On the cover of Thursday’s Sun Journal were two photos from Wednesday’s National Bike to School Day action.
In one image, Kya Robitaille and her brother Max were seen riding along with mom, Angela, on their way to Geiger Elementary School. Smiles all around.
In the other, 11-year-old student Damon Holm was hunkered down on his bike, cruising toward school. His face was a picture of concentration.
Everyone was wearing a helmet.
Unfortunately, some of the adults riding in this Geiger group were not, including a school official.
National Bike to School Day started in 2012, building on the popularity of the annual National Walk to School Day, and is designed to raise awareness of the benefits of biking. It’s a lesson in active, healthy, alternative transportation.
Part of that lesson is supposed to be the importance of preventing serious head injuries by wearing a helmet, but unless every adult sports a helmet, the only lesson children are learning is that helmets are just for kids.
They’re not.
Maine law requires anyone under 16 to wear a bike helmet while riding, but common sense — and the basic law of self-preservation — dictates everyone, of any age, should protect their brain.
According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, “helmet use has been estimated to reduce head injury risk by 85 percent.” That’s a convincing number.
More convincing, perhaps, is the percent of people involved in bike accidents that resulted in death because they were not wearing a helmet. A whopping 95 percent.
The IIHS has crunched national statistics and determined the picture of a “typical” bicyclist killed in the United States is a “sober male over 16 not wearing a helmet riding on a major road between intersections in an urban area on a summer evening when hit by a car.”
So, a rider who is responsibly pedaling along the road but not wearing a helmet is more likely to be killed. Put a helmet on that rider, and his chances of staying alive skyrocket.
Maine’s per capita bike fatality rate is the lowest in the nation, but it’s not zero.
On March 31, 34-year-old cyclist Joseph Lamothe was struck from behind and killed on Route 196 in Lisbon. He was not wearing a helmet, sadly making him another statistic.
And while every traffic fatality is tragic, so too are the permanent injuries that happen every day.
According to the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, bike riding results in the highest number of sports-related head injuries in this country, with more than 85,000 people a year seen in emergency rooms. That’s 54 percent more head injuries than from playing football. Yes. Football — a sport that has garnered so much attention surrounding head injuries, and one in which everyone wears a helmet.
The high rate of head injuries while cycling is more pronounced for children younger than 14 years, even with laws in place requiring helmet use.
According to the California-based Snell Memorial Foundation, a nonprofit organization that tests helmets and develops helmet standards, “every year the estimated number of bicycling head injuries requiring hospitalization exceeds the total of all the head injury cases related to baseball, football, skateboards, kick scooters, horseback riding, snowboarding, ice hockey, in-line skating and lacrosse.”
Every year.
And, according to Safe Kids International, the “annual cost of traffic-related bicyclist death and injury among children ages 14 and under is more than $2.2 billion.” Indirect costs for all unhelmeted bike injuries is another $2.3 billion.
Every year.
That should be enough to make anyone clip on a helmet, but it isn’t.
And it’s not the law or statistics that make a child want to wear a helmet. It’s their parents. And their teachers. And older siblings. Cousins. The next-door neighbor. All leading by example.
Bike to School Day next year will be held May 10. Everyone, please, wear a helmet.
Make it a real and lasting lesson about safety, exercise and fun.
jmeyer@sunjournal.com
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