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Bike helmets: what the science says about an American safety obsession

60 points by jameal 4y ago

kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
> “Mentioning whether or not Eric wore a helmet is akin to blaming an egg for cracking against a pan,” wrote Ng’s friend It's funny how reports of ejections from a crashed motor vehicle never mention that the driver wasn't wearing a seat belt as if their death was an act of god but cyclists have to be chastised as a blame shifting exercise to justify continued ostracism.
- _Adam 4y ago
  https://news.google.com/search?q=%22wasn%27t%20wearing%20a%20seatbelt%22&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen https://news.google.com/search?q=%22wasn%27t%20wearing%20a%2...
blakesterz 4y ago
When it comes to the dangers threatening cyclists, wearing a helmet is like bringing a knife to a gunfight. America’s top-selling vehicle model, the Ford F-Series, weighs up to 7,500 pounds. Its hood stands 4.5 feet tall—at the height of my chin. I get that point. And the other points made here about defense against traffic and cars. But helmets protect against WAY more than getting hit by a truck. They protect you when your foot gets stuck and you fall over backwards onto concrete. They protect you when you flip over and the bike comes back around and the chain ring takes a chunk out of the helmet instead of your head. Helmets stop injuries and many other ways.
- LanceH 4y ago
  They are hard and slick on the outside to allow your head to slide along with your body, instead of snapping; protecting your neck.
- pkulak 4y ago
  But by that logic we should always wear helmets. You're always at some risk of head injury.
  - acomjean 4y ago
    But when walking around you aren't cruising at 10+ miles and hour in an area with multi thousand pound vehicles going a multiple of your speed.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - happytoexplain 4y ago
    There is no implication in the parent that you should wear a helmet when the risk of head injury is greater than zero (i.e. always). They only imply that bike-riding is high enough risk to warrant it.
    - pkulak 4y ago
      The implication that riding a bike puts you at higher risk of head injury than any other moderate activity is precisely what I take issue with. I'd bet good money that showering, walking up stairs, and even driving a car are all at least as dangerous to the ol' noggin.
  - FrontierPsych 4y ago
    I wore a mask during the height of the pandemic and didn't mind that one bit. I liked it. I asked my grocery store clerks, who always wore masks during the height of the pandemic, if anyone got covid. None did, because they all wore masks. And they waited on tens of thousands of customers weekly. Meanwhile, 35 out of 40 of Donald Trump's inner circle got Covid because they didn't wear masks. So some people want to wear helmets and some don't. I say, whatever you want to do is fine. But just like the masks in the pandemic, don't you come whining to me if you realize after you get f-ed up that maybe you should have after all worn the mask or the helmet. Don't want to hear any none no whining no way negative uh-uh go away shut up.
- acomjean 4y ago
  I wear one. One day when I was you, in the spring I slipped on some sand and went down. the helmet hit first basically saving my nose. I've also been hit on the head by an acorn. Thats mild, but it could be startling enough to loose control, but it was just a noise for me.
- Apes 4y ago
  It's so much worse than even what you say. This article is just a continuous slow flow stream of gas lighting. Like, if the problem you notice is 7,500 pound vehicles designed to kill pedestrians, isn't the logical solution to anyone with a functioning brain to propose restricting those vehicles? What kind of lead paint eating logic does it take to conclude that the best solution is to get rid of bike helmets?
  - Kim_Bruning 4y ago
    The author of the article actually doesn't propose taking away helmets. Instead the author says: "Only a suite of infrastructure changes can combat the deadliest risk to cyclists. Not helmets alone." I think the author is actually a bit careful. It is actually quite possible to make the infrastructure so safe that helmets offer little additional protection -and thus people stop wearing them-. This is (rather in a nutshell) what has happened in the Netherlands. This situation still so far from the typical (North America) experience at this moment that I would fully understand if you don't quite believe it. However, hopefully you can see there has to be some reason why all the people in eg. this video [1] aren't wearing helmets. They can't all be crazy, after all. See also [2] for a very short summary of specific bicycle infrastructure. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynwMN3Z9Og8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynwMN3Z9Og8 (Utrecht Vredenburg) [2] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/z5dvqhYQACY https://www.youtube.com/shorts/z5dvqhYQACY A Quick Intro to Dutch Bike Paths
Havoc 4y ago
Long article discussing various societal aspects and knock on effects, but ultimately the key bit is towards the end: >Regardless, experts I spoke to were unanimous about what these flaws don’t mean: that helmets are useless. They all believe you should wear one.
