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Pique'n'yer interest

1979, all over again

Hanging around Whistler these days it feels like it’s 1979 all over again. (I turned six in 1979, but I’ve seen enough movies to get a rough idea what it was like.)

People are riding their bikes on our highways and trails without helmets, throwing their garbage on the ground and out the windows of their cars, driving fast cars and big truck, and smoking, in defiance of all common sense and decades of medical research.

Although British Columbia first brought in a law requiring mandatory helmet use in 1996, the Snell Foundation created the first bicycle helmet standards in 1970. The original design was refined about five years later into a single crash model that had light foam on the inside and a hard outer shell.

I learned to ride a bike without a helmet, but by the time I was in grade one in 1979 we had the Ontario Provincial Police “Bicycle Rodeo” at school, and most of us were wearing some kind of helmet to get some extra points. If you earned enough points you could win a new bike.

Most provinces adopted helmet laws in the mid-1990s, requiring their use on all public roadways — long after various public safety campaigns succeeded in making helmets more or less common by the 1980s.

That said, nobody seems to be wearing helmets anymore. Everywhere I go, people are commuting on the highway and Valley Trail without helmets. When I volunteered at the B.C. Bike Race in Whistler, more than half of the riders who rode out to Alta Lake Road to watch left their helmets at home. Worse, I’m starting to see more people on our bike trails without any head protection or any idea what they’re doing.

I haven’t seen such reckless disregard for personal safety since the ’70s, and it pisses me off. People can argue that it’s their life and it’s a free country, but what about my rights as a taxpayer? Do I really have to pay to support these idiots if they fall off their bikes and sustain lifelong brain injuries that might have been prevented with a simple helmet?

I feel even more strongly about the whole litter issue, which has gotten a lot worse in recent years. I’ve been riding the bus and biking the side of the highway for eight years now, and have never seen as much litter around town as I’m seeing today. The entire Village Stroll is speckled with gum, and every village planter is filled with cigarette butts. Our bus shelters are disgusting.

Woodsy the Owl’s “Give a Hoot, Don’t Pollute” anti-litter campaign dates back to 1970 but took a few years to gain traction in Canada and the U.S.

In 1971, Native American actor Chief Iron Eyes Cody also started a famous anti-littering ad campaign where a single tear ran down his cheek. That campaign was so successful that the Keep America Beautiful campaign estimates that litter was reduced by as much as 88 per cent in 300 communities that kept track of litter.

By the time I hit grade school it was drilled into everyone’s head that littering was bad, and that you should pick up garbage even if it isn’t yours.

But it’s been a long time since we’ve had any kind of public anti-litter campaign, and a whole generation has grown up without Woodsy the Owl or Iron Eyes Cody. I say bring them back or start fining people — the maximum fine is $2,000 in B.C., but I’ve never heard of a single ticket being written.

As for the bigger cars thing, everybody had eight cylinder vehicles in the 1970s until the energy crisis of 1979 drove up gas prices to a level we’re only starting to see again today. In response, then President Jimmy Carter lowered the speed limit across America and mandated new fuel-efficiency standards for car companies that reduced America’s oil imports from the Middle East by 87 per cent. People bought smaller cars like VW Beetles and Mini Coopers, and public transportation took off.

Those speed limits have since been pushed up again, fast cars and big cars came back in fashion, and by 2005 the average fuel-efficiency of vehicles was in decline for the first time in 27 years. People are slowly switching back to smaller cars to save money, showing we didn’t learn our lesson the first time.

Lastly, the first Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking and Health was first published in 1964, warning people of the connection with lung cancer and heart disease. In 1970 Health Canada accepted the consensus that nicotine was an addictive substance.

In 1975, Minnesota became the first jurisdiction to ban smoking in indoor, public places, and it didn’t take long to spread to Canada. According to Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada, 1979 was the year that youth smoking started to decline in earnest with 47 per cent identifying themselves as smokers compared to about 22 per cent in 1989.

Despite the statistics it seems more young people in their early 20s are smoking in Whistler — and littering, because when you’re young and don’t care about the future the world’s your ashtray.

They say history repeats itself, but the actual quote is from George Santayana — “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” I’d rather not relive 1979, but apparently we didn’t learn a thing the first time around.