8 ms·

Mandatory helmet laws make the number of injuries associated with biking go down. That is their purpose, and they are effective. Yes, some of that is people who

by jjk166 4y ago

Mandatory helmet laws make the number of injuries associated with biking go down. That is their purpose, and they are effective. Yes, some of that is people who would rather not bike at all than bike safely, and there are some non-linear effects from that, but it's still a net reduction in injuries. There is a real need for society to discuss whether the value of reduced injuries outweighs the cost in terms of less cycling - for example more car emmisions, more traffic congestion, less easy cardio, etc. But to say people are less safe is just not true for the common definition of safe.

chitowneats 4y ago
> but it's still a net reduction in injuries. Citation needed. If they are now traveling via automobile, I doubt there is a net reduction when taking into account: vehicle injuries and fatalities, air pollution, and of course, in the long term, anthropogenic climate change. This is a classic example of a system with perverse incentives. Everyone feels safer in their big SUV. In reality it's just an arms race, and we're all losing.
- cbsmith 4y ago
  > Everyone feels safer in their big SUV. In reality it's just an arms race, and we're all losing. I'm not sure, absent secondary effects, wearing a helmet makes cycling more dangerous for other cyclists the way that driving a big SUV, absent secondary effects makes it more dangerous for other drivers. It's not like the extra mass from helmets means you'll do more damage when you smash in to other cyclists.
  - noirbot 4y ago
    Sure, but that's not the argument. It's that if you require people to carry a helmet with them to use your for-hire bike system, less people will use it, but they'll still need to get places, so they're more likely to hire a car or drive themselves. The hypothesis is that requiring helmets may make individual bikers safer in isolation, but if it causes less people to bike and to drive instead, the increase in people driving cars may make it less safe to ride a bike, even adjusted for the fact that they're safer via the helmet. I'd imagine this is especially true given that the helmet mostly only helps prevent the more dramatic injuries to the head. Getting hit by a car is still likely to seriously injure you in plenty of places the helmet doesn't help with.
    - cbsmith 4y ago
      > Sure, but that's not the argument. Agreed. I just thought the metaphor was not helpful. > The hypothesis is that requiring helmets may make individual bikers safer in isolation ...though there's a (somewhat) credible argument that even this isn't true. There are arguments against this too. Some argue automobiles see someone without a helmet as more "at risk" and therefore are more mindful of them, thereby net increasing their safety. Others argue that mandates tend to discourage innovation in safety equipment design, effectively encouraging the deployment of limited safety equipment at the expense of more effective alternatives. > I'd imagine this is especially true given that the helmet mostly only helps prevent the more dramatic injuries to the head. Getting hit by a car is still likely to seriously injure you in plenty of places the helmet doesn't help with. Which also brings up the ol' "is it better to be more likely to live, but also more likely to have broken arms and legs?" question.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  > If they are now traveling via automobile, I doubt there is a net reduction when taking into account: vehicle injuries and fatalities, air pollution, and of course, in the long term, anthropogenic climate change. You're not thinking like a Zero-sum American. If you accidentally hit & injure a pedestrian, cyclist, or another driver in your Hummer - better them than you. Best to stick to your Hummer and avoid the bike.
  - chitowneats 4y ago
    I absolutely love your comment. I wish I could upvote it enough to counteract the downvotes. In lieu of that I'm leaving this comment.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  > Citation needed. If they are now traveling via automobile First, there's no need for any citation, helmets do reduce trauma from impact sensibly See: "Helmets provide a 63 to 88% reduction in the risk of head, brain and severe brain injury for all ages of bicyclists" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7025438/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7025438/ Secondly: if they are now traveling via automobile, the risk of injuries is less than going by bike without an helmet. If you believe that by driving cars the risk of brain trauma goes up 63 to 80%, you should provide some evidence, You're also blindly assuming that no bike means car, in my opinion it would mirror the usage pattern of someone not keen to use a car: public transportation, walking, other means of transportation such as skateboard, scooters etc.
  - chitowneats 4y ago
    "First, there is no need for citation" Then you proceed to cite a study. Thanks for doing that.
    - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
