Stanford Students Design Cyclist-friendly Helmets To Prevent Injuries, Accidents

For law enforcement officers at Stanford's Department of Public Safety, encouraging students to wear helmets while biking used to be a serious challenge. Part of the problem is that California does not have laws that require cyclists over the age of 18 to wear helmets. Cycling is one of the main means of transportation around the Stanford campus, and this failure to wear helmets has meant serious injuries or fatalities in accidents. Many of these accidents could have been prevented if the cyclist had been wearing a helmet at the time of the accident.

In order to meet the challenges arising from cyclists who neglect wearing helmets, a workshop was held this month at Stanford's Hasso Plattner Institute for Design or d school. The workshop included teams of graduate students, who put their brains together to develop bicycle safety devices that were also bicyclist friendly. About 40 judges and students attended the workshop, which lasted for about a week. The design school workshop was conducted over a series of classes in the evening. In just a few hours, the students at the school came up with designs for lockable bike lights, helmets with musical functionality and a bicyclist education kit. The musical helmet design encourages students to wear helmets because of the open-air music functionality. The lockable bike light helps prevent bike light robberies.

Before coming up with the design, students interviewed dozens of bicyclists in and around Stanford about their safety concerns. Some of the most frequent concerns that the students came across were the number of accidents during rush hour, as well as the poor bicycle safety knowledge among new students. New students were much more likely to not use bike lights, not wear helmets and fail to obey stop signs.

This isn't the first time students at Stanford have addressed the problem of bicycle safety. In 2007, students of the school designed a roundabout at the corner of Escondido and Lausen Malls. This particular corner was known for the high number of bicycle accidents.

Both walking and bicycling are part of Transportation Sec. Ray LaHood's vision for a less-congested America with fewer polluting and gas guzzling vehicles on the roads. However, encouraging walking and bicycling as safe and viable means of transportation has been difficult, because of the high rate of accidents and injuries involving bicyclists and pedestrians.

California bicycle accident lawyers have found that much of the problem has to do with motorists who fail to look out for bicyclists while driving. However, bicyclists also need to increase their chances of surviving an accident by wearing a helmet while cycling. New bicyclists must take the time to go through a safety crash course, and obey all bicycle safety rules. For instance, all rules of the road that apply to motorists also apply to bicyclists. It's important for bicyclists to understand and appreciate this.