1998's Big News: CPSC Approves Standard!
Summary: The Consumer Product Safety Commission adopted its bicycle helmet standard on February 5, 1998. This welcome advance for consumers raised the minimum legal level of quality of all bicycle helmets in the U.S. market to be approximately equal to the current ASTM standard and Snell B-90S. The standard took effect in March, 1999, but manufacturers began certifying to it immediately.
Most of this message was sent as the BHSI Helmet Update by email on February 5, 1998.
Background
The Consumer Product Safety Commission met on January 21, 1998, and was
briefed by staff on the final draft of their bicycle helmet standard.
It was evident during that meeting that the approval of the
standard would be a formality. It has been several years in the
making, and extensive public comment had been taken on earlier
occasions. Despite a last-minute letter from Bell Sports' engineer
Jim Sundahl asking that the special provisions for testing child
helmets be restored as they had been in the previous draft, the draft
as written by CPSC engineer Scott Heh and others was approved unchanged.
Effect
CPSC had already put into place an Interim Rule requiring that all
bicycle helmets sold in the U.S. be certified to one of seven
voluntary standards from ASTM, Snell, Canada's CSA, Australia's SA or
to the defunct ANSI standard. This action made it unlawful after
March, 1999, to sell a helmet in the U.S. that did not meet one of those standards. In effect, this mandated helmets that could meet a lab test drop of 2 meters, rather than the old ANSI 1 meter drop. The new CPSC rule also requires slightly more coverage than the ASTM standard to which most helmets here were being certified. It also limits projections on helmet shells to 7 mm, a provision left out of the ASTM standard. Virtually any well-made helmet on the market should already meet this standard without major modifications except those with very large projections or points jutting out from the shell. Violations of the CPSC standard will subject manufacturers to mandatory recalls, fines and civil and criminal penalties--you can go to jail for selling a shoddy helmet in the US market.
Today's Meeting
Today's meeting was a media event. The three commissioners voted
unanimously for the new standard as drafted. Chairman Ann Brown
introduced Gail and Joseph Friedman from Michigan, who had lost a
daughter in a bike crash, and said she was dedicating her vote to
them. (Earlier in the morning they had appeared on Good Morning
America together.) As the cameras rolled, Chairman Brown hailed the
event as "a victory for consumers and a testament to common-sense
government." Commissioner Mary Sheila Gall added thanks to the
voluntary standards community, noting that the CPSC rule does not
diminish in any way the work and successes of voluntary standards
over many years. (This was probably intended to be reassuring to ASTM
and others after the Commissioners have said repeatedly that the
standard will "replace the alphabet soup" of current voluntary
standards.) Ann Brown thanked the staff, lavishing praise on project
manager Scott Heh for his diligence, determination, brilliant work
and a superb job. Heh's career at CPSC has fourished since.
Next Steps
The standard must be published in the Federal Register to begin the
one year countdown until it is final. That occurred during March.
In the meantime, manufacturers began certifying to the CPSC standard immediately as one of the standards permitted under the Interim Rule.
CPSC is aware that they will have to update this standard
periodically to keep it in step with industry changes and new
information from the injury prevention community. One obvious area
for potential change may be the child helmet provisions, where CSA was already pointing the way to child-specific lab tests with lighter headforms and a lower threshold of g's permitted. The initiative to add a requirement for reflective material on helmets is essentially dead until new research shows it to be effective in reducing nighttime injuries, but in a conversation after the meeting Ann Brown said with considerable conviction that she is still determined to take action to do something about the extra danger of riding a bicycle at night. The Commission staff indicated that their next research project would be devoted to testing active lighting for that purpose as opposed to reflectors, but nothing came of the effort.
MORE INFO
Our web page has a copy of the draft standard, which has now been
replaced with the final standard published in 1999. We have other stuff up as
well on the CPSC standard on our
standards page. We produced a paper
version of our Hemet Update newsletter bringing together the email messages, and sent it to many of our email recipients.
BHSI no longer publishes on paper.
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