grandparents' place out of old rotten plywood and inner tubes, sailed on the puddled meltwater (that's maybe 4 foot deep, being Canada)


Some of the folks from Kenora in our halls of residence in undergrad talked about how they used to hunt each other in the bush with pellet guns, and then pick the pellets out of each others' backs.


Dad would hook our toboggan up to the back of the skidoo. Did the same thing with the horse except slower.





Bet he's from around Kenora.
I remember soaking hard snowballs with petrol and seeing whether we could light them.
Tractor tires, but yeah.
Um... think I agree with the teachers on this one.


That'd be a felony these days. Think I'm kidding?

And here's Monte Solberg:

Again: I'm not saying that the kids should be trying each and every one of these things. But I sure prefer the world where it's possible than one where none of them are. New Zealand is still mostly outside of the asylum on this stuff. But outfits like SafeKids are trying to end it. We shouldn't let them. There has to be ONE place in the world that doesn't succumb to the madness.

Jason Sorens's Coalition for Fun: needed now more than ever.

Update: Final word goes to Steve Sheere, restoring my faith in New Zealand.
* As ACC is reporting scooter accident claim numbers have been rising, there's at least data that could allow for this kind of test. If there's US data on scooter and bicycle injuries that we could use as proxy for rider numbers, then this could be rather fun.


Posted by Eric Crampton at 10:28:00 19 Comments
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