Should i go skateboarding

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Top Stories. England hold slender lead over Australia after dominating first half. Creating laws that seek to prevent skateboarding is unimaginative and undermines the natural inclination of youth to be active, social, and engaged with their community. In spite of this, they are drafted and unanimously passed all the time. There are too few people speaking on behalf of skateboarders, and that is why people like you are so important. A skatepark allows skaters to form a positive, healthy community.

A park is a gathering place for the community. A skatepark is a gathering place for the local skateboarders. Through the skatepark, the public sees skaters for what they are: brave, athletic youth with a passion for skateboarding.

The stereotypes that may have plagued skateboarders before the skatepark are quickly forgotten. There are over six-million skateboarders in the United States. Most of them are 24 years old or younger. BoardTrac According to the U. Census there are about million people in the United States between the ages of 5 and Therefore, 7. In the larger context, 2. Progress has been made by skatepark and skateboarding advocates. Behind every skatepark there is a group. Every group worked with their community and its leaders.

Together, they raised awareness and effectively communicated the need to the broader public, and those communities responded. The skatepark was created and served as a model for other communities to follow. But skateboarding injuries do happen, particularly if riders skate in the wrong place or don't wear protective gear. Choose the skateboard that's right for your style or activity for example slalom, freestyle, and speed.

Before heading out to skate, you need:. To prevent injuries, it is very important that riders choose safe places to ride. All surfaces should be checked before riding on them. Skateboard only on surfaces that are smooth without cracks or debris, like garbage or sticks.

Riders will fall while skateboarding. It's part of the sport. And while on average bicyclists are about two miles per hour faster than skateboarders, other conveniences of skateboarding can counter that advantage.

Riders can easily carry their skateboards when not in use, allowing skateboarders to travel from door to door like pedestrians and take their skateboards inside their destinations.

On relatively short trips, avoiding this routine can make up, at least in part, for the slower speed of skateboarding. The ability to carry skateboards easily also makes them convenient for multimodal trips. Data from Los Angeles and some college campuses show that many skateboarders use their boards in combination with other modes rather than for entire trips. A rider can easily carry a skateboard onto a transit vehicle or car.

Skateboarders need not worry about the availability of limited bicycle racks on the front of a bus or in a train, or prohibitions of bicycles on some transit systems during rush hours. Skateboards also generally cost less than bicycles, with premium skateboards typically selling for a few hundred dollars, similar to low-to-mid-range bicycles. Additionally, the ability to carry skateboards into destinations allow skateboarders to avoid one of the primary downsides of bicycling: the potential for theft.

In our interviews with skateboarders, we found that stolen bicycles were a common catalyst for a shift to skateboard travel. The decision to travel via skateboard is not always a legal one.

In California, about 90 percent of cities regulate skateboarding in some way, and most regulations either overtly or implicitly respond to negative perceptions of recreational skateboarding — that it is unsafe, damaging to property, noisy, or caters to an unseemly class of people.

Some cities regulate what they consider undesirable skateboarding through restrictions on doing tricks or interacting with street furniture. This approach does not affect well-behaved travelers. However, jurisdictions more commonly prohibit skateboarding in various places or situations necessary for travel. Skateboarding is often prohibited on streets, on sidewalks, in business districts or other parts of a city, and at night. Such prohibitions can make skateboard travel to many destinations illegal in ways that travel using other modes are not.

While not necessarily the target of regulations, skateboard travelers end up being restricted as a result. Skateboard travelers often sit in a legal black hole, restricted by regulations even as regulators rarely recognize their mode of travel. Yet even in places where policymakers know that skateboards are used for travel, they commonly justify prohibitions out of concern that skateboard travelers could be injured or injure other people.

While concern for safety is certainly understandable, blanket prohibitions are not how governments regulate any other mode of travel. Cities do not ban all cars, for example, until it is demonstrated that cars will never hurt or kill anyone — even though cars are involved in thousands of fatal collisions every year. Most campuses in the California State University system ban skateboarding, a policy that dates back to the late s when a professor was struck and injured by a bicyclist.

While many CSU campuses banned skateboarding in response, many did not similarly ban bicycling. Several of the campuses have re-legalized skateboarding over the last few years, but not without running into the same negative perceptions seen in cities.

Are regulations that restrict skateboarding in the interest of safety justified? Fears that skateboard travelers engage in dangerous tricks that could injure bystanders appear to be unfounded. Our observations found that skateboard travelers almost always move forward in simple straight lines while they travel.

Only about one-quarter of skateboarders we observed on the UC Davis campus ride the same type of skateboards used in recreational trick riding. Even those riding trick skateboards often make modifications, such as installing larger and softer wheels, that facilitate cruising at the expense of performing tricks.