The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has determined that 22,058 motorcyclists’ lives could have been saved between 1976 and 2022 if the US had universal helmet laws. This number accounts for 11 percent of all rider fatalities during this time.
While organizations ranging from IIHS to the World Health Organization strongly recommend wearing helmets, only 17 states and the District of Columbia currently have mandatory helmet laws for all riders. This number keeps going down, with Nebraska being the latest, now allowing riders at least 21 years old and who have taken a certified motorcycle safety course to ride without a helmet as of the beginning of 2024.
While there has never been a national motorcycle helmet law, the 1967 National Highway Safety Act withheld certain highway safety and construction funding from states that did not have such laws on the books. By July 1975, 47 states and DC had enacted mandatory helmet laws to gain access to this funding. The year 1976 is significant because that was when the funding restriction was removed, enabling states to enact their own laws without being strongarmed into it by the federal government. The IIHS claims that had this not happened, it would have saved more than 20,000 lives between then and 2022, the latest year for which fatality data is currently available.
For data nerds who enjoy digging into the numbers, the exact methodology used to calculate this number is available here. Additionally, a broader study of motorcycle and ATV fatality facts was released earlier this year, and this data was used in these calculations. I noticed many interesting things in that study’s data, but that’s a topic for another time. Here’s a number directly related to helmet fatalities. When you divide the 22,058 lives lost over the 46 years of data, the result is an average of 480 lives per year. That’s almost one-tenth fewer than those who died by drowning each year between 2020 and 2022.
Helmet Laws: Safety vs. Freedom
Any life lost is a tragedy, especially when it’s preventable. Many of us personally know people who have died in motorcycle crashes. I know I do. The evidence supporting that wearing a motorcycle helmet helps prevent not only death but also life-changing injuries is beyond question. But much of the reason why we ride motorcycles is the freedom, and to many, that includes the freedom to choose whether to wear a helmet or not. That’s why 30 states, following the will of the people, have either weakened or repealed their helmet laws since 1976.
Statistics can also favor those looking to undermine mandatory helmet laws. At the bottom of the IIHS article is a map where you can hover over a state and see how many fatalities they believe could have been avoided in 2022 with a helmet law. South Dakota, home of the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, lost two lives to the lack of a helmet in 2022. They’re not about to enact a helmet law and drive most of the helmetless rally attendees away. Florida, the most deadly state, had 90 fatalities due to not wearing a helmet that year. According to the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, there were 1,410,238 licensed riders in 2022. Ninety fatalities is 0.006 percent of the state’s riding population. Particularly given the state’s conservative politics, it’s about as likely that Florida will enact a mandatory helmet law as it is for an ice cube to survive on the surface of the sun. Similarly, the state with the highest number of motorcycle fatalities overall, California, already has a mandatory helmet law, a fact that could be used to argue that helmet laws don’t save lives after all. Such an argument would be false—California’s high population and long riding season are the real reasons that the figure is so high—but that might not stop them from trying.
I always wear a helmet, whether it’s required by law or not. I was thrilled to be wearing one the day I face-planted into a rock in New Hampshire, a state that does not require helmets for riders 18 and over. I rode home unharmed instead of having a rearranged face. The IIHS is trusting the power of statistics to back its argument that helmets save lives, an argument that I agree with. However, statistics don’t work against emotions, and the opposing side can use the same numbers to prove their point in plenty of ways.
