Thursday, September 04, 2003

Today you may hear motorcyclists revving their engines in celebration of a new freedom, but in reality it is a sad occasion marking a moment when common sense went silent on Pennsylvania's roadways. For this is the day when motorcyclists can take off the safety helmets that they have been required to wear for the past 35 years.

Blind to all the evidence of danger, the Pennsylvania Legislature two months ago finally was worn down by advocates for bikers, passing a bill that gutted the state's safety helmet law. Gov. Ed Rendell, unpopular in many other quarters, made himself popular in one by signing the bill. Pennsylvania now becomes the 31st state that doesn't require helmets.

The Pennsylvania law doesn't completely do away with helmets -- which, of course, is a tacit admission that they make sense. Riders under 21 or older riders who haven't had a license for two years or undergone a rider safety program are still required to wear them -- and good luck to the police officers who must make these distinctions and enforce the law.

The Legislature did raise one fig leaf of responsibility to cover its pandering to the biker lobby. It passed a resolution calling on a legislative committee to complete a study in two years of motorcycle accidents and helmet usage. Instead of studying first and enacting later, the Legislature foolishly took the cart-before-the-horse approach, and now the horsepower will do its worst.

Soon enough, the committee will get the statistics it needs, and some of those statistics will be real people who died or became vegetables because they indulged the freedom to act foolishly by not wearing helmets. And the cost of treating these individuals is likely to become a drain on public resources.

No one argues that helmet laws can save every biker in every accident, but the Legislature didn't have the power to overturn the laws of physics concerning what happens when brain and flesh meet macadam. The evidence that helmets save lives and cut serious injuries is overwhelming.

Perhaps our sense of foreboding will be proved wrong. Perhaps the majority of motorcycle riders, having been given a choice, will choose to wear helmets anyway. But we can't help thinking that somewhere, if not today then in coming days, a biker will throw aside a helmet and make an appointment with tragedy that need not have been.

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