“Hey, a helmet! Now that’s boss!”

This is the rallying cry of West FloMo Resident Assistants (RAs), who are committed to drastically changing student attitudes toward bike helmets, especially among freshmen. As part of the crusade, this year’s RAs always wear their helmets when they bike, both on-campus and off.

So far only West FloMo RAs have committed to wearing bike helmets.

“Right now, the norm is to not wear a helmet, but we want to change that,” said Max Thompson ‘08 in an email to The Daily. Thompson, an RA in Loro, has worn his helmet with pride since freshman year.

“The idea of our program is to counteract what we felt was a negative stigma surrounding helmets on campus,” he said.

Part of that negative image, Thompson said, can come from RAs themselves.

“If you ever hear an RA or another upperclassman say in front of freshmen, ‘Look at that sketchy grad student with the helmet,’ that guarantees that the helmet that the frosh brought from home will stay under the bed in the box and never come out,” Thompson said.

West FloMo RAs have already accomplished their goal among some students.

“It helps especially with freshmen to know others wear helmets, so it’s not an uncool thing to do,” said Loro resident Tiffany Shih ‘11. “And we know our RAs are cool.”

The message of the FloMo RAs, “being safe is synonymous with being cool,” is the same message students receive from Vaden’s Sexual Health and Peer Resource Center or any campus Peer Health Educator, Thompson said.

Helmets can protect bikers from serious head injuries, a fact that leaders of the effort are trying to emphasize.

“It would be great if students would wear helmets so that we never have to face a head injury tragedy amongst our undergraduate population,” said Carolyn Helmke, bicycle coordinator for Parking and Transportation Services (P&TS), in an email to The Daily.

Thompson said he believes that the student body as a whole does not take bike safety very seriously. He listed biking on the wrong side of the road, not using turn signals and biking through campus at unsafe speeds as dangerous actions often seen on campus.

“I think if anyone actually saw what a serious head injury looked like,” he said, “they would wear a helmet for the rest of their lives.”

In addition to the RAs’ efforts to promote bike helmets, P&TS sponsors other programs to encourage helmet use, including giving $10 Stanford Dining gift cards to students spotted wearing helmets on campus. Also, the Campus Bike Shop sells high quality helmets at a low cost to the campus community.

Those at the center of the effort insist that they have already seen positive results since the start of the campaign.

“I believe more people are starting to recognize that wearing a bike helmet is a smart thing to do,” Helmke said, “and Stanford has lots of smart students, so the culture at Stanford should work in our favor. We have already seen more undergraduates wearing bike helmets this quarter, many of them from FloMo.”

However, Thompson conceded that it may be difficult for the RAs’ efforts to have a campus-wide effect.

“We know that [it] is going to be tough to change an entire campus culture,” he said. “In 10 years, it would be great to see students who speak out to their friends who don’t wear helmets.

“That is probably unrealistic, but it doesn’t mean we can’t try,” Thompson added. “The more people who wear helmets, the easier it will be for other people to wear them without feeling self-conscious.”