Brain Bowl

Recently, Mayor Rama said that he will not enforce the Motorcycle Helmet Act because it is "anti-poor". The new act requires motorcycle riders to wear certified helmets or face a fine of P1,000 to P3,000 or less than six months of prison or both if the court judge is in a really bad mood.

Now, aside from the troubling notion of the executive choosing which laws he will or will not enforce, I think this new law is pretty stupid. Of all the ways the government can do to improve road safety, they had to choose the one that's burdensome to the citizen and hard to enforce. It's bad enough that many riders don't wear helmets at all and get away with it, but now you gotta wear a helmet that's government approved with a sticker slapped on the side of it. I bet this sticker won't be free either.

Look, I know many riders wear the wrong helmets. Helmets like a construction workers helmet is inadequate to protect your face and neck. A bicycle helmet can't handle the kind of speed and impact motorcycles get into. The wrong helmet serves no purpose except to be a neat bowl for your brain when they scrape what's left of you from the pavement. But for God's sake, can't you put up a damn poster showing the correct type of helmet and enforce that? Just give out general guidelines on what an ideal motorcycle helmet should do like cover the whole head and neck and have a clear visor. I don't get why you need to get the damn bureaucrats involved with their lists of approved brands and get people to line up to get stickers and approval to wear a helmet they bought. Just tell them to buy a motorcycle helmet. That's it. Is there some kind of motorcycle helmet scam or something where the Chinese are selling fake Styrofoam helmets? There isn't and even if there were, it's a problem with sellers not riders.

I really wish government always took the least inconvenient route for citizens whenever it tries to "fix" things because it always stinks of a money-making scam here in the Philippines. The trend is always towards the heavy handed approach where we just stick fines here and there and have some government drone give you approval of what brand helmet you can buy. Just catch people not wearing motorcycle helmets. Period. That's what they should be doing in the first place and are failing at too, sad to say. Catching people wearing motorcycle helmets that don't have the governments seal of purity on them is just pushing it too much in the wrong direction. It's an unnecessary burden.

This reminds me of the time when motorcycle assassins used to roam the streets of Cebu, gunning down whoever and escaping scot-free. The killers wore motorcycle helmets so nobody could see their faces. So what kind of solutions do you think the politicos upstairs came up with? Why, there was a proposal to ban motorcycle helmets altogether! I guess it's better for people to die in accidents than to be murdered, forcing the police to have to do actual work to catch the killers. It's that kind of genius thinking that makes me wonder how we managed to survive as a nation this long.

By the way, always wear the right helmet and worry about government stupidity later.