So there’s this report today that some politician or other, not far below the rank of Deputy Prime Minister (seventeen and counting) soon plans to introduce a law compelling motorbike passengers to don crash helmets under pain of, what, a ten-pence fine.
It’s two years since he, or maybe one of those Deputies, pushed through laudable legislation requiring helmets for drivers.
You’d be churlish not deny the primary law has been a partial success. It took months and months but your blogger estimates that these days around 75% of Phnom Penh motorbike drivers comply …
… between seven in the morning and six in the evening.
After sunset helmeted drivers become rarer, perhaps one in three. At weekends lawlessness reigns; the species seems endangered.
And that’s in Phnom Penh. Country folk clearly have a touching faith in their skulls’ resilience, day and night.
Maybe it’s to do with the likelihood of being caught, urban police working seven to six, Mondays to Fridays; rural police, if any, confining themselves to barracks.
Not being a Deputy Prime Minister, nor any kind of legislator, I humbly suggest that, if the aim is to save lives, action focuses on enforcing the primary driver law, while also refining details such as helmet quality and the fastening of chin straps.
With 95% compliance in the bag, it might be time for the labyrinthine difficulties of wording a helmet law, one that encompasses passengers such as grannies with drips in their arms on their way from home to hospital and new-born babes on their way from hospital to home.
Not to mention more obvious life-saving measures such as banning motorbike drivers talking on phones or passengers carrying sheets of glass or long steel rods or seven-on-a-bike plus the family dog plus a dead pig etc
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