Passes & Canyons Blog

As Senate Bill 24-065 (Mobile Electronic Devices & Motor Vehicle Driving) was coming up for its initial Colorado House hearing recently I was wondering–as I mentioned previously–if there would be opposition as there was two years ago claiming that it would be unfair to fine poor people who violated the law.

Thinking about that got me thinking about a different issues from what must have been 25 years ago. The connector here is well-intentioned people reaching conclusions that overlook extremely relevant factors. In the case of outlawing use of handheld electronics while driving (SB24) it is the idea of trying to help people who did not have to break the law while ignoring the very real impact on other people who did nothing wrong. If it’s not clear what I’m referring to please read the other piece linked to above.

The situation 25 or so years ago had to do with insurance and wearing helmets. Specifically, there were health insurance companies that were writing policies that said if you were injured in a motorcycle crash and you were not wearing a helmet they would deny your claim. Does that still happen or were laws passed forbidding that? I’m not sure but I suspect it is no longer an issue because it’s been a long time since I’ve heard it mentioned.

So anyway, my family was gathered at some point and this whole thing came up and my father offered his opinion that he saw nothing wrong with that policy. After all, people should wear helmets and why should the insurance companies pay if they refuse to protect themselves?

I nearly exploded. This is the gist of what I told him.

OK, let’s say I’m legally riding my motorcycle without a helmet. I’m obeying the speed limit and all the traffic laws and I have a motorcycle endorsement on my drivers license. Then I get hit but a guy who a) is speeding, b) runs a red light, c) does not have a license because he lost it due to DUIs, and d) is drunk. He veers off and hits a telephone pole and is also injured.

So everything I have done is 100 percent legal, while everything he has done is 100 percent illegal. Oh, and by the way, while I am badly injured, I have not sustained any head injuries, despite not wearing a helmet.

After all this, my insurance company says it will not cover my medical expenses because I was not wearing a helmet (legally!) but his insurance company will cover his medical expenses.

Are you telling me that is somehow fair and appropriate? Really?? Are you telling me this makes any sense at all??

OK, my Dad was a rational guy and he acknowledged the error of his thinking once I educated him on the matter. And that’s my whole point. There are plenty of people out there who favor or oppose policies we might know are respectively bad or good simply because they are not personally connected to the issue and have not given it more than cursory consideration. But once they are presented with more facts, a deeper understanding, they see the error of their thinking.

That’s what the motorcycling community has to do, continually. That’s what organization such as the American Motorcyclist Association, the various state ABATEs, the Motorcycle Riders Foundation, and others work to do constantly. And it’s what each of us needs to do when talking with non-riding friends and family members. We need to educate them. I mean this was my own father and he thought it made sense to deny his son coverage until I educated him.

Let’s all be educators.

Biker Quote for Today

Every ride is a tiny holiday.

I had a boss once whose favorite term for motorcycles was “murder cycles.” She hated them and believed that anyone who rode one would surely end up dead beside the road. Thirty-five years later, she is dead, of natural causes, and I’m still very much alive and very much still riding motorcycles.

Other people like to refer to motorcyclists who ride without helmets as “organ donors.” Both of these pejoratives are based primarily on ignorance but hey, we who ride are used to provoking ignorant people to dispel any doubt about who they are.

But sometimes we encounter someone who wants to take things a little too far. This is the case at the moment in Connecticut where a state senator, with the convenient name of Martin Looney, has proposed a bill mandating that anyone who dies in a motorcycle crash without a helmet is deemed to be offering their organs for transplant. Here’s the text of the bill:

AN ACT ESTABLISHING A REBUTTABLE PRESUMPTION THAT PERSONS KILLED IN A MOTORCYCLE ACCIDENT WHILE RIDING WITHOUT A HELMET WISH TO DONATE THEIR ORGANS.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives in General
Assembly convened:
That the general statutes be amended to establish a rebuttable presumption that a person who is killed in a motorcycle accident while
riding the motorcycle without a helmet wishes to donate their organs.
Statement of Purpose:
To improve public health.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favor of people donating their organs once they have no further use for them, but seriously? Why single out motorcyclists not wearing helmets? Why not a bill saying that all people who die prematurely, unless previously stated, shall be deemed organ donors. Or at least accompanying the unhelmeted motorcyclists with car drivers and passengers who aren’t wearing seat belts?

The American Motorcyclist Association issued a protest, saying:

“The bill shows callous disregard for the motorcycling public,” said AMA Government Relations Director Mike Sayre. “Organ donation is a noble cause that regularly saves lives around the country, but the decision to become a donor is a deeply personal one — one that this legislation would take away from motorcyclists.”

