What a JOKE it is to get a drivers license in the country. When I got mine 30 years ago I at least had to have a real live and very intimidating DPS officer ride with me for the test. I had recently moved from Europe where I had lived since I was five. In England, student drivers had to display a big red letter L on the front and back of their vehicles. Everyone got a fair warning that a noobie was behind the wheel. What a smart idea for everyone concerned! Many people who took the test there did NOT pass it on the first try.

Flash forward to my kids learning to drive. The Great State of Texas in it’s infinite wisdom has decided that parents can teach their own kids to drive. I took that option with both of mine – because I’m cheap and didn’t want to pay for them to learn to drive a car. And, I was a teacher, so I knew how to deal with high school kids.

What a joke. It was damn near impossible to get a straight answer from DPS about exactly how many hours the kids needed to log before they could come in and get their licenses. Not that it really mattered to me, because I intended on actually teaching them to drive and was not about to let them get a license until they could actually do it right.

I love my daughter like she was my own daughter, but it took her a month to figure out which way to turn the steering wheel to back out of the driveway. I was scared a lot of the time at first. Did you know that cars weigh 2000 pounds and go at 60 miles per hour? Think about that for a minute. I mean really think about it.

I decided it wasn’t enough for them to be able to drive their moms minivan. They would also have to master my car with its standard transmission. If you can’t drive a stick shift, you can’t drive.

Finally, my kids got it right and we drove down to the DPs HQ and they turned in their silly meaningless driving logs and walked out with their licenses from the state so they could make a 2000 pound piece of metal go 65 mph through the dark and rain on Mopac at 0200 on a Saturday night when the bars are closing (not that I would let them do that – but they COULD legally). No driving test was given. No scary DPS officer with reflective aviator glasses scowling from the passenger seat. No final written test. That was done months ago. It was 20 multiple guess questions long. It had four answer choices for each question and a student only had to get 75% of them correct to get that driving permit. The only other thing you needed to have was a pulse and body temperature above 96F.

My kids are pretty good drivers, but how many other people out there took this Parent Driving Program as seriously?

Yeah, exactly.

What we should start with:

1. Make tinted windows illegal. How can cyclists, pedestrians, or other drivers for that matter, make eye contact when people can’t see one another?
2. Ban cell phone use while driving. Execute people who text.
3. Make cars so that when the engine comes on, so do the headlights. Even on a July afternoon in Death Valley.
4. Make the driving test significantly difficult.
5. Do away with automatic transmissions and cruise control. If you are driving a car you need to be on full alert every single second.
6. Ban Hummers. If you want to drive one, go join the Marines and do it in Kabul.
7. Set the price of gas so that it covers the real but hidden costs of driving.
8. Make helmets mandatory for car drivers and passengers. Do you have any idea how many lives we could save that way. People in cars must also wear full protective gear. Cars are dangerous and the people in them should look like goalies in a hockey game. Yes, even in Texas in the summer.
9. Provide free Cialis to the guys that have to compensate by driving jacked up trucks with balls hanging off the trailer hitch.
10. Make the cops have to spend a certain amount of their time patrolling on bicycles. They would get to know the folks they are supposed to be protecting better. They would see more of whats going on and so be better able to do their jobs. They might even begin to have more empathy for cyclists.

It would be a start.

People are always telling me to be safe. The truth is that I cannot be safe through my efforts alone. There are others on the road, and there are always times when I am going to be vulnerable to them. On their part, they are safer in their vehicles now than at any time in the past, with air bags and seat belts, etc. and also less attentive to driving than ever before.

I wear a helmet all the time, and I don’t really mind wearing it, but it has nothing to do with safe cycling, all it is is something that might make an accident a little less severe.

One of this interesting things that really stuck in my mind was the comment “Ordinary cycling is not demonstrably more dangerous than walking or driving, yet no country promotes helmets for either of these modes.”

How dangerous is cycling? To know that, you must make a lot of assumptions about how many cyclists there are, how much they ride, and how many accidents there are. I have read, for instance, that cycling is a little less dangerous than skiing. Is that good or bad?

Another little nugget, “Of 28 publicly funded cycle safety interventions listed in a report in 2002, 24 were helmet promotions.”

OK, so, the *focus* is not on reducing the number of accidents, but just ensuring that if there is one, your mangled body will still retain the capacity of thought, even though you might be paralyzed.

This diversion of attention from accident prevention strikes me as the biggest problem with helmet promotion.

Those who engage in those activities should feel free to tell each other to wear helmets all they want; but leave the transportation cyclists the hell alone.

Newsflash: We haven’t; you can’t tease out any positive effect on major head injuries or death that can be attributed to helmets. They don’t work. If they were a drug (that had shown promise in trials but not in the general population), they’d be recalled and sent back for more study to figure out why.

I never had strong feelings about the helmet argument one way or the other UNTIL I got hit by a car. The driver was speeding along the shoulder on Parmer, blew through an intersection and right into me making a very legal left turn onto a side street. The driver took off. Of course.

Within minutes the police, EMS and Fire were on the scene. Other drivers had also stopped to help me. And everyone seemed to want to know one thing above everything else. And you know what that was.

And the answer was ‘Yes I was’, but no one seemed as interested in the fact that my head never touched the ground anyway. I guess the EMS guys listened, but I got the very distinct impression that since I was wearing a helmet, everything was going to be just fine. That’s when I saw the light on the helmet issue.

It’s not that helmets are that big a deal per se, it’s that they are a HUGE distraction to the real issues of cyclist rights and safety. I commute by bike every day that I don’t commute by running. My coworkers tell me to be safe and sometimes comment on how glad they are that I wear a helmet. Then they get in their cars and drive off chatting on their cell phones.