      > "First, there is no need for citation" I'm no native english speaker, sometimes I make mistakes. "there's no need to" in my language can translate to "it is superfluous because" and then you explain why it is. I'll remind you HN guidelines, in case you forgot. Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
  - 0x457 4y ago
    > there's no need for any citation > provides citation Yeah, it's going great.
denton-scratch 4y ago
> Mandatory helmet laws make the number of injuries associated with biking go down. You can also reduce the number of cycling injuries by banning bicycles. [Edit] /s
- dylan604 4y ago
  You can also reduce the number of cycling injuries by banning cars
  - notch656a 4y ago
    Doubtful if "cars" means motor vehicles, as most of the US has poor public transit thus cycling would be the closest best substitute readily available. The number of cyclists would explode. There would likely also be lots of deaths due to weakness in the supply chain.
    - 6LLvveMx2koXfwn 4y ago
      You seem to have missed the fact that cycling deaths NOT involving cars are negligible. Remove cars, remove deaths.
      - b3morales 4y ago
        Agree but that said cyclists can still injure themselves without help from cars. We'd expect the absolute number of cycling injuries to rise with the number of cyclists. However, they will be much less serious injuries.
      - jjk166 4y ago
        About 30% of cycling deaths are not traffic related, hardly negligible. If cars magically disappeared there would be a lot more than 3 times the current number of cyclists on the road.
        seadan83 4y ago
renewiltord 4y ago
Interestingly, mandatory helmet laws for car drivers and passengers would get us more QALYs than MHLs for bikes. By our reasoning chain of proximate injury reduction, we must prescribe them.
nix0n 4y ago
> Mandatory helmet laws make the number of injuries associated with biking go down. What are the effects on the number of fatalities associated with biking? It's well known (you didn't cite any studies, so I won't either) that cars pass closer to helmeted cyclists than to unhelmeted cyclists.
- b3morales 4y ago
  I'm a little wary of relying on this, because it seems like the kind of effect that would go away if no-helmet was more normalized. In other words, if we have a (local) culture that says "bicycling is sufficiently dangerous as to require a helmet", then drivers (even the ones who don't themselves cycle) are going to have that in their heads, and it's going to influence their behavior: "if I accidentally strike this person not wearing a helmet they're going to get really hurt, I'd better be extra careful". If the consensus is that lacking a helmet is not particularly problematic, I suspect we'll find drivers not acting specially too.
- jjk166 4y ago
  https://helmets.org/evalstudies.htm https://helmets.org/evalstudies.htm There is an incredibly large number of studies that have all shown massive reductions in the rates of head injuries and deaths with the introduction and enforcement of mandatory helmet laws. Apparently whatever negative effect drivers passing closer to helmeted cyclists has is insignificant against the massive improvement of protecting an extremely important and extremely vulnerable part of your body.
  - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
    All of these studies are measuring incidents per year. They miss the confounding effect that helmet laws can make people bike less.
    - wizofaus 4y ago
      Which just by itself would help reduce the total number of injuries, as the unfortunate reality is almost every other form of transport is less likely to result in hits to the head. So you then have to balance that against the downsides of people choosing "safer" forms of transport, which are not inconsiderable.
NegativeLatency 4y ago
> rather not bike at all than bike safely There are many many thousands of Dutch who bike daily without a helmet, so this is a false dichotomy. I bike a lot as in for transportation and running errands, and the speeds are generally quite low, and after many years I'm good at not falling off my bike. The biggest thing that concerns me is drivers and their associated cars. In many cases a helmet will do nearly nothing when you get crushed by an overpuffed SUV or truck. > There is a real need for society to discuss whether the value of reduced injuries outweighs the cost You could make an equal argument about driving and car/vehicle use. For example the city I live in has had more deaths by vehicle than deaths by homicide this year.
- giantg2 4y ago
  Which city?
  - NegativeLatency 4y ago
    Portland, I cant find the slide with that stat that I saw from a PBOT meeting, and it looks like the results are contradictory to my statement for last year (2021) 66 dead from traffic: https://www.portland.gov/sites/default/files/2022/traffic-crash-report-2021.pdf https://www.portland.gov/sites/default/files/2022/traffic-cr... 93 dead from homicide (breaking the previous record of 66 from ~30 years prior): https://www.opb.org/article/2022/01/15/2021-was-a-record-year-for-homicides-in-portland/ https://www.opb.org/article/2022/01/15/2021-was-a-record-yea...
- uoaei 4y ago
