Helmet not included.Photo: Paul Swansen

Imagine for a moment that cities around the world are rolling out fleets of magic carpets, and that those carpets are having truly wizardly effects: improved public health and safety, reduced traffic congestion and carbon emissions, and reduced dependence on foreign oil. City dwellers can check them out or drop them off at stations everywhere, and they are free to use for up to 30 minutes. After that, they cost something, but not much. Picture literally millions of citizens using these carpets for short, speedy trips all over town. Now imagine being in the Northwest and watching this opportunity fly by because fanatical carpet helmet laws discourage would-be riders.

This is exactly what’s happening. The magic’s not in carpets, though: It’s in the humble bicycle.

Public bike-share programs, whether run by municipal governments, private entities, or both, are built on a simple idea: blanket urban areas with hundreds, even thousands, of identical, sturdy bikes, and give people a huge network of convenient stations at which to park them. Make the system accessible and reliable, so that city dwellers can get to nearby destinations, on time and without a hassle. Don’t worry about theft and payment systems, either: bike sharing has come a long way since Amsterdam’s unsuccessful attempt in the 1960s. The latest systems tie checkouts to credit and debit cards, significantly deterring theft, and fees are kept quite reasonable through subsidies from advertising on stations and on the bikes themselves. In Dublin, a three day pass is only $3, while a year’s subscription to the network costs just $15!

Cities everywhere are climbing aboard. Check out these videos from London, D.C., and especially Hangzhou, China (watch it below). Hangzhou’s enormous bike-sharing program of 50,000 bikes and 2,050 stations has already become an integral component of the city’s transit network. The program is so popular the city plans to expand its fleet to 175,000 bikes by 2020.

Public bikes in places like Hangzhou are a normal, safe part of the urban scene, and people don’t think twice about swiping a card or inserting a membership key to get a quick ride any time of the day. Dozens, even hundreds, of bike-share programs have popped up across the world, as the Institute for Transportation & Development Policy has documented [PDF]. Almost every one of them launched in the last decade. To see just how many there are, look at this map of bike-share programs.

Click the map for a larger view.

If bike sharing has been successful in so many places, why isn’t the Pacific Northwest already in on this? Why are there only two operational bike-sharing programs in all of Cascadia — a small one in Pullman, Washington, on the campus of Washington State University, and a tiny one in Golden, British Columbia? Golden has 15 bikes, which mostly go back and forth between the town center and a nearby campground. It turns out there’s something the Northwest has that other places do not, and it makes all the difference: mandatory helmet laws. British Columbia’s helmet law is provincewide. Numerous cities and counties in Washington, including King County and Spokane, have helmet laws. In Oregon, only riders under 16 are required to wear helmets, but until now, cities such as Portland have been slow to set aside money for bike sharing because the competition for scarce funding is fierce.

There is nothing more contentious in the cycling community than the debate over helmets, and though the safety research is mixed, the political lines are sharply drawn. When it comes to bike sharing, however, there are a few things on which the evidence is clear:

• Bike sharing attracts first-time cyclists … As the links above show, the typical users of public bikes are not die-hard or even regular cyclists. They’re newbies who see a convenient way to get from one place to another and hop on.
• … who make things safer … Just as drivers are more careful at crosswalks in pedestrian-packed downtowns, they are more aware and cautious of cyclists when the streets are full of them. Adding new cyclists to streets makes the environment dramatically safer for everyone.
• … but only if helmets are optional. The only failed program in the world is Melbourne’s. It’s also the only one put in place under a helmet law. As this short video documents, Dublin has launched a program of similar scope (450 bikes versus Melbourne’s 600), but its fleet clocks 5,000 trips per day, while Melbourne’s barely manages 70. Dublin’s program has already racked up a million trips without a single fatality, and a stunning 40 percent of users are first-time cyclists.

Forcing casual riders to don helmets is a high barrier to bike sharing. It depresses ridership, getting in the way of the overwhelming health and safety benefit of having more bikes on the roads. Providing headwear at kiosks or local businesses raises concerns about sanitation (lice!) and safety (cracked helmets). Casual, would-be riders weigh those concerns and decide to keep walking.

Besides, no bike-sharing program tells people not to wear helmets. They just leave wearing one as a personal choice.

The crux of the matter is this: The Pacific Northwest can reap the huge benefits of bike sharing without compromising safety. It just needs to tweak its helmet laws. Here are two ways to do it:

1. Make riding helmetless a secondary offense. Adjusting the law so cyclists cannot be cited unless they do something else illegal would allow people to take safety decisions into their own hands. Helmets are often compared to seat b
   elts, so why not give them the same legal status?
2. Make an exemption for bike-share users. Pedicabs (three-wheeled rickshaws for hire) are excluded from helmet laws, both for drivers and passengers, and their safety records are stellar. Vancouver’s bike share feasibility study [PDF, see page 56] found that in the 12 years since the pedicab helmet exemption took effect, there has not been one reported head injury. There are also exemptions for people with religious objections (it’s hard to put a helmet over a turban), children on tricycles, and even people with big heads. Why not public bikes?

