Durning finds the evidence in The Guardian:
Did Seattle’s mandatory helmet law kill off its bike-share scheme?
Fundamentally, low ridership killed Pronto. The system had 500 bikes at 54 stations. In its first year of operations, there were 142,832 trips or an average of just 0.78 rides per bike per day. According to the National Association of City Transportation Officials, the national average for US bike share systems is 1.8 rides per bike per day. New York City’s CitiBike system gets nearly 3.8.
If you ask five people why Pronto had such low ridership, you’ll get as many answers. Some say Seattle’s helmet law discouraged use. Others say the system was too spread out and never got the expansion it needed. Some say it lost its political support both inside and out of city hall. More still think would-be riders were discouraged by the lack of bike infrastructure in downtown Seattle or the city’s notorious rain and hills.
In truth, all those theories are at least partially correct. It was a series of compounding problems that spiralled over time until the mayor had little incentive to fight to keep Pronto alive. …
If you ask five people why Pronto had such low ridership, you’ll get as many answers. Some say Seattle’s helmet law discouraged use. Others say the system was too spread out and never got the expansion it needed. Some say it lost its political support both inside and out of city hall. More still think would-be riders were discouraged by the lack of bike infrastructure in downtown Seattle or the city’s notorious rain and hills.
In truth, all those theories are at least partially correct. It was a series of compounding problems that spiralled over time until the mayor had little incentive to fight to keep Pronto alive. …
Few advocates think the helmet law alone killed Pronto, but Russell Meddin, co-founder of The Bike-Sharing Blog, is among those who think helmets hurt the spontaneity that makes bike share successful. “Helmet laws stop the serendipity of using the system,” he says. “People want convenience. The more convenient a system is, the more it’s used.” …
One of Pronto’s biggest flaws was its lack of station density. According to Meddin, successful systems need 20 to 28 stations per square mile. Seattle’s had closer to 12. …
In February 2016, as the city council debated whether to acquire the system, Pronto’s financial woes came to light. Ridership had fallen short of projections, leaving the system with less fare revenue than planned. On top of that, the non-profit had stopped seeking new sponsorships in 2015 because they’d expected the city to take over sooner than they did. When it came time to vote, Pronto was nearing insolvency and the city needed to spend $1.4m to acquire it and pay off its debts. …
The final straw came when it emerged that Seattle was going to have to scrap all Pronto’s equipment to move forward with its expansion plans. All the leading proposals from the tender process called for starting fresh with new stations and bikes, and the winning bid from Bewegen called for an all-electric assist bike share fleet. “That definitely frustrated some of the more fiscally conservative members of the council who felt like we were had. Bad press leads to bad policy leads to bad outcomes and it spiralled,” explains Padelford. …
Some cycle experts in the city believe new Chinese private bike share companies will set up in the city. Operating on an Uber-like model of implementing first, asking forgiveness later, they have been launching without permission in cities around the world: BlueGoGo launched in San Francisco recently, while Ofo is headed for Cambridge.
One of Pronto’s biggest flaws was its lack of station density. According to Meddin, successful systems need 20 to 28 stations per square mile. Seattle’s had closer to 12. …
In February 2016, as the city council debated whether to acquire the system, Pronto’s financial woes came to light. Ridership had fallen short of projections, leaving the system with less fare revenue than planned. On top of that, the non-profit had stopped seeking new sponsorships in 2015 because they’d expected the city to take over sooner than they did. When it came time to vote, Pronto was nearing insolvency and the city needed to spend $1.4m to acquire it and pay off its debts. …
The final straw came when it emerged that Seattle was going to have to scrap all Pronto’s equipment to move forward with its expansion plans. All the leading proposals from the tender process called for starting fresh with new stations and bikes, and the winning bid from Bewegen called for an all-electric assist bike share fleet. “That definitely frustrated some of the more fiscally conservative members of the council who felt like we were had. Bad press leads to bad policy leads to bad outcomes and it spiralled,” explains Padelford. …
Some cycle experts in the city believe new Chinese private bike share companies will set up in the city. Operating on an Uber-like model of implementing first, asking forgiveness later, they have been launching without permission in cities around the world: BlueGoGo launched in San Francisco recently, while Ofo is headed for Cambridge.
If you think Seattle has problems, check out China’s bike share issues: thieves, vandals, pranksters and $1b investments in recent months. Shanghai has half a million shared bikes. When they’re working.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/braking-bad-thieves-and-pranksters-lay-waste-to-chinas-share-bikes-1491230284
Wouldn’t the apparent success of Mobi belay the standard “blame the helmet law” response?
The police in Vancouver seem to have finally found more important things to do. It seems that no-helmet infractions are way down even though more and more people are riding bare-headed like they do in most of the world.
This is especially true of Mobi. I’d guess less than 1/4 of riders are wearing helmets.
