IRVINE : Kids Wearing Bike Helmets Rewarded

Even though some schoolmates call him “mushroom head,” 8-year-old Jesse Alderman unabashedly straps on a neon green bicycle helmet whenever he mounts his bike.

“My mom makes me,” Jesse said Friday afternoon as he prepared to ride his bicycle home from Meadow Park Elementary School in Woodbridge village. “And I wear it because I like it.”

Jesse was one of six schoolchildren rewarded Friday by an Irvine traffic officer for resisting peer pressure and wearing a helmet. Officer Richard Worcester wrote out the six yellow tickets--each good for a free order of french fries at Irvine McDonald’s restaurants--to reward the students for being safe.

Irvine’s 10 traffic officers began issuing the tickets late last month as another prong in the city’s attack on bicycle injuries and deaths. The officers have issued about 80 tickets so far.

Besides the tickets, the city’s Bicycle Helmet Awareness Program includes bicycle-safety instructions in the elementary schools and a doctor’s outreach program that asks Irvine pediatricians and family practitioners to inform children about the importance of wearing a helmet when bicycling.

Three Irvine bicyclists died this summer after accidents while not wearing helmets, Worcester said.

Reaction to the tickets has been positive, Worcester said, although some adults have been upset initially that a police officer had pulled them over. Once, Worcester said, he used his loudspeaker to ask a man bicycling with his son on a nearby bike path to ride over to him. Both were wearing helmets.

“The first thing out of the father’s mouth was, ‘What do you think we did?’ and the first thing out of my mouth was, ‘I want to compliment you for getting your son to wear a helmet,’ ” Worcester said.

“As soon as you have this big smile on your face and they’ve realized they’ve done nothing wrong, that usually turns them around.”

The main problem with the ticket program is that officers haven’t been able to spot many bicyclists with helmets, he said. “It’s hard for officers to give them away.”

Dianne Daugherty, principal at Meadow Park Elementary, said students face stiff peer pressure not to wear helmets. Like Jesee, she said, they are called names chiding them for using a helmet.

Before school ended Friday, she pointed to a full bicycle rack outside the school and said that of all the students riding, only seven children wear helmets to school.

Despite education programs at the school stressing the importance of helmets, most students still refuse to wear them, she said.

Helmets are vital because serious injuries from accidents decrease substantially for bicyclists wearing helmets, said Katherine Lyon, coordinator of the city’s bicycle safety program.

Three of every four bicycle accidents result in head injuries, Lyon said. A recent medical study found that helmets reduce head injuries for bicyclists by 85% and brain damage by 88%, she said.

More than 38,000 children in the United States are injured each year while bicycling, yet studies show that only 2% of the them regularly wear helmets.

“It’s the most easily prevented accident,” Lyon said. “Most kids don’t think of their bicycles as vehicles. They think of them as toys and don’t realize they can be killed.