  > I'm good at not falling off my bike. The biggest thing that concerns me is drivers... I think this is a good way to frame it for those who ~~are anxious about riding~~ don't regularly ride bikes. It's really easy to ride safely on your own once you learn the intricacies of riding on two wheels. Bikes are hard to tip over if you know what you're doing. It's the introduction of large machines with the means of generating immense amounts of kinetic energy with very little human input that things start getting complicated. In fact this applies for the introduction of electric bikes and scooters, too. So many times I have seen new riders on shiny new e-bikes accidentally shock themselves four meters forward because they aren't used to the throttle. Imagine if they're waiting behind a cyclist, or at a stoplight, and they push either themselves or a cyclist in front of them into the flow of traffic. I would be interested to see hard data but I suspect "one-person" bike injuries are much less prevalent and dangerous on average than those involving at least one cyclist and at least one motor vehicle (including e-bikes).
seanmcdirmid 4y ago
We could just do what the Netherlands does and make streets/paths safe for biking rather than armoring up bikers to deal with a more dangerous environment.
- rhacker 4y ago
  so basically for most urban areas you're advocating a huge usage of eminent domain, since doing such retrofits would likely involve chopping off the livingrooms of many homes to make space necessary for the change. so that we can have bikes without helmets, destroy a million homes.
  - Scarblac 4y ago
    No, because that wasn't necessary on the Netherlands either, and are streets were never as wide as US streets. Just make the streets smaller, with fewer, narrower lanes. It slows down the cars and makes bicycles look better in comparison too.
  - ActorNightly 4y ago
    No. Simply segmenting a lane for bike traffic is enough, or turning certain streets into bike only streets during certain hours.
aceHN 4y ago
Sure, and lets make the speed limit 5mph and avoid 1.3 million vehicle deaths every year. It'll take people longer to get places but we know what's best for them
- jjk166 4y ago
  We did implement speed limits to reduce the probability of car fatalities.
- zip1234 4y ago
  You say this in jest but truly their should be speed governors on every car. Would do WAY more for safety than any mandatory helmet law for cyclists.
soperj 4y ago
> Yes, some of that is people who would rather not bike at all than bike safely, and there are some non-linear effects from that, but it's still a net reduction in injuries. Doubtful, since it raises the number of miles driven in cars, which would increase the number of injuries there.
equalsione 4y ago
This topic has come up several times now on HN and the conversation is always very frustrating. The debate tends to run towards "no one will tell me to wear a helmet". The same studies are cited as supporting one side or the other when all the studies are clearly insufficient. It's good that HN doesn't take things are face value, and the discussions here seek to understand unintended consequences. But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and anecdata does in fact equal data. Unfortunately cycling is dangerous because - in most countries - cyclists share the road with cars and trucks. There's only one winner in a cyclist vs car showdown. If you cycle somewhere that doesn't have nice cycling infrastructure a helmet is a great idea. A helmet will not automatically turn you into a target for indifference or road rage from motorists - that's the default posture of most motorists towards cyclists, helmet or not.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
> Mandatory helmet laws make the number of injuries associated with biking go down. That is their purpose, and they are effective. There's significant problems with most of the studies showing the effectiveness of bike helmets (especially the Thompson and Rivara study) and there's also the issue that they can conceivably cause greater brain damage die to rotational forces (by increasing the diameter of the head). Some issues are discussed here https://crag.asn.au/5-ways-wearing-a-bicycle-helmet-can-result-in-injuries/ https://crag.asn.au/5-ways-wearing-a-bicycle-helmet-can-resu... Also, there's the Dr Ian Walker study (although very small) that shows a greater number of close passes from drivers when the cyclist wears a helmet. Risk compensation may also be at play, so that cyclists take more chances when wearing a helmet (I recall a study showing that effect was particularly pronounced in kids). Unfortunately, most helmet studies use hospital admissions which is going to bias the results unless hospital admissions are a close match with the cyclist population. It's of note that cycle helmets are safety tested by typically a 2m drop onto a flat surface - this equates to providing a level of protection at slow speeds up to approx 12mph, but they are most certainly not tested to withstand the forces involved when there's a RTC. The question then is why are they being prescribed for situations far beyond their designs?
thomastjeffery 4y ago
The point here is that the "mandatory helmet" part is less significant than the "law enforcement" part. People who would happily be riding with a helmet are disincentivized to go riding at all, because they don't want to be the subject of police patrol. That's the effect we clearly don't want.

