Motorcycle Helmet Laws

I Do Not Know The Original Source Of This.

THE ORIGIN OF MOTORCYCLE HELMET LAWS
Motorcycle racers used crash helmets as early as the 1920s. Helmets were more widely used during World War II, when Hugh Cairns, a consulting neurosurgeon to the British Army, recommended mandatory helmet use for British Service dispatch riders, who carried instructions and battle reports between commanders and the front lines via motorcycles.6 Cairns first became concerned about helmet use after treating the war hero T. E. Lawrence—otherwise known as Lawrence of Arabia—for a fatal head injury suffered during a 1935 motorcycle accident. Cairns later published several landmark articles that used clinical case reports to show that motorcycle crash helmets mitigated the severity of head injuries suffered by military motorcyclists during crashes.7
After World War II, the British government's Ministry of Transport became the first regulatory agency in the world to establish research-based motorcycle helmet performance standards. During the early 1950s, the ministry offered the British Standards Institute "kite mark" (a diamond-shaped seal) as an indicator of helmet quality and performance.8 In the United States, however, no such standard existed, and ads for American motorcycles invariably showed riders without helmets or goggles. The initial market for these bikes included returning veterans who had learned to ride military-issue Harley-Davidsons while overseas.9 During the late 1940s and early 1950s, motorcycle clubs created an "outlaw" masculine social identity around motorbikes—part of an emerging cultural reaction to the social confines of 1950s suburbia. At the same time, the motorcycle took its place amid the variety of new postwar consumer culture offerings, and many young men took up riding motorcycles as a weekend hobby.10
The 1966 National Highway Safety Act introduced drastic and unwelcome changes to US motorcycle culture. The law, which was introduced after the 1965 publication of Unsafe at Any Speed, Ralph Nader's scathing indictment of the US auto industry's vehicle safety standards, included a provision that withheld federal funding for highway safety programs to states that did not enact mandatory motorcycle helmet laws within a specified time frame. This provision was added after a study showed that helmet laws would significantly decrease the rate of fatal accidents. The National Highway Safety Act was passed without debate on the helmet law provision.11 Adoption of this measure drew upon a broader movement within public health to expand its purview beyond infectious disease to "prevention of disability and postponement of untimely death."12 Several years later, this shift sparked debate on the role of both individual and collective behaviors in contemporary patterns of morbidity and mortality, which led to Marc Lalonde's New Perspective on the Health of Canadians (1974), the US government's Healthy People Initiative (1979) and, most famously, John H. Knowles's controversial but agenda-setting article, "The Responsibility for the Individual," which asserted that individual lifestyle choices determined the major health risks for Western society.13
As of 1966, only 3 states—New York, Massachusetts, and Michigan—and Puerto Rico had passed motorcycle helmet laws, but between 1967 and 1975, nearly every state passed statutes to avoid penalties under the National Highway Safety Act. By September 1975, California was the only state to not have passed a mandatory helmet law of any kind. This resistance carried weight because California had both the highest number of registered motorcyclists and the highest number of fatal motorcycle crashes.14 Additionally, motorcycle groups in the state had developed into a powerful antihelmet lobby. State legislators made 8 attempts between 1968 and 1975 to introduce helmet legislation, but they were thwarted by vocal opposition from the motorcycle groups.15 In September 1973, when a Burbank councilman proposed a mandatory motorcycle helmet ordinance after the death of a 15-year-old motorcyclist, more than 100 motorcyclists came to the council's chamber to protest during hearings on the ordinance. The Los Angeles Times reported that the Hells Angels planned to bring "at least 500 members" on the day of the scheduled vote. The councilman then withdrew his proposed ordinance.16
CONSTITUTIONAL CHALLENGES TO MANDATORY HELMET LAWS
As soon as states began to pass mandatory helmet laws, opponents mounted constitutional challenges to them. Some challenges involved appeals in criminal cases against motorcyclists who had been arrested for failing to wear helmets; others were civil suits brought by motorcyclists who alleged that the laws deprived them of their rights. Between 1968 and 1970, high courts in Colorado, Hawaii, Louisiana, Missouri, Massachusetts, New Jersey, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin and lower courts in New York all rejected challenges to the constitutionality of their state motorcycle helmet laws.17 In June 1972, a US District Court in Massachusetts similarly rejected a challenge to the state's helmet law that was brought on federal constitutional grounds, and in November of that year, the US Supreme Court affirmed this decision on appeal without opinion.18
