Perhaps, but is more usage worth foregoing massive safety improvements? Bike helmet usage reduces serious head injuries by 70% and fatal injuries by 65%. According to the CDC, universal helmet usage from 1984 - 1988 would've prevented 2,500 biking deaths and more than 750,000 biking injuries in the US.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeand...-serious-head-injury-by-nearly-70-study-finds
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00036941.htm
Easy fix... Require bike rental shops to give out helmets and create an exception for Toronto Bike Share as long as it's used on bike lanes, cycle tracks and multi-use trails.
Got a link to those studies?
I don't think there's any argument to be made that biking without a helmet is safer. As far as easier and more prevalent goes, you could say the same about motorcycles and power-assisted bikes - they're a lot more efficient (for both energy and space) than cars, and yet we have mandatory helmet laws for them. Biking would be a lot more prevalent if kids and teenagers grew up riding bikes, but they're also required by law to wear a helmet. And if the price of a helmet is really a barrier, the city can subsidize them and/or give them for free to low-income residents.
Literally every one of your responses is pretty much straight out of the playbook of conservative, anti-cyclist lobbyists.
1. As the very article you cite points out, focusing solely on head injuries represents an incomplete picture of the story, as other longitudinal studies point out that the overall, long-term health benefits of cycling may outweigh the risks associated with only serious head injuries. And if you actually cared about safety, first and foremost, you should be advocating for the much more rapid and widespread construction of protected cycle infrastructure, which make cycling safer for everyone without imposing new restrictions on them.
2. "Require bike rental shops to give out helmets" is a cost-offloading measure that businesses surely would reject (and rightly so); "create an exception for bike share" is, oddly, undermining the basis of your own argument, and also just makes no sense because the vast majority of bike share docking stations aren't along protected cycle tracks, which is unsurprising given the embarrassing dearth of protected cycle tracks we have in the city.
3.
Here's a link to a study that does a good job of explaining the often spurious claims by mandatory helmet law proponents, homing in on the difficulty of independent, isolated variables, explaining that "whether such legislation is effective has remained uncertain and studies examining this issue have been small, hampered by flawed methodology, and limited to young people." And here are a nice few lines from a
Sydney-based doctor testifying at the Senate committee hearing against mandatory helmet laws:
"...there is 'evidence of wider harm to population health resulting from the reduction in cycling. It does seem odd that we, as a community, should have a law about something that reduces population health'", and another good one from that same debate:
"...mandatory laws have proved 'inefficient. They have discouraged large proportions of the community from using their bicycles and most probably have caused a much worse impact on our nation’s health by keeping people away from this kind of exercise than they have given benefit by reducing head injuries”, and another from a professor who testified:
“Helmets are utterly useless in collisions with motor vehicles. Worse, they give both the cyclist and the motorist a false sense of security. It is well established, for example, that motorists give a helmeted cyclist less passing room.”
And still
other studies have focused on the question of whether a link can even be drawn between mandatory helmet legislation and a resulting decrease in the number of serious head injuries, where
"the researchers concluded that head injuries were decreasing across the country at a rate that wasn't 'appreciably altered' by the new helmet laws. Other rider health initiatives — namely, public safety campaigns and the introduction of better bike infrastructure — rendered the contribution of helmet laws "minimal."
Personally, my opinion is to err on the side of caution; I wear a helmet whenever I'm riding a non-bike share bike. But it is undoubtedly true and obvious that imposing a mandatory helmet law would decrease the prevalence of cycling and unduly punish people. And that's a terrible combination of policy outcomes.