by jjk166 4y ago

chitowneats 4y ago

> but it's still a net reduction in injuries. Citation needed. If they are now traveling via automobile, I doubt there is a net reduction when taking into account: vehicle injuries and fatalities, air pollution, and of course, in the long term, anthropogenic climate change. This is a classic example of a system with perverse incentives. Everyone feels safer in their big SUV. In reality it's just an arms race, and we're all losing.

cbsmith 4y ago
> Everyone feels safer in their big SUV. In reality it's just an arms race, and we're all losing. I'm not sure, absent secondary effects, wearing a helmet makes cycling more dangerous for other cyclists the way that driving a big SUV, absent secondary effects makes it more dangerous for other drivers. It's not like the extra mass from helmets means you'll do more damage when you smash in to other cyclists.
- noirbot 4y ago
  Sure, but that's not the argument. It's that if you require people to carry a helmet with them to use your for-hire bike system, less people will use it, but they'll still need to get places, so they're more likely to hire a car or drive themselves. The hypothesis is that requiring helmets may make individual bikers safer in isolation, but if it causes less people to bike and to drive instead, the increase in people driving cars may make it less safe to ride a bike, even adjusted for the fact that they're safer via the helmet. I'd imagine this is especially true given that the helmet mostly only helps prevent the more dramatic injuries to the head. Getting hit by a car is still likely to seriously injure you in plenty of places the helmet doesn't help with.
  - cbsmith 4y ago
    > Sure, but that's not the argument. Agreed. I just thought the metaphor was not helpful. > The hypothesis is that requiring helmets may make individual bikers safer in isolation ...though there's a (somewhat) credible argument that even this isn't true. There are arguments against this too. Some argue automobiles see someone without a helmet as more "at risk" and therefore are more mindful of them, thereby net increasing their safety. Others argue that mandates tend to discourage innovation in safety equipment design, effectively encouraging the deployment of limited safety equipment at the expense of more effective alternatives. > I'd imagine this is especially true given that the helmet mostly only helps prevent the more dramatic injuries to the head. Getting hit by a car is still likely to seriously injure you in plenty of places the helmet doesn't help with. Which also brings up the ol' "is it better to be more likely to live, but also more likely to have broken arms and legs?" question.
onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
> If they are now traveling via automobile, I doubt there is a net reduction when taking into account: vehicle injuries and fatalities, air pollution, and of course, in the long term, anthropogenic climate change. You're not thinking like a Zero-sum American. If you accidentally hit & injure a pedestrian, cyclist, or another driver in your Hummer - better them than you. Best to stick to your Hummer and avoid the bike.
- chitowneats 4y ago
  I absolutely love your comment. I wish I could upvote it enough to counteract the downvotes. In lieu of that I'm leaving this comment.
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
> Citation needed. If they are now traveling via automobile First, there's no need for any citation, helmets do reduce trauma from impact sensibly See: "Helmets provide a 63 to 88% reduction in the risk of head, brain and severe brain injury for all ages of bicyclists" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7025438/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7025438/ Secondly: if they are now traveling via automobile, the risk of injuries is less than going by bike without an helmet. If you believe that by driving cars the risk of brain trauma goes up 63 to 80%, you should provide some evidence, You're also blindly assuming that no bike means car, in my opinion it would mirror the usage pattern of someone not keen to use a car: public transportation, walking, other means of transportation such as skateboard, scooters etc.
- chitowneats 4y ago
  "First, there is no need for citation" Then you proceed to cite a study. Thanks for doing that.
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    > "First, there is no need for citation" I'm no native english speaker, sometimes I make mistakes. "there's no need to" in my language can translate to "it is superfluous because" and then you explain why it is. I'll remind you HN guidelines, in case you forgot. Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
- 0x457 4y ago
  > there's no need for any citation > provides citation Yeah, it's going great.

