Dear Sir,

I write to provide an alternative point of view to that voiced by Gilbert Darrell in the opinion titled “Full-face helmets should be a priority” in The Royal Gazette of June 26, 2024.

I have a lot of time for Gilbert and was a fan of his dad as well, but he really has gone too far here. He is drawing extreme conclusions from data which, to a large degree, is simply not appropriate for Bermuda. For example, the stats about how important it is to have a full-face helmet are based on where impacts are likely to fall, not how severe the impact will be, nor how much damage it will do. Sad to say, the definitive source for the protection provided by helmets — the Virginia Tech Helmet Lab — has yet to focus on motorcycle helmets.

1, There is no data quoted here that supports the idea that a substantial fraction of Bermuda’s road fatalities would actually have been avoided if a full-face helmet were in use — and buckled up — rather than a half-face helmet.

2, I believe the reading of our death/serious injury stats should go a step further: when examining the question of whether everyone should be forced to use a full-face helmet, the death/serious injury statistics should count only those instances where high speed and/or dangerous driving were not involved in the crash. The logic here is that it is fundamentally unfair to force everyone to wear a full-face helmet when the only drivers who will actually need them are the drivers who decide to drive dangerously and at high speed.

3, To dig deeply into studies about different helmets while ignoring the 900lb gorilla in the room is, sadly, a red-herring exercise that we have had to endure all too often — including the infamous Froncioni report that Gilbert mentions. Time and again we hear righteous discussions around why age, lack of training, vehicle size, helmets and impaired driving are such critical factors in death and serious injury, and that they need to become the focus of increasingly stringent restrictions, rules and enforcement. Not so!

The 900lb gorilla is speed.

All of the factors above become truly dangerous only when high speeds are involved. Under 50km/h, they are rarely killers.

I remember discussion around automatic “speed cameras” from the early Nineties — 30 years ago! The reality then was as it still is today: hardly anyone is getting killed or maimed on Bermuda’s roads while driving at 35km/h or even 50km/h. Bad things are happening at high speeds, and almost only at high speeds. This was actually the one nugget in the Froncioni report that got little attention.

The sad truth is that we could have had cameras in operation for all of those 30 years had there been the political will. Every premier, police commissioner, politician and member of the Bermuda Road Safety Council during that time must share responsibility for the 300 or so road deaths and even more serious injuries that have happened at speeds in excess of 50km/h in that time.

It needs pointing out that we did not need an all-seeing, island-wide CCTV system operated by the Bermuda Police Service to stop speeding. All we needed was relatively inexpensive cameras. These could have been entirely privately funded and operated with the recorded evidence submitted to the BPS or sent directly to the Department of Public Prosecutions. Even the issuing of the original summonses could have been done under contract and under court supervision by a private entity. Not a penny of public money would have been necessary. All over the world, automated camera systems record video, analyse it for licence numbers and speed, and actually issue tickets to the registered owners 24/7/365.

Why not here?

As I understand it, the only legal challenge is that the owner of a vehicle would have to be made liable for the infraction unless they could identify another party as the driver at time of the offence. Given the number of much more complicated legal changes that have been rapidly enacted over the past 30 years, there is no excuse here. This excuse is just a proverbial fig leaf to hide that a fair number of voters would be paying hefty fines.

Sadly, Gilbert has raised one more red herring that will distract us from speed cameras still not being at work. The kabuki theatre continues.

JAN CARD

Smith’s