The constitutional challenges focused principally on 2 arguments: (1) helmet statutes violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment or state constitutional equivalents by discriminating against motorcycle riders as a class, and (2) helmet statutes constituted an infringement on the motorcyclist's liberty and an excessive use of the state's police power under the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment or similar state provisions. Only the Illinois Supreme Court and the Michigan Appeals Court accepted these arguments. The Illinois Supreme Court ruled that the helmet laws constituted an infringement on motorcyclists' rights.
If the evil sought to be remedied by the statute affects public health, safety, morals or welfare, a means reasonably directed toward the achievement of those ends will be held to be a proper exercise of the police power [citations omitted]. However, [t]he legislature may not, of course, under the guise of protecting the public interest, interfere with private rights [citations omitted]. . . . The manifest function of the headgear requirement in issue is to safeguard the person wearing it—whether it is the operator or a passenger—from head injuries. Such a laudable purpose, however, cannot justify the regulation of what is essentially a matter of personal safety.19
The Michigan Appeals Court heard a case brought by the American Motorcycle Association, then the country's largest organization for motorcyclists, which argued that the state's motorcycle law violated the due process, equal protection, and right to privacy provisions of the federal constitution. The association cited the US Supreme Court's birth control decision in Griswold v. Connecticut as authority for establishing a right to privacy. The state attorney general contended that the law did not just concern individual rights and was intended to promote public health, safety, and welfare. Furthermore, the state argued that it had an interest in the "viability" of its citizens and could pass legislation "to keep them healthy and self-supporting." The Appeals Court, however, countered that "this logic could lead to unlimited paternalism" and found the statute unconstitutional.20 The court also rejected the claim that the state's power to regulate the highways provided the basis for imposing helmet use.
There can be no doubt that the State has a substantial interest in highway safety . . . but the difficulty with adopting this as a basis for decision is that it would also justify a requirement that automobile drivers wear helmets or buckle their seat belts for their own protection!21
The plaintiff in the Massachusetts District Court case used an argument nearly identical to those that had been successful in Illinois and Michigan: a helmet law was designed solely to protect the motorcyclist.22 The plaintiff's argument cited John Stuart Mill's assertion that "the only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others."23 The District Court rejected this line of reasoning. Although it relied on Mill's distinction between self-regarding and other-regarding behavior, the court clearly found injuries that resulted from motorcycle riders failing to wear a helmet to be other-regarding harms. Even more striking was that the court found the psychological burden on caregivers to be an other-regarding basis for intervention.
For while we agree with plaintiff that the act's only realistic purpose is the prevention of head injuries incurred in motorcycle mishaps, we cannot agree that the consequences of such injuries are limited to the individual who sustains the injury. In view of the evidence warranting a finding that motorcyclists are especially prone to serious head injuries . . . the public has an interest in minimizing the resources directly involved. From the moment of the injury, society picks the person up off the highway; delivers him to a municipal hospital and municipal doctors; provides him with unemployment compensation if, after recovery, he cannot replace his lost job, and, if the injury causes permanent disability, may assume the responsibility for his and his family's continued subsistence. We do not understand a state of mind that permits plaintiff to think that only he himself is concerned.24 [authors' emphasis]
Although others echoed the Massachusetts decision by using economic—utilitarian—arguments to reject constitutional challenges to helmet laws, some courts upheld motorcycle statutes on the basis of the narrow ground that helmet use affects the safety of other motorists. A Florida US District Court held that a requirement for motorcyclists to wear both helmets and eye protection was not an unreasonable exercise of state police power because "[a] flying object could easily strike the bareheaded cyclist and cause him to lose control of his vehicle," and "the wind or an insect flying into the cyclist's eyes could create a hazard to others on the highway."25


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