- emmelaich 4y ago
  Should is fine. Must is not.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
The conclusion makes it clear that every expert they spoke to made it unambiguously clear that helmets should be worn: > Regardless, experts I spoke to were unanimous about what these flaws don’t mean: that helmets are useless. They all believe you should wear one. This is one of those articles that reads like a lot of claims against something, even though the conclusion is very clearly in favor of it. There are some valid concerns about how bike safety needs to extend beyond just the helmet, but the middle sections trying to suggest that maybe helmets are bad just feels like bait.
- twiss 4y ago
  The conclusion is not in contradiction with the rest of the article. What makes sense for society to do (improve infrastructure) is not necessarily the same as what might make sense for an individual to do (wear a helmet, especially if the infrastructure is insufficient).
- aksss 4y ago
  Every expert would tell me not to ride a OneWheel at a high rate of speed. Doesn’t mean I won’t. Doesn’t mean I’d support city ordinances banning them. Risk evaluation is weird that way, and your answer will depend on your role in the conversation. What I would recommend for you may not be the best for me. So putting a pin in that, there are arguably more important considerations when evaluating the proposition that, “somebody should make a law”, than expert risk analysis for the genpop.
  - tommiegannert 4y ago
    > Risk evaluation is weird that way, and your answer will depend on your role in the conversation. What I would recommend for you may not be the best for me. Asking the "why" one or two more levels, we end up in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimism_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimism_bias. Which suggests you should let someone else evaluate the risk to you.
- pwinnski 4y ago
  In a society shaped by misguided efforts to keep bike riders safe, the smart move for any individual cyclist is to wear a helmet. Better for all would be to reshape society so that helmets weren't required, but in the US, at least, that's not where we are, so for now: wear a helmet.
_Adam 4y ago
The article tries extensively to dance around the fact that all else being equal, if your head is hitting the ground you're better off wearing a helmet. In the worst cases, you aren't worse off. Acceleration is what kills, and because you can't change the starting speed nor the end speed (0 m/s), all you can change is time. That doesn't mean they have to be enforced legally, of course. So rather than attacking the merits of helmets, the argument made in the article would be more compelling if it focused on the unalienable right of humans to get severely injured doing stupid stuff for fun or profit.
- treeman79 4y ago
  Got hired into a company to replace a guy that didn’t wear a helmet. He came in to visit about a year later. He could sort of talk and walk a little by that point. Few years earlier my office Kate declared on Friday he was going to buy a motorcycle. Came in Monday with a broken leg. To each their own. But I’ll stick to a car with a high safety rating.
  - karamanolev 4y ago
    Ah, cars. Heralded as the future for humanity, the awesome big steel cans they are.
  - cassepipe 4y ago
    Public transportation is rather safe if you live in a city where it exists. Then you don't have to contribute to the car society and all its ills
- threetonesun 4y ago
  Ask any mountain biker and they'll give you this conclusion from experience, almost all of us have had some low-speed awkward crash where a helmet was the difference between getting up and walking away or laying in the woods with an open head wound. If I'm riding on the road do I expect a helmet to help if I'm run over or hit at high speed? Not really. But if someone clips me and I hit the pavement I'd rather something than nothing.
davidw 4y ago
At an individual level, helmet wearing makes sense, but at a societal level, designing infrastructure better is where it's at in terms of keeping people safe, and that's probably a far bigger win.
