Bicycle Safety Helmet Legislation and BIcycle-Related Non-Fatal Injuries in California (Working Paper – Please Do Not Quote)

Legislation that mandate people to wear bicycle safety helmets while using a bicycle has been used as a method of head injury prevention by a number of jurisdictions i n Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States for over a decade. Many helmet laws have been evaluated and most of these studies used helmet-wearing rates among bicyclists as a measure of the legislative effects. Few studies have associated bicycle-related injuries with legislation and of the ones found in the literature review that did, only six used state or nation wide hospital admissions or discharge data that represented the vast majority of injured bicyclists in a population (Cameron et al. 1994; Hendrie et al. 1999; Macpherson et al. 2002; Marshall and White 1994; Povey et al. 1999; Scuffham et al. 2000; Vulcan et al. 1992). Furthermore, of these six studies, only three analysed more than two years of postlegislation data (Hendrie et al. 1999; Povey et al. 1999; Scuffham et al. 2000), two of which used the same data source (Povey et al. 1999; Scuffham et al. 2000), and none examined helmet laws in the United States.