denton-scratch 4y ago

> Mandatory helmet laws make the number of injuries associated with biking go down. You can also reduce the number of cycling injuries by banning bicycles. [Edit] /s

dylan604 4y ago
You can also reduce the number of cycling injuries by banning cars
- notch656a 4y ago
  Doubtful if "cars" means motor vehicles, as most of the US has poor public transit thus cycling would be the closest best substitute readily available. The number of cyclists would explode. There would likely also be lots of deaths due to weakness in the supply chain.
  - 6LLvveMx2koXfwn 4y ago
    You seem to have missed the fact that cycling deaths NOT involving cars are negligible. Remove cars, remove deaths.
    - b3morales 4y ago
      Agree but that said cyclists can still injure themselves without help from cars. We'd expect the absolute number of cycling injuries to rise with the number of cyclists. However, they will be much less serious injuries.
    - jjk166 4y ago
      About 30% of cycling deaths are not traffic related, hardly negligible. If cars magically disappeared there would be a lot more than 3 times the current number of cyclists on the road.
      - seadan83 4y ago

renewiltord 4y ago

Interestingly, mandatory helmet laws for car drivers and passengers would get us more QALYs than MHLs for bikes. By our reasoning chain of proximate injury reduction, we must prescribe them.

nix0n 4y ago

> Mandatory helmet laws make the number of injuries associated with biking go down. What are the effects on the number of fatalities associated with biking? It's well known (you didn't cite any studies, so I won't either) that cars pass closer to helmeted cyclists than to unhelmeted cyclists.

b3morales 4y ago
I'm a little wary of relying on this, because it seems like the kind of effect that would go away if no-helmet was more normalized. In other words, if we have a (local) culture that says "bicycling is sufficiently dangerous as to require a helmet", then drivers (even the ones who don't themselves cycle) are going to have that in their heads, and it's going to influence their behavior: "if I accidentally strike this person not wearing a helmet they're going to get really hurt, I'd better be extra careful". If the consensus is that lacking a helmet is not particularly problematic, I suspect we'll find drivers not acting specially too.
jjk166 4y ago
https://helmets.org/evalstudies.htm https://helmets.org/evalstudies.htm There is an incredibly large number of studies that have all shown massive reductions in the rates of head injuries and deaths with the introduction and enforcement of mandatory helmet laws. Apparently whatever negative effect drivers passing closer to helmeted cyclists has is insignificant against the massive improvement of protecting an extremely important and extremely vulnerable part of your body.
- adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
  All of these studies are measuring incidents per year. They miss the confounding effect that helmet laws can make people bike less.
  - wizofaus 4y ago
    Which just by itself would help reduce the total number of injuries, as the unfortunate reality is almost every other form of transport is less likely to result in hits to the head. So you then have to balance that against the downsides of people choosing "safer" forms of transport, which are not inconsiderable.

NegativeLatency 4y ago

> rather not bike at all than bike safely There are many many thousands of Dutch who bike daily without a helmet, so this is a false dichotomy. I bike a lot as in for transportation and running errands, and the speeds are generally quite low, and after many years I'm good at not falling off my bike. The biggest thing that concerns me is drivers and their associated cars. In many cases a helmet will do nearly nothing when you get crushed by an overpuffed SUV or truck. > There is a real need for society to discuss whether the value of reduced injuries outweighs the cost You could make an equal argument about driving and car/vehicle use. For example the city I live in has had more deaths by vehicle than deaths by homicide this year.

giantg2 4y ago
Which city?
- NegativeLatency 4y ago
  Portland, I cant find the slide with that stat that I saw from a PBOT meeting, and it looks like the results are contradictory to my statement for last year (2021) 66 dead from traffic: https://www.portland.gov/sites/default/files/2022/traffic-crash-report-2021.pdf https://www.portland.gov/sites/default/files/2022/traffic-cr... 93 dead from homicide (breaking the previous record of 66 from ~30 years prior): https://www.opb.org/article/2022/01/15/2021-was-a-record-year-for-homicides-in-portland/ https://www.opb.org/article/2022/01/15/2021-was-a-record-yea...
uoaei 4y ago
> I'm good at not falling off my bike. The biggest thing that concerns me is drivers... I think this is a good way to frame it for those who ~~are anxious about riding~~ don't regularly ride bikes. It's really easy to ride safely on your own once you learn the intricacies of riding on two wheels. Bikes are hard to tip over if you know what you're doing. It's the introduction of large machines with the means of generating immense amounts of kinetic energy with very little human input that things start getting complicated. In fact this applies for the introduction of electric bikes and scooters, too. So many times I have seen new riders on shiny new e-bikes accidentally shock themselves four meters forward because they aren't used to the throttle. Imagine if they're waiting behind a cyclist, or at a stoplight, and they push either themselves or a cyclist in front of them into the flow of traffic. I would be interested to see hard data but I suspect "one-person" bike injuries are much less prevalent and dangerous on average than those involving at least one cyclist and at least one motor vehicle (including e-bikes).

