Bicycle helmet proposal seems a `no-brainer’

Of the thousands of bills submitted to the Legislature each year, many aren’t worth the reams of paper they’re printed on.

Some are even counterproductive, causing more harm than good by stirring controversy where none needs exist. A bill to make English the official state language is one that comes to mind.

But, occasionally, a modest bill appears that seems so sensible, so obviously beneficial that you have to wonder why it was so long in the making. Such a bill was debated by the Transportation Committee on Monday. Known as the Bicycle Safety Act, it would require that children wear safety helmets while riding their bikes.

If that were its entire language, it could easily be perceived as overly punitive. Would kids who were found riding without helmets be pulled over by the police, who would confiscate their bikes and slap their parents with fines?

The bill is more reasonable than that, however, which is why it could work. Instead of focusing on prosecution, it allows police to inform unhelmeted children 16 and younger about the law and warn them about the dangers of riding with their tender noggins exposed. It also encourages police to talk bike safety with parents of violators and to tell them where they can get helmets for little or no cost.

That’s all there is to it — truly a no-brainer, which seems an apt description for the serious health problem it addresses. It also leaves the degree of enforcement up to individual communities, which should appease proponents of local control. Yet the measure has its detractors, including the four committee members who voted against it.

“It’s pretty bad when the state has to be the parent here,” said Sen. Vinton Cassidy of Calais.

Cassidy has a valid point, though rejecting the proposal seems like a backward way to make it. Yes, it is pretty bad when the state has to act as a parent. So, maybe if every parent did what was necessary to keep their children from unnecessary risk, the state wouldn’t have to get involved. But many parents don’t always act responsibly, of course, and the statistics are ample proof of their carelessness or neglect.

Each year, more than 200 children — two to four of them in Maine — are killed in bike accidents. More than 2,000 kids a year — some 30 of them Mainers — are disabled by nonfatal head injuries. A lifetime of care for a brain-injured child, according to the Maine Medical Association, costs an estimated $4 million. A simple helmet, on the other hand, reduces the risk of head injury by 85 percent. What more do you need?

Bangor Police Chief Don Winslow welcomes the helmet proposal. For 10 years, his department and the Bangor Noontime Kiwanis have put on bike rodeos to teach safety and to give away helmets — 500 of them so far. As an advocate of community policing, he sees the bill as an extension of his department’s role as educators in uniform.

“We’ve always recognized that helmets make a lot of sense,” Winslow said, “and anytime we can engage kids and parents in conversation about risky behavior on the streets it’s a win-win situation. We couldn’t stop every kid we see, of course, but we could get to the ones riding down the street at 25 miles an hour without a helmet.”

To those who insist that a bike helmet law is just another example of Big Brother’s meddling ways, remember this: Once upon a time, we didn’t think to buckle up our vulnerable little children as our cars sailed down the highway doing 70. Lots of people grumbled about the law that finally changed all that, too.

Nowadays, is there a responsible parent around who would have it any other way?