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The Shady Origin of the 1996 Helmet Law
10 years ago I was participating in the newly formed Austin Bicycle Program’s Bicycle Advisory Council, where I sat around the table with various bike advocates. When we learned from one of the members, Doug Ballew, that he was working on bring a helmet law proposal to council there was some groaning all around, and I mentioned privately to him that there would be a divisive fight if he insisted on that course. That mention was all the warning the community got, and I wish I had the foresight and political savvy to organize an opposition then. Naively, I figured there would be a public hearing.
But the next I heard, it was a done deal. Ballew and his cohorts from some medical lobby groups, along with Mayor Bruce Todd (who was apparently gung-ho on the idea) convinced most of the council of the importance of it, and simply brought it straight to vote. The one councilmember who would have likely opposed it, Max Nofziger, was out of town on the day it came up, so it passed unanimously. Normally, it takes three readings of a motion to create an ordinance, but the council used an "emergency measures" provision and passed it on just one. So we had an all-ages helmet law with a $50 fine.
The Citizens For Cycling Freedom
So, naturally, all Hell broke loose. Hundreds of bicyclists descended on the council chambers the next week, and they kept showing up week after week. They had been disrespected by their government, which denied them due process and gave them no say in a law that affected them directly. That disrespect came right back, and they decided to have their say anyway.
The Bicycle Advisory Council broke up, with some of us putting the defeat of the helmet law as #1 priority for advancing the cause of cycling. Others supported it, and the moderates wanted to keep working on facilities while trying to ignore it.
The Citizens for Cycling Freedom formed at these meetings to begin the effort of repealing the law. We soon changed our name to the slightly shorter "League of Bicycling Voters" (it was a mouthful getting the full name of the CFCF out when identifying oneself on the telephone). The only avenue of immediate redress was a petition to repeal the law, which meant getting 35,000 signatures, so we buckled down to it. There was a civil lawsuit launched by an independent activist affiliated with the LOBV, but it eventually foundered on some bureaucratic error (the pro-bono lawyer apparently filed the wrong document, or missed a deadline, or something).
In the meantime, the city celebrated its new law with a swirl of citations. Various grumpy cyclists were hauling their tickets into court, some of which were thrown out by judges who considered the helmet violations a giant waste of time. Cops pulled cyclists over, got occasional attitude from them, and hauled the cursing and spitting cyclists off to jail. I got my ticket too, riding at 6 mph past the play scape at Zilker Park by a parks officer who was standing around handing out helmet tickets. The officer actually showed up to the court hearing and my $50 ticket stuck. Ten years later I still get recorded messages from some company, working on contract for the municipal court, telling me to pay the thing and "take this seriously."
Even though I wore a helmet prior to the law, the helmet had become less an item of "bike pride" for me ("I wear it because I am a cyclist") and more a symbol of repression. Not wearing one, thereby telling the city where to stick it, became more important. Was this irrational? Maybe so. But for me that was all the more reason why helmet laws are such a bad idea. If you really want people to adopt the helmet habit then you cannot make it a symbol of bad government. It was like "the mark of the beast," stamped on your head by the evil emperor, Bruce Todd, whose contempt for what he called "the coalition for wind in the hair" was growing with every city council meeting.
The League of Bicycling Voters
The petition eventually failed. The LOBV just did not have the staff for it, and we did not have much money. The initial group of activists gathered about 15,000 signatures in the first half of the petitioning period, but when we started to burn out on the work there was no second wave of recruits to pick up the slack. The next move came with the city elections. The LOBV took a cue from its name and pressed candidates for a commitment to repeal the helmet law, and we worked to oppose those council members who voted it in.
The change in council opened the way for a change, but it still took work. The council tends to resist repealing any ordinance before at least a year, so they kept delaying. One advocate (the one who started the lawsuit), famously marched uninvited into the office of the new mayor (Kirk Watson) and began to harangue him about it. The security guard at the front door appeared right after that. More restrainedly, a core group of LOBV members began to meet with council members to get a repeal motion placed on the agenda. Exactly one year after its passage, the new council voted to amend the all-aged law down to under-18 (they passed it as another "emergency measure," by the way). This fell short of our demands, but it took the wind out of our sails. Many supporters, tired after a year of being pissed off, fell away since they were no longer directly threatened.
10 years Later
The LOBV stuck together for a while, monitoring the enforcement of the law. By obtaining police records, we found that most of the tickets were being handed out to minorities, probably by police using probable cause to detain and question suspicious looking characters. Helmet law proponents prefer to use court records to show that enforcement was evenly distributed racially, but those records showed only those cases that went to court. We don’t know how many fines were actually paid.
Then, in early 2006, ex-mayor Todd went out on his drop-bar racing bike and crashed. He has no recollection of how it happened, but he survived, touting the protection afforded by his helmet. There was an outpouring of sympathy from the bike community, who answered his call for donations to buy helmets for poor kids. Too bad he did not leave it at that. Shortly after he began his own crusade for a new all-ages helmet law. (This seems to be his baby.)
And now here we are. Several things are different this time, though. The city council is acting more responsibly, and we are getting our public hearing up front. While the original LOBV had disbanded, we quickly reconvened. Many members had stayed in politics and built upon their experience fighting the first helmet law. Others had been working and prospering, and had more funds to support the effort.
We are confident that this proposal can be defeated, but we need a big volume of public response. We need your "no thank you" letter to council, and we need you to encourage your friends, family, co-workers, and other associates to sound off as well. This is something that affects all cyclists, both non-helmet wearers and helmet advocates alike. Folks like me who want to see helmet use increase know that this law will have the opposite effect. This law is less about cyclist’s safety and more about one guy’s personal will and his expression of personal clout.
We beat this before and we can beat it again, together, as the Austin cycling community.
