What Does Motorcycling Cost?
WHAT DOES MOTORCYCLING COST?
ROUNDUP
Until the last couple of years motorcycle safety legislation (usually read helmet laws) was argued on a straightforward approach. Either you felt that freedom of choice was all important or you felt that it was more important for all motorcyclists to use a minimum amount of protective equipment, i.e. a helmet.
Arguing a concept on its own merits is difficult so the arguments grew to include something people are more comfortable with: Reason. And therein lies the rub. People who believed motorcyclists should be more concerned with protection concocted statistical studies to prove that helmets prevent injuries and reduce fatalities. With that they were able to argue for mandatory helmet laws based on reason, not just feeling.
Most of the studies were not terribly impartial, so the opposition was able to use the same studies to argue against the effectiveness of helmets, even though there has been a general concensus that helmets do offer some protection to motorcyclists.
Now the arguments have escalated to a higher, if less noble, plane. The issue is societal cost.
Of course society costs, as anyone who has ever read a society page can verify, but that's not what the words mean. Societal costs, according to the professional safety community, are what society pays for when motorcyclists are injured.
Societal costs include several things. Medical costs are a major part, plus the loss of productivity of injured motorcyclists. Various studies have been done to show that injured motorcyclists cost the rest of society millions of dollars either because other insured people must pay more money, or because motorcyclists are less likely to pay their bills. And some studies say it’s unfair of motorcyclists to get injured when a car driver hits them because of the expense to the car driver.
There is no question that the collective output of a society is lessened when any member is injured. In that sense there is a societal cost to automobile accidents, water skiing, horseback riding, cigarette smoking, daytime TV, and probably apple pie. But researchers are giving societal costs a number and people believe numbers. Numbers are more believable than people. So if Susan Baker says the societal costs of not wearing helmets is $5 billion a year, or the societal costs of riding motorcycles is $100 billion a year, there is no easy answer.
Yes, we could all be more productive if we spent less time riding motorcycles and more time doing constructive things like> growing food or building ships. Freedom, any freedom, has a societal cost. But the really strange thing is watching newscasts from Poland where none of these recreational freedoms exists and everybody is busy working six days a week and somehow the shelves in the stores are empty. Could it be there’s a societal benefit from any creative or even recreational activity? Absolutely. It’s not a direct connection. It’s not even measurable. But it exists.
