Imagine this: every time you wanted to drive or ride in a car, you had to wear a propeller hat. It would of course look silly and what's more, wouldn't be particularly comfortable. Due to a bizarre property of this hat, you couldn't in fact leave it in the car for when you needed it, because it can be stolen by telepathy by anyone walking by. Additionally, it has this feature that if it is raining outside, your head under the hat gets wet, and if it's cold your ears freeze. However, not to worry, you can keep your head dry by wearing a shower cap in addition to the propeller hat. And the ears freezing can be solved by wearing a toque underneath the propeller hat, but, of course, apart from looking incredibly ridiculous, this might make your propeller hat not fit on your head anymore, so you might have to get another one. These propeller hats would cost about a tenth of the price of your car, and if somehow you ended up bumping it, you would need to buy a new one. Not wearing one would seem to be a good solution, except that that will result in being stopped by police, usually followed by a fine.
Outlandish, you say, why would such things exist. But, as you may have guessed, my point is that they already do - except they are called "helmets" and they go with bicycles. I just saw this video (thanks A.A.!) of a talk by Mikael Colville-Andersen on how wearing helmets discourages biking:
Colville-Andersen is very engaging and charismatic. It's true that the talk is a little overwrought and conspiratorial - I think the speaker recognises this as well. But the upshot is, helmet laws make biking sound dangerous, which makes people not bike. To me, it seems rather commonsensical that bike helmets would increase bike safety, so, since I don't have data to the contrary, I'm not going to argue that it's not so (Colville-Andersen, however, does, and does). But just like the Times' "DANGER ZONES" story, it seems to me the increased safety of wearing bike helmets is more than offset by the increased safety hazard of less people biking. Helmets, both in their hazardmongering aspect and just in their inconvenience, means less people biking, means more people driving who are going to hit bicycles with their cars, means less motorists aware of cyclists, means less cycle-friendly infrastructure, which in turns means it's more annoying to bike and even less people do it. I wouldn't say don't wear a bike helmet - wear one if you want. All I would say is that I seriously doubt mandatory helmet laws improve a city's overall bike safety.
