Study puts a number on deaths due to repealed helmet laws

Honestly, I almost didn't write this story because the science is pretty settled on the question of whether you're more or less likely to die in a motorcycle crash if you're wearing a helmet. Plus, the purpose of this study specifically was to put a number on the deaths that can be traced to repealed helmet laws, which is a good way to get a headline but of little practical use to those of us who ride. And third, we've covered the helmet law issue pretty thoroughly, as well as addressed some of the ridiculous lies you'll hear, such as helmets causing neck injuries.

The study was done by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, which is funded by insurance companies that have a financial interest, as well as an altruistic one, in reducing highway injuries and deaths — through mandatory laws, if necessary.

So is having that number useful? Or just a useful talking point for lobbyists trying to get laws passed? Those 22,058 deaths average out to about 500 a year, and to be honest, if you had asked me to guess, I probably would have predicted a higher number than that.

But in the end I did decide to write something, because despite how much the helmet law issue has been hashed out in various Common Tread stories (check out some of the links in this text) and hundreds of reader comments on those stories, I figure it's not a bad idea to think about it again, now and then. U.S. motorcycle fatalities hit a record high in 2022 at nearly 6,000, which just reiterates that we choose to expose ourselves to risk every time we get on a motorcycle. We all have our own level of risk that we find acceptable, and another level we consider to be too much. Like any decisions, it's one we should make with more contemplation and consideration, not just automatically doing what we've always done.

How did we get our patchwork system of helmet laws?

Prior to 1976, some federal highway funds were contingent on the states having a law requiring helmet use by motorcyclists, so helmet laws were nearly universal across the United States. That requirement was dropped in 1976 and states gradually began reducing helmet requirements. Many states dropped helmet laws entirely while others required helmets only for riders under age 18 or 21. Today, 17 states and the District of Columbia require all riders to wear a helmet.

The study by IIHS Director of Statistical Services Eric Teoh, who has done similar research we've reported on before, looks at data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) from 1976 through 2022, the last year that fully complete data is available. Like his previous studies, care has been taken to consider variables that can skew the numbers. I'm not going to get into the details of how the end number was determined, but if you really want to get into the weeds on the methodology used, here's the full text of the study.

The end product of the study, the number of people who died, will be used to argue for or against laws. In the end, the issue is loaded with philosophical discussions, from where we locate the tipping point between individual freedoms and societal good, on whether slippery slopes are valid, and how much we should be able to choose our own risk level versus how much that should be decided for us by the community at large. Putting a number on how many people lost their lives over the past nearly 50 years due to some of those decisions is just another data point in the discussion.