Putting the responsibility of safety solely on individual shoulders all but guarantees failure, said Kathleen Bachynski, an assistant professor of public health at Muhlenberg College, in Allentown, Pennsylvania, who has studied bike helmet and sports injuries. “It’s an enormous burden,” she said. Asking individuals to spend money on helmets, lights, and reflective gear without investing in better transit culture ignores the fact that the real danger to cyclists comes from behind the wheel, not from behind handlebars.
“We can talk about bike helmets because it’s something we can blame for individual decision-making,” said Alison Bateman-House, an ethicist and medical historian at New York University who has studied mandatory helmet laws.
Are these laws really designed to prevent injury or shift responsibility when an injury occurs?
In North Carolina, contributory negligence law prevents a someone from recovering any damages in an accident if their "negligence" is found to have contributed in any way to the incident or its outcome. This means that if a victim is only 1% "at fault" then they are prevented from making any recovery for their injuries. Not wearing a helmet, whether or not it was a significant factor, could be seen as "contributory".
AFAIK, NC is one of the 2 states in the country that has not adopted a shared or comparative negligence law, so victims are sometimes out of luck. There is a bill before our General Assembly to change this, though.