“Not only is this bill insulting to motorcyclists,” Sayre added, “but it also violates the religious liberty of those whose faith prohibits posthumous organ donation, and is clearly an unconstitutional violation of bodily autonomy for any American.”

How likely is this bill to pass? Who knows. Probably it won’t. But when the AMA contacted the senator’s office to inquire about the bill and spoke to one of his staffers, this was the upshot:

The staffer stated that their position was that if motorcyclists put their lives at risk by riding helmetless, they assume those riders don’t care where their organs end up.

Ignorance.

Biker Quote for Today

If you party like you ride, make sure to wear a helmet.

There was a wise crack going around some time ago about a particularly grisly motorcyclist death where people were saying, “Thank goodness he was wearing a helmet.” That’s pretty much where this latest thing from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) fits in.

I saw this report, with the title “NTSB calls on states to mandate motorcycle helmets in wake of deadly New Hampshire crash involving impaired West Springfield truck driver” and it’s the same sort of thing. It appears a drunken driver of a pick-up pulling a flat-bed trailer crossed into the oncoming lane and killed seven motorcyclists.

So what does the NTSB do? After investigating they issue a report calling for mandatory helmet laws in every state. Like that totally makes sense.

Don’t get me wrong. I believe in wearing a helmet and always do. However, I also believe in leaving it to the rider to decide. I just don’t think this is the kind of thing government should be dictating. As it was, 12 of the 18 riders in this group were wearing helmets. And the article states that, “NTSB investigators could not conclusively determine the effectiveness of the helmets used by riders in the New Hampshire crash. But the board still voted to recommend that states review and implement motorcycle helmet laws.”

I translate that as “probably most of these people would have died anyway but let’s use this tragedy to push our point of view.” Or, thank goodness some of those dead people were wearing helmets.

The NTSB chairman, Robert Sumwalt, is quoted pulling out the old canard that “someone’s right to ride without a helmet ends at my wallet.” The report says, “NTSB staff and board members also emphasized the societal costs of motorcycle fatalities, citing nearly $9 billion combined in medical costs, lost productivity, EMS services, insurance administrative costs, property damage and workplace losses that may have been avoided in 2017 through universal helmet mandates.”

That argument totally ignores the fact that there are countless things that each and every one of us do that contribute to those same costs, from eating unhealthy food to not exercising to just plain walking down the street. You might get hit by a bus where the driver had a heart attack and the bus veered off onto the sidewalk you were on! Taking that walk was an avoidable behavior that resulted in your injury! Maybe you should have been wearing a helmet when you took that walk.

I say back off. It’s called life.

Biker Quote for Today

They say stress kills. Well, I found the cure. Ride motorcycles.

Some motorcyclists who die in crashes do so while wearing helmets, while others do so without helmets. This led Bruce Downs to the question, how many of those fatally injured actually die of head wounds?

The heart of this question was exemplified by a photo that was making the rounds several years ago, of a motorcyclist in such an horrific crash that he was cut in two. Someone made the remark, “Good thing he was wearing a helmet.”

So Bruce was asking the question and he was in a good position to come up with an answer. Bruce is State Coordinator for ABATE of Colorado and he raised this question at a MOSAB meeting. MOSAB is the Motorcycle Operator Safety Advisory Board, which is made up of representatives from rider organizations, the Colorado State Patrol, and others. When Bruce asked this question, he tells us, the representative from the state patrol said that he, too, would like an answer to that question. “And you’re going to get it for us, aren’t you,” he said to Bruce.

Now, you or I might not be able to corral the assistance such an endeavor might need but with the weight of MOSAB and the state patrol on his side Bruce was able to do so. I’m not sure who he worked with on this but three simple questions were decided upon, which were put up on Survey Monkey, and they then contacted 11 county coroner offices around Colorado, asking that every time the office deals with a motorcycle fatality that someone answer the three survey questions.

One question was, was this a single vehicle crash or were there more vehicles involved? Second, was the deceased wearing a helmet? Third was, was a head injury the cause of death?

In one county the coroner declined to participate, saying that in every motorcycle fatality he sees the death is due to multiple blunt force trauma. That is to say, it’s impossible to say conclusively what the rider died of because there were so many different, severe injuries that you just can’t isolate one in particular. If he/she didn’t die of this then he/she still would have died of that.

