State laws that allow motorcyclists not to wear helmets are costing lives every year, according to a new study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
IIHS found that if every state had required all riders to wear helmets from 1976 to 2022, a total of 22,058 motorcyclists’ lives could have been saved.
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That represents 11% of all rider fatalities over those years.
“Requiring all riders to wear helmets is a commonsense rule not that different from requiring people in cars to buckle up,” said IIHS President David Harkey. “We have an obligation to protect everyone on our roadways through smart policy.”
Currently, only 17 states and the District of Columbia have all-rider helmet laws in place. Georgia is one of those states.
In Florida, riders younger than 21 must wear a helmet, but riders 21 years and older can skip the helmet if they have at least $10,000 in medical insurance coverage for motorcycle accident injuries.
IIHS data showed that in 2022, Florida had by far the most deaths of motorcyclists not wearing helmets with 90. The next closest was Texas with 64.
According to the IIHS study, more than 6,000 motorcyclists were killed each year in 2021 and 2022, the most recent years for which statistics are available.
“Wearing a helmet is one of the biggest things riders can do to protect themselves from death and traumatic brain injury,” said Eric Teoh, IIHS director of statistical services and the author of the paper. “We understand that requiring helmets for all riders everywhere would be unpopular with some motorcyclists, but this could save hundreds of lives each year. Those aren’t just numbers. They’re friends, parents and children.”
By state, the largest number of lives lost over the time period of the study (1976-2022) was in California with 2,536, primarily due to its large population and long riding season.
But an all-rider helmet law went into effect in California in 1992, dropping its numbers dramatically.
Other states with high numbers of additional deaths such as Texas (2,490), Florida (1,786), Illinois (1,738), Ohio (1,651), Indiana (1,151) and South Carolina (1,000) still allow unhelmeted riding, so the toll in those places will continue to rise, the IIHS warned.
“Requiring every rider to wear a helmet is a simple change that could have a dramatic and immediate effect on fatality rates,” Harkey said. “With 6,000 riders dying every year, it’s unconscionable that we haven’t already made these laws universal.”
The first all-rider helmet laws took effect in 1967, after the National Highway Safety Act made them a prerequisite for certain highway safety and construction funds. By July 1975, 47 states and the District of Columbia had such laws on the books.
But the funding restriction as removed in 1976, and since then, most states have weakened their helmet laws to be applicable only to riders under 18 or 21 years old or repealed them altogether.
To determine the human cost of allowing unhelmeted motorcycling, Teoh compared the number of helmeted and unhelmeted riders killed each year in jurisdictions with and without all-rider helmet laws. That allowed him to estimate helmet use rates for the states when all-rider laws were in effect and when they weren’t. He then estimated the number of lives that would have been saved each year if all-rider helmet laws had been universal throughout the entire 1976-2022 period. For that calculation, he used the 37% decrease in motorcyclist fatality risk associated with wearing a helmet established by other published research. In another analysis, he estimated the cumulative effect of allowing unhelmeted motorcycling within each state.
Notably, population-level helmet use has increased over time in jurisdictions with and without all-rider helmet laws. However, helmet use rates in states with all-rider laws were generally 2-3 times as high as in states without them over the study period. Teoh’s estimates take those historical changes and differing helmet use rates into account.
The number of lives lost as the result of laws that allow unhelmeted riding ranged from 182 in 1976 to 673 in 2021. Most states had all-rider laws in 1976, but compliance was spotty. Helmet use was higher in 2021, but far fewer jurisdictions required them.