- toast0 4y ago
  As a sometimes frequent cyclist, I'm hoping a helmet is going to protect me from solo accidents more than car v bike; better bike infrastructure isn't going to help much with solo accidents (although it would eliminate trolley rail v bike, so there's one). Actually, if there was better infrastructure, I'd probably be able to travel at higher speed, and therefore have more danger in solo accidents. Making me ride on the shitty pavement at the edge of the road, and watch out for cars everywhere slows me down, and reduces my danger. :P In car v bike, a helmet may or may not help, I'm definitely going to lose, either way. Thankfully, I've never had a car v bike, but I've had plenty of solo crashes, although I think I've been lucky enough not to hit my head.
  - davidw 4y ago
    > Making me ride on the shitty pavement at the edge of the road, and watch out for cars everywhere slows me down, and reduces my danger. :P Statistically, it does not.
  - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
    > Actually, if there was better infrastructure, I'd probably be able to travel at higher speed, and therefore have more danger in solo accidents. That really doesn't happen in the Netherlands, however. I mean, ya, those grannies on bikes seem aggressive, but they aren't going very fast, Dutch bikers wearing suits are not like Americans bikers wearing spandex. Biking as a normalized transportation thing means speed isn't as common compared to biking as some kind of recreational sport.
- FrontierPsych 4y ago
  I never understood the whole "designing infrastructure better" thing. Most large cities are fully built out. You can't design infrastructure better as the infrastructure is already there. Maybe on brand new places being built, but that won't help Chicago or San Francisco or Los Angeles. You can't just use eminent domain and take out all buildings and highrises on both sides of Market Street in San Francisco to build a 10 foot wide roadway only for bicycles on each side. It's the same with public transportation as well, especially light rail. To put in light rail in some cities, you would have to rip up tens of thousands of homes and businesses. I never did get this whole argument. It's like saying that you should make a better infrastructure for the human body. I for one, would like it if my anus would be right over my achilles tendon, that way if I shit my pants, it wouldn't dribble all down my leg, it would just be there on the ground already with minimum fuss.
deleted 4y ago
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midasuni 4y ago
Head injuries are a leading form of death for car occupants, so why don’t we wear helmets when driving? “While car accidents contribute about 14% of the aggregate TBI cases in the US, they are the leading cause of TBI-related deaths among children and young adults” https://treatnow.org/knowledgebase/car-accidents-and-brain-injury-statistics-2020/ https://treatnow.org/knowledgebase/car-accidents-and-brain-i...
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  Do helmets protect against TBI? A piece of metal going 50 mph is a different beast from blunt-force trauma.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  Because cars have more and more airbags?
- jbandela1 4y ago
  Seatbelts and airbags in modern cars are basically doing what a helmet tries to do which is protect your head from hitting something hard (like the windshield or steering wheel etc. In a modern car driving along a normal road, I don't think a helmet would add much additional protection. Speaking from experience treating traumatic brain injuries, the brain injuries that are common in a car (as long as you are wearing a seatbelt and don't get the) is something called diffuse axonal injury (DAI) also know and traumatic axonal injury (TAI) which is diffuse brain injury caused by the (de)acceleration/rotational acceleration. A helmet would not be much help against those types of injuries.
- crackercrews 4y ago
  > Head injuries are a leading form of death for car occupants, so why don’t we wear helmets when driving? What percent of bicyclists have been in an accident that would benefit from a helmet? Must be at least 10x the percent of car occupants who have been in such an accident.
- oliwarner 4y ago
  It is critical to understand that "car accidents" does not mean "occupants in car accidents". It means accidents involving a car; many will be car vs pedestrian and car vs [motor]cyclist.
magicalhippo 4y ago
I've only been in one bicycle accident. I was being a dumbass and attempted a sudden stop on a small iron bridge, when it had rained the previous night after a dry spell. The wooden deck was thus very slippery, and about one second after touching the brakes the bike was horizontal and I smacked the side of my body and helmet against the wooden deck. Since it happened so quickly, my hands were still holding the handlebars when I hit the deck. While not concrete, that wood wasn't exactly pliable and while I have no idea what would have happened without a helmet, I'm quite glad I didn't get to find out.
- zwieback 4y ago
  This is how I broke my hip, it was so fast I couldn't even get my feet out of the pedals. I've been riding my bike for 50 years and I wear a helmet when I feel like it could potentially help but most of the time I don't. Statistically what I do makes no sense at all but wearing a helmet is enough of an annoyance that I only do it in specific situations.
