Anonymous
Source: Santa Barbara City Fire Department
Your Santa Barbara City Firefighters recently responded to a traffic collision involving a pickup truck and a bicycle. A little girl and her father were crossing the street at an intersection with no crosswalk. The girl was on her bicycle when they both were struck by the pickup truck.
Bystanders pulled them from under the vehicle prior to the firefighters arriving. Luckily the injuries were minor to the little girl despite her not wearing a bicycle helmet. Her father had moderate injuries and went to the hospital.
The California vehicle code requires bicycle riders under the age of 18 years, to wear a bicycle helmet while riding on a public road. The law also requires anyone under 18 to wear a helmet when riding a scooter, skateboard or when using inline skates. Properly-fitted helmets provide protection from a potentially life-threatening head injury.
Source www.dmv.ca.gov
The Santa Barbara City Fire Department would like to remind everyone to promote bicycle safety for your children and have them wear a properly fitted helmet when riding.
Photos courtesy of the Santa Barbara City Fire Department
Helmets are good. But driving with caution is much better. There are more pedestrian head injuries than bike head injuries and we don’t harp on pedestrians to wear helmets. So glad to learn that both father and daughter are alive. The photos are terrifying.
Holy crap. SO glad the little girl is okay, and daddy too.
Pedestrians walking can fall but they aren’t as likely to get a head injury as a bike rider who can go much faster and take a harder fall. I see kids with helmets that are so poorly adjusted the helmet probably wouldn’t do much good.
The study you’re citing is for raw numbers of head injuries and does not take into account the population of cyclists vs population of pedestrians. There’s also no comparison for pedestrians who wear helmets (obviously). The stats are inherently flawed.
Is there some explanation for why the truck driver hit these people?
I’m all for bike helmets but In our nanny state would not be surprised if they did require pedestrians to wear them
Why didn’t the dad see the truck coming and get them both out of the way? Was the truck speeding around a corner or something? Were the dad and child coming out from between large parked vehicles? Was something obscuring the vision of both the pedestrians and truck-driver?
Don’t hold your breath to see real journalism here–remember that the Edhat.com staff are all volunteers
Pedestrians getting hit by cars has become almost a daily report – remind me why the powers that be want us all to get out of our cars again? It is not safe to walk in our walkable city. Yes, please more follow-up on why this accident happened. And why so many other pedestrians got knocked off last week.
The only way the helmet law will be followed by more people is if there is a fine for _not_ wearing a helmet. I appreciate the police have a lot to do, but citations should be given to all youth not wearing a helmet. It’s too bad that safety laws are much more obeyed if there’s a personal reason to do so. How about it, SB Police? Or, if not, please post here in edhat why you won’t cite those not wearing helmets?!
(I, an adult, bike and wear a helmet but have a friend who refuses to do so because, unlike me, she has no personal experience with how a helmet can prevent a serious injury.) It’s especially hard for a young person to think that anything bad will happen to them….)
Interesting how this article turned into a lecture about wearing helmets instead of other issues like distracted driving, not looking while you are crossing in a non-crosswalk. How about a lecture about paying attention and being smart. Oh, that.
Every intersection is a legal crosswalk, actually. The press release should actually say “no marked crosswalk”. Drivers are required to yield to pedestrians at any legal crosswalk. That said, you are not a pedestrian if you are riding a bicycle.