seanmcdirmid 4y ago

We could just do what the Netherlands does and make streets/paths safe for biking rather than armoring up bikers to deal with a more dangerous environment.

rhacker 4y ago
so basically for most urban areas you're advocating a huge usage of eminent domain, since doing such retrofits would likely involve chopping off the livingrooms of many homes to make space necessary for the change. so that we can have bikes without helmets, destroy a million homes.
- Scarblac 4y ago
  No, because that wasn't necessary on the Netherlands either, and are streets were never as wide as US streets. Just make the streets smaller, with fewer, narrower lanes. It slows down the cars and makes bicycles look better in comparison too.
- ActorNightly 4y ago
  No. Simply segmenting a lane for bike traffic is enough, or turning certain streets into bike only streets during certain hours.

aceHN 4y ago

Sure, and lets make the speed limit 5mph and avoid 1.3 million vehicle deaths every year. It'll take people longer to get places but we know what's best for them

jjk166 4y ago
We did implement speed limits to reduce the probability of car fatalities.
zip1234 4y ago
You say this in jest but truly their should be speed governors on every car. Would do WAY more for safety than any mandatory helmet law for cyclists.

soperj 4y ago

> Yes, some of that is people who would rather not bike at all than bike safely, and there are some non-linear effects from that, but it's still a net reduction in injuries. Doubtful, since it raises the number of miles driven in cars, which would increase the number of injuries there.

equalsione 4y ago

This topic has come up several times now on HN and the conversation is always very frustrating. The debate tends to run towards "no one will tell me to wear a helmet". The same studies are cited as supporting one side or the other when all the studies are clearly insufficient. It's good that HN doesn't take things are face value, and the discussions here seek to understand unintended consequences. But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and anecdata does in fact equal data. Unfortunately cycling is dangerous because - in most countries - cyclists share the road with cars and trucks. There's only one winner in a cyclist vs car showdown. If you cycle somewhere that doesn't have nice cycling infrastructure a helmet is a great idea. A helmet will not automatically turn you into a target for indifference or road rage from motorists - that's the default posture of most motorists towards cyclists, helmet or not.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

ndsipa_pomu 4y ago

> Mandatory helmet laws make the number of injuries associated with biking go down. That is their purpose, and they are effective. There's significant problems with most of the studies showing the effectiveness of bike helmets (especially the Thompson and Rivara study) and there's also the issue that they can conceivably cause greater brain damage die to rotational forces (by increasing the diameter of the head). Some issues are discussed here https://crag.asn.au/5-ways-wearing-a-bicycle-helmet-can-result-in-injuries/ https://crag.asn.au/5-ways-wearing-a-bicycle-helmet-can-resu... Also, there's the Dr Ian Walker study (although very small) that shows a greater number of close passes from drivers when the cyclist wears a helmet. Risk compensation may also be at play, so that cyclists take more chances when wearing a helmet (I recall a study showing that effect was particularly pronounced in kids). Unfortunately, most helmet studies use hospital admissions which is going to bias the results unless hospital admissions are a close match with the cyclist population. It's of note that cycle helmets are safety tested by typically a 2m drop onto a flat surface - this equates to providing a level of protection at slow speeds up to approx 12mph, but they are most certainly not tested to withstand the forces involved when there's a RTC. The question then is why are they being prescribed for situations far beyond their designs?

thomastjeffery 4y ago

The point here is that the "mandatory helmet" part is less significant than the "law enforcement" part. People who would happily be riding with a helmet are disincentivized to go riding at all, because they don't want to be the subject of police patrol. That's the effect we clearly don't want.