  - latchkey 4y ago
    You crashed unexpectedly, yet you think you can predict when you're going to need to wear a helmet.
    - zwieback 4y ago
      No, my point was that what I'm doing makes no sense and I suspect lots of people are in the same boat. Of course helmets help in the specific situation a helmet is for but it's hard to convince people to change their habit for something that's rare and unexpected.
      - magicalhippo 4y ago
        Sure it's rare and unexpected. But if it does happen, the consequences of not wearing a helmet can be significant. Similar reason why I wear a seat belt. Being involved in a car crash is rare and unexpected, but the consequences of not wearing a seat belt when involved in a crash can be significant, so I use it.
emmelaich 4y ago
I've been riding bikes for over 50 years. I'm legally required to wear a helmet but I don't when I'm just poking along the local parks on the way to the shops. I could get fined :-( There's a strong cycling culture around here. Some of them ride in packs on some major roads. I'd never do that, with or without a helmet. Recently there was a major incident. One death, a bunch injured. The dead one had their head severed. The helmet didn't help. [edit: I usually do wear a helmet for any major ride]
- jeffbee 4y ago
  In what jurisdiction are adult bicyclists required by law to wear helmets?
  - ryukafalz 4y ago
    Australia, for one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_helmets_in_Australia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_helmets_in_Australia
  - cldellow 4y ago
    King County, Washington (Seattle) Edit: actually, repealed last year due to racism [1] [1]: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/king-county-repeals-mandatory-bicycle-helmet-law/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/kin...
iamleppert 4y ago
Why don't they use the revenue from the helmet tickets of the privileged, white riders (who clearly have the money to buy a helmet) to provide free helmets to brown and black riders? That seems to me like the better solution and would drastically improve equality.
- twiss 4y ago
  Why not use it for building better biking infrastructure instead? The entire article is about how that'd have a better ROI.
  - crackercrews 4y ago
    I get the point you're trying to make. But they never actually talk about ROI. Helmets are cheap. Infrastructure is expensive. I would be surprised if infrastructure changes had a higher ROI than helmets. It's just that some people don't want to wear helmets. That's what this was all about.
    - twiss 4y ago
      Infrastructure changes happen anyway. Roads get widened, reorganized, and maintained all the time. It's just a question of what the available space should get allocated to. The Netherlands didn't change their infrastructure overnight. They changed the infrastructure standards instead, and whenever a road needs to be redone, they upgrade it to the new standards. This took ~30-50 years, but had amazing results. Of course it can be done faster if you want, and then it will be more expensive as well. But if you want to do it cheaply, you can absolutely get a very high ROI this way.
- BoorishBears 4y ago
  I'm black, I wear a $200 helmet. Certain races are disproportionally affected by inequality, but treating my race as equivalent to poverty is pretty damn insulting.
happytoexplain 4y ago
I've never bounced off a title so hard. "Safety obsession" is an absurd phrase in this context. No society on earth is "obsessed" with the safety of adults, in the way we use the word "obsessed" to e.g. describe helicopter parents. One can easily argue that specific rules are ineffective or have unintended effects, as the body of the article appears to at a glance, but that's not a problem with being somehow overly-dedicated to safety - it's a problem with making rules. Making rules is a hard problem.
- karamanolev 4y ago
  Regardless of the merits of the article, as a European, "safety obsessed" describes my experiences in the US. Not a good or a bad thing, each society makes its own choices, but for me, the US is safety obsessed. And that comes from someone who rides 10k+ miles a year and always wears a helmet.
- nostrebored 4y ago
  Our society in the U.S. is absolutely obsessed with safety. The level of risk aversion in western society today is crazy. Part of our safety obsession is helicopter parenting.
