The King County Board of Health voted Thursday to repeal its decades-old mandatory helmet law for bicycle riders. The TKTK vote comes in the face of data showing enforcement has been both minimal and disproportionate toward people of color and those experiencing homelessness.
“Everyone should wear a helmet while riding,” said Board of Health Chair Joe McDermott. “Enforcement of the helmet law, however, has caused harm especially to BIPOC riders and riders experiencing homelessness who are bearing the brunt of disproportionate enforcement and citations.”
The board voiced its support for the voluntary use of helmets, passing a resolution encouraging riders to don the protective gear. But McDermott said there are other ways of encouraging helmet use that do not rely on law enforcement, including educational campaigns and free helmet distribution.
“This work responds directly to our declaration last year that racism is a public health crisis,” McDermott said.
The vote came despite criticism from some in the medical and legal communities, who argued that the law remained a necessary mechanism to ensure helmet usage remains high in Seattle. Dr. Beth Ebel acknowledged that the law may have some shortcomings, but that its issues could be addressed in some other way.
“The helmet really is a critical piece and, from what I see, having that law has potency. The downside of it in my view can and should be addressed as well,” she said in an interview before the vote.
“Let's examine the unfair enforcement practices before we start changing the law,” said attorney Richard Adler. “The focus has been on who's getting tickets; maybe we need to look at who's giving the tickets.”
But advocates for the repeal argued that, while riders should wear helmets, empowering police to mandate their use is neither effective nor fair.
“Repealing the law is completely separate from the issue of helmet efficacy,” said Lee Lambert, executive director of Cascade Bicycle Club, which previously supported the law, but recently advocated for its repeal. “The issue isn't whether helmets work or not. The issue and the opportunity moving forward is from a punitive approach to a proactive approach that encourages helmet use.”
Ethan Campbell, whose group Central Seattle Greenways has studied how the law is being enforced, argued it was not serving its intended purpose and was being used as a pretext to stop people.
“Let's avoid conflating two things: the need for helmets, which work, and helmet laws, which don't,” he said.
The law mandating bike riders wear helmets was first passed by King County in 1993 and was expanded to explicitly include Seattle in 2003.
At the time, studies suggested that implementing helmet laws did increase use of helmets, especially among young people. Studies also repeatedly confirmed that helmet use does reduce the severity of injuries. Fatalities and severe head injuries among cyclists decreased by as much as 20% following the law’s implementation, according to research from Harborview Medical Center.
But recent data connecting helmet laws to their use and therefore improved outcomes for cyclists is less clear. In Seattle helmet use is as high as 87 percent, according to one study. Meanwhile, in Portland, which does not have a helmet, one study found use is similarly high, at just over 80 percent. In fact, a study in King County could not find any discernible impact on hospitalization rates following law’s expansion into Seattle in 2003.
The law came up for reconsideration this year following a Crosscut analysis of helmet citations dating back to 2017. That analysis showed that, even as bike share has become common, enforcement by Seattle police is minimal. When the law was used to issue a citation, nearly half went to people struggling with homelessness, raising the concern that it was being used predominantly as a pretext to stop people. In fact, in 2019, a Seattle Municipal Court judge tossed a firearm charge against a man that he received after being stopped for not wearing a helmet, calling the stop an illegal pretext.
A separate analysis from Central Seattle Greenways found that Black riders were roughly four times more likely to receive a citation for not wearing a helmet.
Following Crosscut’s article, the board added the law to its 2021 work plan. The board briefly considered stripping out any enforcement mechanism from the law while leaving it on the books, but was advised by legal counsel that doing so could, in fact, broaden discretion to law enforcement.
As the board considered the law’s repeal over several months, opposition was muted. But in recent days, the board has heard from people concerned about the impacts of doing so. In public comment, a number of medical professionals and attorneys told stories about witnessing head injuries that could have been prevented with helmet use.
Janna Friedly, a physician at Harborview Medical Center and professor at UW Medical School, argued that patients with head injuries from cycling were more likely to be people of color and that repealing the law would hurt them the most.
“If you repeal the helmet law, the message to the public is that helmets are optional and they're not important enough to protect you from brain injuries to make them mandatory,” she said.
But Tamar Shuhendler of Cascade Bicycle Club said the question should not be whether helmets are advisable “To be clear, I believe that helmet use is absolutely valuable,” she said. “But the helmet law has opened the door to unjust policing and it is no longer effective at its main purpose, which is getting helmets on heads.”
With its vote Thursday, King County joins Tacoma, which voted to repeal its helmet law last year. Data similarly showed it was being used only rarely and disproportionately against Black riders. At the same time, 17 cities in King County, comprising roughly one third of the county’s population, have their own laws mandating helmet use that won’t be affected by Thursday’s vote.