Though our helmet fiats are the greatest legal obstacle to a bike share rollout, there are a couple other barriers worth mentioning. A recent University of Washington study [PDF] examined the feasibility of bike-sharing in Seattle and discovered a slew of hurdles over curb-space usage and the city’s sign rules. Bike-share programs sell advertising space on their bike stations to help cover their costs, so the design of the bike stations must reflect the needs of advertisers. At a minimum, that means that having consistent and easily understood sign rules is a must. In Seattle, though, almost every district from Pioneer Square to Ballard has its own sign guidelines. This patchwork of regulations makes it hard to design a single, modular bike-share station that will be legal citywide. And custom bike stations would be prohibitively expensive.

Fortunately, Seattle’s municipal code allows the director of the Department of Planning and Development to issue signage exemptions in downtown areas. No doubt other Northwest cities have their own particular hoops to jump through, but once the helmet barrier is addressed, nothing should truly stand in the way of a concerted push to bring this transportation revolution to Cascadia.

Bike sharing is too good an opportunity to let pass. It’s sustainable, healthy, and doesn’t require extra parking garages or oil imports. Fortunately, Vancouver has solicited contractor bids to design a system in spite of BC’s helmet law, and Seattle and Portland are exploring the idea. Let’s treat bike-share riders like pedicab passengers, exempt them from helmet rules, and join the global wave of magic carpet rides.

Photo: Mike Lacon

Elizabeth Morris and her family bought their house in Seattle’s High Point neighborhood for a reason. “High Point is the city of Seattle’s premier ‘green community,’ having been touted internationally as such, as well as [for] mixing Seattle Housing Authority [SHA] rental properties and private home ownership,” she explained. It’s a compact, walkable, mixed-income, energy-efficient, green-built neighborhood peppered with bicycle commuters and rain barrels. So Morris was shocked to find that at High Point, clotheslines are banned.

“Homeowners have even been warned that it is illegal,” Morris said. “Not only are owners not allowed to save energy by hanging out laundry, but those who rent from SHA [read: low income] aren’t allowed to save on their energy bills, either.”

Like over 60 million other Americans and Canadians, Morris lives in a neighborhood governed by a homeowners association (HOA). These quasi-private governments, along with some apartment blocks and condominiums, are largely free to set rules as they see fit. Penalties for violations range from fines to forced expulsion. Imagine being banished by your neighbors for drying your clothes!

Clothesline bans are wrongheaded, because line drying’s advantages are numerous. For one, anyone who hang dries will tell you that it makes clothes last much longer — all that lint in your dryer filter has to come from somewhere. Benefits go beyond that, however: according to the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, households in the Northwest states use 4.3 percent of their annual electricity consumption to dry laundry. To put that into perspective, even our refrigerators only gobble up 3.5 percent. As The New York Times highlighted in an article last year, the typical U.S. household could prevent 1,500 pounds of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere each year simply by turning off its dryer and hanging out the wash. Oh, and clotheslines never burn down your house; in the U.S. alone, dryers cause more than 12,000 residential fires annually [PDF].

Not everyone has the time to put all their laundry on the line every wash day, but for many Northwesterners, including Morris, overbearing homeowner rules deny them the choice. Examples abound. The Willow Brook Home Owners Association [PDF], in Bonney Lake, Wash., lumps clotheslines with such outdoor undesirables as “litter, trash, junk … broken or damaged furniture … [and] trash barrels.” In the neighborhood of Awbrey Butte [PDF] in Bend, Ore., a clothesline-using mother and nurse garnered national attention, including a spot on the Colbert Report, a few years ago for standing up to her homeowners association when it fined her nearly $1,000 for sun-drying her laundry without approval. Bans do not have to be explicit to be a significant barrier, either: The neighborhood of Forest Heights [PDF] in Portland, Ore. allows clotheslines, but only if they are “completely screened” and “are not visible from any street or adjoining property.”

Sightline found these cases in just a few days of looking. We suspect that many HOA, condo, and rental rules across Cascadia carry the same hidden impediment to solar drying. We need your help to document the scale of the problem. We’ve set up a Google Map to plot out the locations of these pernicious regulations. If you or someone you know lives where clotheslines are forbidden, please help us! Email Editor@sightline.org with the location, name, and text of the rule in question. See the map for examples.

Fortunately, there’s good news in laundry-land. First, air-drying systems have come a long way in sophistication and design elegance: Take a look at this array of options. Second, some states have blasted through outdoor-drying barriers by passing laws that prohibit the banning of clotheslines. That’s right, they’ve banned the bans and enacted a right to dry. Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Maine, Utah, and Vermont have legalized laundry lines, while Connecticut, Maryland, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Virginia have all considered or passed watered-down versions. Not to be left out, in 2008, Ontario became the first Canadian province to pass so-called Right to Dry legislation (though it exempted condos and apartments). The Oregon legislature has considered, but failed to pass, House Bill 3059, which would amend the rules that govern what can be legally included in property agreements. Another, more circuitous, way to unban air drying is to reclassify clotheslines as solar energy collectors. This redefinition would ensure that existing “solar rights” laws (in effect in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, but not British Columbia) extend to solar dryers, and not just to solar panels. However it’s done, the key to addressing the issue is to ensure compliance from existing homeowner associations and not just future ones.

In an age of climate change, high energy prices, a down economy, and tight budgets, leaders have few clearer opportunities to help citizens save money while trimming emissions than to legalize clotheslines. And what better place to start than with Elizabeth Morris’ neighborhood — Seattle’s model, green, low-income housing place, High Point?