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    If the US were truly obsessed with safety, they'd ban guns and make cars much more inconvenient to own and use. As it is, any moron can buy a gun or drive a car with pretty much zero training. As an American, I honestly have no idea what you're talking about: the US is by far the least safe society among developed nations. If you want to see risk-averse to a fault, come to Japan. US society is anything but risk-averse. It has its elements of risk-aversion (notably your helicopter parenting, which is actually completely absent here in Japan, as little kids routinely walk around alone here), but overall, it is anything but. I'd say the helicopter parenting is actually a reaction, by a portion of parents, to the extreme danger present in daily life in America. By contrast, no one blinks an eye here in Tokyo when little kids ride the subway by themselves because it's so safe.
thoiu23oi4u234 4y ago
[flagged]
- emmelaich 4y ago
  You're agreeing with the article. Regarding the law, if it's selectively enforced it is worse than no law.
- fallingknife 4y ago
  If you can afford a bike, you can afford a helmet https://www.amazon.com/s?k=bike+helmet https://www.amazon.com/s?k=bike+helmet. I don't think there should be a law either, but the whole thing about it being unfair to minorities is complete garbage.
mperham 4y ago
The problem isn't bikes or helmets. You can count on one hand the number of cyclists who die every year in the Netherlands and no one wears a helmet there. The problem is cars. Cars kill the people they hit.
- deadbunny 4y ago
  You must have a lot of fingers. https://www.statista.com/statistics/523310/netherlands-number-of-cyclist-road-fatalities/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/523310/netherlands-numbe...
  - mperham 4y ago
    I meant to say "die due to lack of helmet as the only factor". They die because they are hit by cars.
  - twiss 4y ago
    Although I don't want to trivialize any of these deaths, I think it's important to note that the elderly (especially people over 70) are overrepresented in these statistics: https://opendata.cbs.nl/#/CBS/nl/dataset/71936ned/table?dl=76B4D https://opendata.cbs.nl/#/CBS/nl/dataset/71936ned/table?dl=7... In my opinion, it's great (and in general very healthy) that the elderly are still biking a lot in the Netherlands. However, it does seem that it's a bit riskier for them than for the general population.
munk-a 4y ago
> Helmet mandates intimidate potential riders, they argued, by framing cycling as an activity so dangerous it necessitates body armor. But that's sort of the point in America. The act of not being in a car is a non-standard and dangerous option compared to the rest of the world.
- valtism 4y ago
  It's also like arguing that seat belts discourage potential drivers, by framing it as an activity so dangerous it necessitates safety mechanisms. Of course it's dangerous. I would personally barely ever ride without a helmet. I see so many arguments like this postulating on hypothetical situations where life without helmets would be better, but they all come across as justifications for not really wanting to wear a helmet. I think it's very important to have them required by law, so that it is not seen as a cool or rebellious thing to not wear one. It's just normal.
  - Kim_Bruning 4y ago
    I disagree. I think the opposite should happen. I think that governments should make the roads so incredibly safe that helmets become (largely) redundant. Only a couple of countries have gotten near to this goal so far, sadly (and we can still always do better).
nostrebored 4y ago
What we should care about is the aggregate public health impact of the intervention. In the case of bicycles and motorcycles I think people attribute magical safety benefits to helmets that don’t exist. Similar to protective gear in hockey actually increasing injuries I suspect that the impact of helmets is bimodal: some people respect the risk of going XX mph nearly unprotected and others view their protective gear as a shield. I’m also willing to bet that the biggest change in safety for bike helmets is actually people outside of the urban areas most likely to have safety mandates
analog31 4y ago
I've been an avid cyclist for 50 years, am a daily year-round bike commuter in a mid sized city in the Midwest, and use my bike for both transportation and recreation. "Single minded devotion to the helmet" makes for engaging controversy, but it isn't what I observe out here in the trenches. People wear helmets, but they almost always choose routes with less car traffic when possible. In my opinion, route choice is probably the single most important cycling safety measure. What it suggests to me is that real riders are actually making pretty good safety choices.
- rascul 4y ago
  I don't ride much currently, but when I did, I would go out of my way for routes that were easier and safer to ride, usually due to less traffic. I was able to relax a bit and it was a nicer and more enjoyable ride.
