As long as that’s the case, I don’t have a problem with riding without a helmet. I personally find it stupid, and wouldn’t do it, but if someone else wants to and it’s not going to negatively impact me, I don’t care.
My worldview tends to be that people have the right to do what they want as long as it doesn’t cause harm to others. Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose. Which is why I think helmetless riders should not be the beneficiaries of public dollars related to their head injuries.
Honestly I think there’s a case to be made for extending that concept to motorcycle riding in general, or at least requiring a stellar insurance package for riding - as in, half-million-dollar minimum payouts in the event of a catastrophic injury.
These people are voluntarily stripping every modern safety feature away and then driving more than a mile a minute next to multi-ton hunks of metal piloted by people browsing the internet instead of looking out the windshield. I’m not in favor of banning motorcycles, but I do think that perhaps a framework wherein the general public is not responsible for funding the consequences of your extreme risk-taking isn’t a bad idea.
As to why assuming they’ll take public money, I’ve got a family example. Guy I’m related to rode a motorcycle, got run off the road by a wrong-way driver, and broke his neck. Paralyzed from the chest down. He had a good job with “good” health insurance, but it was a physical job so that went away. Driver fled the scene and was never caught, so there’s no way to make him pay.
He had to get a new house to accommodate his wheelchair, paid for by the government, and his income is government disability checks. This was a guy who was doing everything right as far as being responsible, earning a living, being insured to legal minimums, etc. But driving that motorcycle was a risky decision, and he lost the gamble. Fortunately for him the taxpayers stepped in, but really there should have been an additional insurance policy that he had to pay for in order to ride that would have covered those expenses.
Yes, that insurance would be expensive, but so is injury insurance if you’re race car driver - and racers who don’t get the competition medical insurance/workers comp insurance often quickly find out that they aren’t covered by their regular insurance for injuries sustained on track.
Motorcycles represent a category of activity where it’s fairly cheap to get the hardware. Doing it right costs more money than people might expect, but it’s something that every rider should do as responsible adults, and because a lot of riders don’t do the responsible thing and the rest of us end up footing the bill, there’s an argument that doing it right should be required.
As a personal example, I have a camera drone. You can get a really good one for under $1,000. And lots of people get one and start buzzing it around without thinking about what might happen if they lose control of the drone and it crashes into someone or something expensive.
I didn’t do that - before my first flight I already had a hull-loss rider on my homeowner’s policy and a 2.5 million dollar liability insurance policy. Yes, it was an extra cost, but it was the responsible thing to do, and now if my drone loses connection with the transmitter and crashes into a Lexus convoy on the interstate, I’m covered. But what happens when the neighboring drone flier doesn’t do that, and causes a disaster? Insurance policies for flying drones should be mandatory just like they are for driving cars.
Seems insane to me that you wouldn’t require that for activities that have an enhanced likelihood of causing a disaster, including motorcycle riding.
