From a paper by SFU student Erica Hirschberger:
1985: The Bicycle Advisory Committee is created as a citizen advisory body to Council.
1988: The Vancouver Comprehensive Bicycle Plan is published. It recommends the implementation of a helmet law to reduce the number of serious bicycle accidents, and recommends following Palo Alto, CA engineer John Forester’s assertion that the best cycling facilities are those on arterial streets for fast and safe travel.
1996: The Province of British Columbia adds a mandatory helmet requirement for cyclists to the Motor Vehicle Act.
I see what you did there.
A reminder that John Forester is NOT a traffic or road engineer and has done more to damage cycling in North American than any one individual ever has:
http://www.copenhagenize.com/2010/07/vehicular-cyclists-secret-sect.html
Copenhagenize? Now there’s an impartial source.
“[…] a helmet law to reduce the number of serious bicycle accidents […]”.
Did they actually suggest that helmets prevent accidents? That’s like saying that painting 747s green will prevent plane crashes.
But helmet laws do prevent accidents … by reducing the number of cyclists.
I think it means to prevent the seriousness of ….[by reducing head injuries].
Notice how people nowadays don’t know how to use adverbs and adjectives? i.e. the absence of the suffix “-ly”?
It was indeed an assertion, as the guest post above suggests, that helmets would reduce the severity of accidents, not their number. Please excuse the laziness of writing in the above text, being in the middle of an MA thesis does tend to take a bit out of a person.