Originally Posted by
njkayaker
It's highly unlikely that the bell-requirement laws were written with this motivation.
Are you familiar with the Mylan EpiPen scandal? Epi-pen is a device for people who have severe allergic reactions to the point where if they accidental encounter whatever they're allergic to, they'll die. An epi-pen injects them with a drug that - well stops from from dying if used as soon as their reaction starts.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/busin...4fa_story.html
Mylan lobbied lawmakers — both directly and indirectly — to increase the availability of epinephrine autoinjectors in U.S. schools. Although these legislative efforts were not supposed to benefit a particular company, the brand has such a lock on the market that when President Obama signed the School Access to Emergency Epinephrine Act in 2013, a news announcement simply called it the “EpiPen Law.”
A provision in the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill that passed the Senate in April requires the agency to update its regulations to ensure that airlines carry epinephrine autoinjectors on board.
In 2012, Mylan announced the EpiPen4Schools program, providing the drug free, which doctors said created a kind of social marketing pressure. Since then, it has given away more than 700,000 free EpiPens to schools nationwide.
It's not always been this expensive, they lobbied for it then raised the price through the roof:
EpiPen Prices: 5 Signs Mylan's EpiPen Pricing Is a Ripoff
That’s based on estimated prices of around $100 for an EpiPen two-pack in 2008, up to around $500 (now $600 after the article was published I believe) today.
If a law is based requiring "mandatory xyz", then the companies that make product xyz have most likely paid money to lobby for the law.
A mandatory bell law isn't going to kill or seriously injure anyone. It's just a bell. But if bike shops are required to sell their bikes with bells, someone is going to make more money selling them. It's not a super secret backroom conspiracy - it's an out in the open (well a lot of it) regular thing businesses do.