Perhaps the Seattle police enforce the law like our police used to.
Still, it’s hard to imagine that our helmet law isn’t having some negative influence. Just the fact that it is a law sends a powerful message that cycling isn’t safe. For what other activities do governing bodies demand head protection?
Motorcycling, contact sports and some construction sites.
People naturally associate helmets with dangerous activities, ergo cycling must be dangerous. Given the statistics it’s absurd.
It’s probably just one factor. Pronto had several strikes against it. They probably all added up.
The cycling infrastructure is mostly nonexistent in Seattle. Pronto’s helmets were huge and heavy on top of being required. Seattle doesn’t have any nice places to cycle on like our Seawall. Station locations were not convenient and often hidden out of sight.
Mandatory helmet laws everywhere should be scrutinized with science. There also should be an investigation how the laws came to be. While we’re at it, let’s find out why we are being told that a safe activity is not.
If I remember correctly the helmet law in BC was brought in based on the pestering of one single woman who’s son had died in a bicycle crash. (I don’t recall the details of the crash.) It was a Social Credit MLA in an NDP government that pushed her pestering through government and it became law on the slimmest of questionable evidence.
The one and only study that supported helmet efficacy and justified the legislation has now been discredited by the US DoT.
The debates in the legislature read like a Monty Python sketch for their absurdity.
Quote: “Eight of the ten cyclists who died in 1993 were not wearing helmets, yet only 5 percent of all cyclists nationally wear them.”
Do the math. It supports NOT wearing them. Yet this was an important point in the preamble to second reading and passing legislation.
It is not surprising to me that bicycles were, at this time, first becoming a (small) threat to motor vehicle sales. Not much has changed in BC politics.
Details of the crash:
A 14 year old kid was riding his bike on Oak Bay Avenue in Victoria. A passing truck had a piece of 4×4 lumber protruding out the right side and it clipped the left handlebar of the bike. The bike did a hard right and threw the kid in the opposite direction under the back wheels.
And some brainiac thought the solution was a piece of plastic on the kid’s head.
Not like you need more corroboration on the idiocy of bike helmet laws, but Howie Chong has a good post titled: Why it makes sense to bike without a helmet.
It’s galling that a motorist can be sucking on a cigarette and a coffee while looking at cyclists as evildoers. Or you see these nincompoops eating an ice cream, or a burger, while driving. No way should that be permitted.
We live in a bully dominator motoring environment and cyclists are a convenient red herring. It’s partly jealousy I think. Humorist J.P. Donleavy called cars “mobile temples of discomfort”. The temple part of it is apropos – we are so subservient to this “higher power” – like the castrati of days past. No sacrifice is too great in praise of motordom.
How dare a grieving mother push for safety laws, eh Ron? The whole argument that helmets make cycling seem unsafe is ridiculous. Do people avoid cruises because of lifeboat drills? Flying because of the safety demonstrations? I wager more cyclists are turned off by the squads of lycrabros flying around on the weekend, which send a message that cycling is not an everyday activity for the masses but some kind of extreme sport.
A grieving mother is not the one who should be making provincial safety policy.
I’ll wager that if you made airline passengers wear helmets or cruise ship passengers wear life jackets you’d see a lot less flying and cruising.
I don’t take issue with all safety laws, just ones not related to actually improving safety. Supporters of mandatory bike helmet laws should ask themselves why the CDC, the NHTSA, and the UK Dept of Transportation have all advised that their previous recommendations for helmet use based on the study Ron references, can no longer be supported due to lack of evidence.
“I wager more cyclists are turned off by the squads of lycrabros flying around on the weekend, which send a message that cycling is not an everyday activity for the masses but some kind of extreme sport.”
All around town, drivers of Hondas and Toyotas, perfectly good transportation devices, must be selling their vehicles en mass because they saw a Ferrari earlier and came to the conclusion that driving is not an everyday activity.
Do you see how ridiculous that sounds?
People ride bikes because it makes sense to them. If you think they might stop doing so because they see a sport cyclist, well, you should give them more credit than that. But when the government tells them repeatedly that their chosen transportation mode is incredibly dangerous, despite the data to the contrary….
This has been discussed previously in PT; here’s a link and a quote from that thread:
https://pricetags.wordpress.com/2015/02/03/comments-worth-commenting-on-who-has-a-helmet-law/
Misguided doctors or marketing agents?
http://crag.asn.au/1121
Basically Bell Helmet Company needed a new market so they created a bogus research agency, the Snell Foundation to create a study to conclude that helmets were effective and were needed. They then sent out propaganda that claimed that cycling was unsafe (using the classic technique of scaring parents of children) and it went from there.
One guy is still going at it even now.
The Helmet Alarmist Who Cried Wolf
http://systemicfailure.wordpress.com/2014/06/17/the-helmet-alarmist-who-cried-wolf/