Among those coroners who did agree to participate, however, results have been coming in. And guess what? In approximately 80 percent of the fatalities reported–evenly divided between helmeted and helmetless–the cause of death was given as multiple blunt force trauma. (Bruce didn’t specify what the other 20 percent were; I ought to ask him that.)

Where this leads him, Bruce told us, and what he was planning to tell MOSAB the following day, was that regardless of what some people might wish to be the case, helmets are not that big a factor in saving lives. What would be a big factor in saving lives would be to reduce the number of crashes. And what will make that happen is educating drivers and riders, getting drivers off their cellphones while they’re driving, and so many other factors that will add up. But to anyone who thinks a helmet law would be all the answer needed, he says get over it.

“If you want to continue with the rhetoric you’re not going to get where you want to go. It’s not a short fix, it’s a long fix but you’ve got to get started.”

The reason this all matters is that the Colorado State Patrol has been given explicit direction to reduce highway fatalities. The people running that effort want real answers and it’s this kind of data collection that will help provide those answers.

Biker Quote for Today

You know you’re a biker if you get hit by a car, break your leg, then tell the nice police officer, “I’m fine I can ride home.”

I was at my ABATE District 10 meeting on Sunday and the topic arose of the Michigan legislator who sponsored the repeal of that state’s helmet law and who just this past week was killed riding his motorcycle. The discussion was about how the media played up the fact that he sponsored that bill and then died on his bike–as if the two were in any way related.

Pete Pettalia was wearing a helmet. Let’s get clear on that right up front. There is no irony here.

So my curiosity was piqued and I came home and googled the incident to see how it was reported. I don’t know, maybe the writers/editors have gone back and revised earlier reports but every report I read either said he was wearing a helmet or that, at the time of writing, details of that sort had not yet been released by the police.

Whatever the media response, it all missed the real issue while sometimes going after what was not the issue. That is, helmets were not the issue; the issue was once again someone in a car or truck turning in front of someone on a motorcycle. A right-of-way violation. And as Pettalia’s death shows, wearing a helmet frequently will not save your life. His helmet was irrelevant; the violation of his right-of-way meant everything. That’s the issue.

Nevertheless, the internet trolls got busy right away, who cares about facts?

A Michigan-focused website called MLive ran a piece about the crash and fatality at a point that was probably too early for the facts about the helmet to have been released.

That didn’t stop the trolls:
flint style coney: he was exercising his personal right to operate his motorcycle unsafely. he advocated for people to do the same, and many died as a result. these deaths are tragic losses.

To which MlxPlant replied: @flint style coney Let’s see…he was wearing a helmet. The other vehicle pulled out in front of him. Who bears the brunt of this fault?

Frog City Council: HE WAS NOT WEARING A HELMET

And from manthor: @Frog City Council @MackFloating Police report he WAS. Can you not read?

So md22mdrx suggested: It’s not the helmet, it’s the motorcycle. Motorcycles are deathtraps. Don’t ever let a friend or family member get on one. If you don’t wear a helmet on top of it? The idiocy of people knows no bounds. Darwin Award.

To which MlxPlant replied: @md22mdrx The lack of compassion of people knows no bounds. The driver failed to yield to the right of way and you blame the motorcycle. You are no better than someone who blames the victim for a rape.

Kind of getting to like MlxPlant, aren’t we?

People like these are the reason we needs motorcyclist rights organizations such as ABATE and the Motorcycle Riders Foundation.

Biker Quote for Today

I am a biker, not your next roadkill. Get off the phone and open your eyes.

The legislative update at our ABATE of Colorado D-10 meeting on Sunday brought news of a bill possibly in the offing that would reinstitute a helmet law here.

According to State Coordinator Bruce Downs, Rep. Paul Rosenthal had first stated that he would definitely such a bill in the upcoming session. Rosenthal then apparently backed off from that, indicating that he might work on developing a base with an eye toward introducing such a bill in the 2016 session.

ABATE has been cooperating with two other major motorcycle groups in the state, the Colorado Confederation of Clubs and the US Defenders, preparing to fight any such bill.

The groups have put together a letter that will be made available at numerous motorcycle events, such as ABATE’s Last Brass Monkey Run this week and the Colorado Motorcycle Expo (formerly Colorado Motorcycle Show and Swap). Riders will be asked to sign the letter and provide their address, and then the letters will be sorted by the signer’s representative. Should a bill be introduced at any point the letters will be hand delivered to the appropriate representative.

The idea is to be ready, and hopefully to have thousands of signed letters in hand to be delivered.

