here in NY after Nov 1st to May 1st you need a PFD in any water craft 21 feet or less. They look at the stats and where most drownings occur. No law is perfect but here on Long Island there seems to be more people getting killed or rescued in kayaks and paddle boards than power boats.
But where does this kind of law finally end? For example, WHY apply such a law to a situation where perhaps a few dozen might be saved annually, when a similar law applied to all of us who drive or ride in cars would save thousands? What am I talking about? Crash helmets. If all of us were required to wear crash helmets along with our seat belts when driving or riding as a passenger in a car, the number of lives saved and the number of serious brain injuries prevented would make the benefit of any PFD law a minuscule drop in the bucket. If saving lives is REALLY the issue here, then we should apply the crash-helmet law first, before worrying about something that’s so completely trivial in comparison. There’s no denying that logic, but I bet none of the PFD-law promoters here would go for it.
@Guideboatguy said:
There’s no denying that logic, but I bet none of the PFD-law promoters here would go for it.
There absolutely is denying that logic with a simple cost-benefit analysis. Automobiles bring enormous societal benefits and so we tolerate high costs in lives and pollution and so forth. The marginal costs of additional protections (helmets) would be high, deterring people from driving, eliminating children too small for a helmet from being in a car, etc. This shift to public transportation would socialize the costs of transport to a degree that we seem unwilling to accept. By and large, the United States prefers costs distributed to users rather than socialized. Not to mention helmets potentially creating unintended dangers, like reduced hearing and peripheral vision and an unrestrained mass on people’s heads in accidents (unless we all wore HANS devices too).
Kayaking has essentially no societal benefit, PFDs don’t interfere with the activity, So, in this case, the cost of rescues is huge in comparison to the benefit, so we push to reduce them. Again, we’d prefer not to socialize the cost of bad decisions. And since people have shown time and time again that they will make bad ones anyway, we force as many as possible to choose the path that will reduce the burden on the rest of us.
After accidents, it is often the rescue departments that push for these laws because they have budgets to manage and rescuing live people bobbing around in a PFD is much cheaper than diving for bodies.
All good points. I guess my main idea is that in the case of coming up with such laws, the decision-making process would get complicated and that undoubtedly would mean that politicians (who are almost invariable clue-less since none of the topics they deal with are within their own realm of knowledge) would be completely unable to do something that makes any sense, at least when comparing one situation to another or when comparing sub-situations within a broader one. For example, why are we allowed to go swimming without PFDs, or even to go swimming at all in places of our own choosing? Swimming is another activity which would need to be strictly regulated long before similar regulations are applied to paddling small boats, at least if the number of people dying has any real bearing on the situation (and in fact, many outdoors groups such as the Boy Scouts or the canoeing trips led by people like Cliff Jacobson already have their own rules addressing swimming safety, but that seems to be a far more reasonable approach than laws applied willy-nilly by the idiots who run government). I just don’t imagine any official PFD law making sense in the grand scheme of things or across the board (on that note, some of the tiny creeks I paddle on are mostly too shallow to even get fully wet if I were to tip over, and though I’ll often wear my PFD then anyway, it sure wouldn’t make any sense to me that the only way to legally take it off would be to walk the creek while towing my boat instead of paddling).
If we already make it illegal to operate a boat without a PFD for everyone on board, is it really that much of a stretch to require it to be worn?
With helmets and seat belts few would argue that you wouldn’t be able to put it on at the moment you realize it’s needed. But those same people have no clue that it would be almost as futile to try and don a PFD in the water, especially if you’re already cold and exhausted. Try it. It’s not easy if you haven’t practiced it ahead of time. Not to mention if you get separated from your boat, to which the PFD is loosely attached.
@dc9mm said:
Hey less helmets more organ donation…
My friend, on the liver transplant team, says that motor cycle fatalities are often too damaged for major organs donation.
@Guideboatguy said:
All good points. I guess my main idea is that in the case of coming up with such laws, the decision-making process would get complicated and that undoubtedly would mean that politicians (who are almost invariable clue-less since none of the topics they deal with are within their own realm of knowledge) would be completely unable to do something that makes any sense, at least when comparing one situation to another or when comparing sub-situations within a broader one. For example, why are we allowed to go swimming without PFDs, or even to go swimming at all in places of our own choosing? Swimming is another activity which would need to be strictly regulated long before similar regulations are applied to paddling small boats, at least if the number of people dying has any real bearing on the situation (and in fact, many outdoors groups such as the Boy Scouts or the canoeing trips led by people like Cliff Jacobson already have their own rules addressing swimming safety, but that seems to be a far more reasonable approach than laws applied willy-nilly by the idiots who run government). I just don’t imagine any official PFD law making sense in the grand scheme of things or across the board (on that note, some of the tiny creeks I paddle on are mostly too shallow to even get fully wet if I were to tip over, and though I’ll often wear my PFD then anyway, it sure wouldn’t make any sense to me that the only way to legally take it off would be to walk the creek while towing my boat instead of paddling).
I agree that clueless politicians are often quick to legislate areas that they don’t understand. This follows your swimming analogy: most people have swum at some point and so it seems like a safe activity. Few have kayaked or paddled a boat and therefore it can seem like an exotic or dangerous activity in need of more control. And that is true to some extent - the efficiency of a kayak means that covering more distance than when swimming is possible so it is easier to get in trouble farther away from help. For example, the entirety of my local lake is available to me in my kayak, but people swim only at the town’s beach in a 50 x 25 yard roped-off area with lifeguards. So instead of PFDs we control swimming in other ways by outlawing it in many places and tightly controlling it with professional supervision where it is allowed. I read that the best olympic-class swimmers can hit 4 m.p.h. The best in the world could sustain that pace for maybe tens of minutes, meaning most people aren’t going to ever swim more than a few hundred yards from shore. On the other hand, even a person in half-decent shape can paddle a kayak at 3-4 m.p.h for a couple hours a session and find themselves 4-5 miles away from shore help pretty easily.
Finally, boating, in general, seems to give many an illusion of safety that causes people to either take unnecessary risks or to be unable to properly evaluate risks. At least once every couple years someone drowns fishing in one local pond near me and the newspaper story says that they went out in a boat without a PFD even though they couldn’t swim at all. This was one story from a few years ago:
After nearly 11 hours of searching, authorities on Monday found the body of a Worcester man who appears to have drowned in Mill Pond.
Carlos Sibrian, 28, fell into the pond with two other men after their canoe capsized, authorities said.
“The victim was not a swimmer,” said Fire Chief Nick Perron.
The canoe tipped over Sunday night after one of the men leaned over and tried to grab something out of the water, said Police Sgt. Chet Hallice.