Less than a year in, the Capitol Bikeshare program is rolling along. By its own count, the community bike service has registered 250,000 trips around D.C. in its first six months. Wednesday, a new station was opened up at the Wilson Building, at 14th and D Street NW, and five more are slated to open over the next week.
With more people taking to two wheels on shared bicycles, some have asked, what about the helmets?
The program's bikes themselves do come with a number of built-in safety features, including reflectors, a light in the front, and blinking LED's in the rear. But a piece of equipment that does not come standard in the pay to pedal program is protection for the head.
On the Bikeshare website, a heading "Helmets" points users to a list of bike shops where they can go and purchase their own headgear.
"In terms of distributing helmets on the street or through a machine,” Jim Sebastian, one of DDOT’s bike program planners said last year at the time of the launch, “No one's been able to work that out."
The company Alta oversees Washington's program. The company also runs a bikeshare in Melbourne, Australia, where, guess what? They have a helmet distribution system.
Over in Melbourne, riders there pedal familiar looking step-over bicycles, wearing government-subsidized bicycle helmets.
In the Melbourne plan, introduced last October, cheap bike helmets can be purchased from vending machines or retail shops for $5 Australian. Bike-share riders can keep them, or make a return to select 7- Eleven convenience stores, for a $3 Australian refund. The helmets actually cost $13, but the government eats the extra cost.
Back at the 7-Eleven, helmets are disinfected, straightened up, and then resold.
In Melbourne, local law makes it mandatory to wear a helmet. According to Aussie newspaper the Age, bikesharing trips wallowed in its first month, before the cheap-helmet program was introduced. After that, the city recorded almost ten times as many monthly rides.
The situation is different in D.C. City law requires those under the age of 16 to wear a helmet when riding on a bike, but adults are free to go lidless.
Would the plan work here? Some argue that part of the success of the Capital Bikeshare program is that it gives participants the ability to hop on two wheels and go, on a whim and without prior planning. Making helmets mandatory could really take the spontaneity out of the system.
But, wearing a helmet is undeniably a good thing for rider's heads - a New England Journal of Medicine study says that wearing bicycle helmets causes an 85 percent reduction to the risk of brain injury.
For the programs 10,000 members that ride in a city that averages 265 bicycle accidents a year, greater availability of helmets might not be a bad idea.