“There’s no way this is going away,” said Bruce of the attempt to reinstate the helmet law.

According to Bruce, the organizations sought a meeting with Rosenthal to discuss the issue but the representative made it clear he would not be swayed by their arguments.

Recent from National Motorcycle Examiner
Only a biker knows . . .: Motorcycle wit and wisdom, 35

Biker Quote for Today

Full Throttle – solves the problem or ends the suspense.

If you live in Colorado there’s a good chance you occasionally ride in Utah and Nebraska, east and west of us. This current legislative session they’ve both had some potentially good bills introduced that have to do with motorcycles, but it doesn’t look like anything will make it into law.

In Utah they have a bill that would allow lane-splitting. Lane-splitting is when bikes go down the road between cars when the cars are stopped or slowed way down in traffic jams. California is the only U.S. state that currently allows this, and it works fine there. More than that, the rest of the world does it and it works fine all over the world. Go to Paris or Rome or just about any place of your choosing and see how well it works. Why do we have to be the dummies who think there’s something wrong with this?

Well, Utah is going to stay a dummy. According to a story in the Deseret News, “Several members of the House Transportation Committee said they had safety concerns about HB281, and they voted 7-1 to table the measure until more study is done.” Can you say “dead”? Why this euphemism about “tabled”? Well the guy who introduced it–a Republican I will note–said he’ll reintroduce it next session. Till then . . .

Over in Nebraska they’ve been kicking around the idea of repealing their helmet law. I don’t care how stupid you might think anyone is to ride without a helmet, I simply believe it should be the rider’s choice. I always wear a helmet these days (not true in my younger days) and so this law would have no effect on me, but I just don’t think it’s the government’s place to forcing us to be “safe.” Why don’t they outlaw using cell phones when you’re driving? They’d save more lives that way, if that was truly what they cared about. Of course they’d save even more lives if they just outlawed motor vehicles. You know what they say: If it saves even just one life . . . !

So will you be able to ride lidless in Nebraska soon? Not likely. As in, fat chance.

They do apparently have the votes to make it happen, if it could just come to a vote. But guess what? The opponents are filibustering it. Who cares what the majority wants, if we can keep it from coming to a vote the minority rules! I couldn’t have been more pleased when the U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid changed the filibuster rules there. The Republicans screamed bloody murder but you better believe they’ll be overjoyed for what Harry has done the next time they’re in the majority.

But hey, it’s just like baseball: There’s always next year.

Biker Quote for Today

“The motorcycle, being poorly designed for both flight and marine operation, sustained significant external and internal damage,” police noted.

I guess if you always wear your helmet it doesn’t matter what the helmet laws are in different states. But if you sometimes like to go without, you know how important it is to laws in different states you might ride in. There’s an app for that.

I got an email yesterday from Catherine Kazda at Buckfire & Buckfire, PC–which is to say they are attorneys–plugging this new app they have made available on their site for no charge. It will give you not only the state by state laws in the U.S., but also has information on Canada and Europe. Maybe some other places as well–I forget. The video goes into all that but my memory isn’t that good.

So it’s kind of a good idea. And I think it’s probably a great promotional idea for them. They apparently deal in motorcycle crash litigation so of course they want bikers coming to their website.

The app offers other information as well. It basically covers motorcycle laws in general, not just helmet laws. And they have a link on it to information on what to do if you’re involved in a crash. I’m sure one of the things it tells you to do is call an attorney, preferably Buckfire & Buckfire. But OK, it’s still probably good information.

So hey guys, your marketing plan is working. I’m passing this along, and I have already seen a link to some other site that did so, too.

Of course there is one other way to get all this information, though I don’t know if it’s quite as easy as a smartphone app. You can go to the American Motorcyclist Association site, to their page where they list all the state-by-state info.

And I guess I might as well tell a couple stories here because they’re totally related.

The first time John and Bill and I came down into Nebraska from the Black Hills we stopped at a wayside picnic area and got to talking to a guy there. Somewhere along the way he mentioned that we ought to be aware that “Nebraska is a bucket state.” He had seen us ride in without our helmets on. OK, thanks.

Another time, our first time in Nevada, we pulled into Vegas–coming from Arizona, I guess–and it wasn’t until after we had checked in to a hotel that we learned Nevada is a helmet state, too. We hadn’t been wearing ours. Oops. After that we made it a point to find out about states we were going to before we went there.

Recent from National Motorcycle Examiner
Motorcycle safety studies continue

Biker Quote for Today

You’re a biker wannabe if you grab for your hairbrush before your old lady.