  - analog31 4y ago
    I have a rule of thumb, to avoid any route where two or more lanes of traffic are going in the same direction. Those are the places where traffic is fast and heavy, and people are not completely in control of their cars. Also, those are the places where car crashes tend to occur -- especially at intersections. And I figure if cars can crash into other cars, which they do, then they can crash into bikes.
BlackFly 4y ago
I grew up in Canada, where helmets are required by law and barely anybody cycles to commute. I immigrated to the Netherlands where cycling is a casual and de facto mode of transportation and helmets feel gratuitous and unnecessarily hampering. I'm currently visiting my family in Canada where the sidewalks are so icy simply stepping out of the house risks head injury, but nevertheless wearing a helmet to protect myself as a pedestrian seems gratuitous and unnecessarily hampering. Casual skating? Little to no helmets. Amateur ice hockey? People start wearing helmets. Yes, wearing a helmet will protect you from a head injury from falling, but some things should be people centered and "it protects you" is really reductive. North America is really centered around automobile usage, even pedestrians are relegated to beg buttons and cycling nor simply walking about often doesn't feel like the casual activity that it can be.
- twiss 4y ago
  Are you https://www.youtube.com/@NotJustBikes https://www.youtube.com/@NotJustBikes? ;)
  - BlackFly 4y ago
    I am not, but when I first came across that channel I was relieved to hear a kindred spirit.
- oliwarner 4y ago
  You appear to have confused "requiring a helmet" with "has great cycle infrastructure, terrain, climate, population density and generations of social pressure". The Dutch cycle because it's easier than driving. The reason it's safer comes down to many factors. Just the city planning and redevelopment to make it safe counts for most of it. They didn't get to this point by not requiring helmets.
  - BlackFly 4y ago
    I haven't confused anything. There are some debates in the Netherlands to require helmets and these debates focus on the injury prevention aspect to the exclusion of any other concern. By comparing cycling to the injury risk of falling on ice or just tripping over your own feet, I'm appealing to people's intuition on the importance of balancing the mild inconvenience of a helmet, with the low risk of falling and the severity of injury of falling. The article establishes that helmets are not designed for collision injury mitigation but instead falling. Helmet usage on ice typically increases with vigor of activity, and in the Netherlands you see the same intuition with helmet use: low velocity commuters rarely wear helmets, almost all high speed sports cyclists wear one. Laws and these debates on usage instead rarely show such common sense.
throw7 4y ago
So if whites were ticketed more for wearing helmets that would be perfectly fine? I don't like this newspeak. I suppose there is this ideal ticketing distribution we are not told of that would keep the law on the books? I am pro helmet, but anti-nanny laws. I don't wear my helmet when I'm making a local trip to the grocery, but will on longer varied rides. God help me if I were ticketed for not wearing a helmet. I ski too... and don't wear a helmet... I'm not a maniac on the slopes. My 2 cents.
- 1shooner 4y ago
  I think the point is that for average, white, middle-class people, the helmet is part of the little bike hobby kit you keep in your garage, but in reality there are many people perhaps more economically and legally vulnerable that have a greater need to ride a bike and less convenient access to safety equipment.
LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
Can't have them. Automatically bad hair day. Also impairs my 'third eye' as in sense of hearing, thus my situational awareness. Also one more piece of kit to lug around. No, thanks, keep it! Wear these if you feel like it: https://www.gettyimages.de/fotos/michelin-man https://www.gettyimages.de/fotos/michelin-man I won't!
NoPicklez 4y ago
There was a post recently in Australia where someone posted a picture of their helmet broken, saying they were glad to have been wearing a helmet. There were countless posts of people having been involved in all sorts of accidents either from automobiles or themselves and all said that their life may have been altered following the accident had they not been wearing a helmet. Having grown up in Australia where they're mandatory, I don't think twice about it. I find the bickering about helmet safety in the US something very similar to your gun laws and gun violence. Stop bickering and splitting hairs and wear a damn helmet. You have to wear them when you're on two wheels with an engine.
- latchkey 4y ago
  Reminds me of this one... "A Florida attorney who opposed the state’s helmet law dies in a motorcycle crash. He wasn’t wearing a helmet. Ron Smith, who spent over a decade fighting Florida laws that required the use of helmets, represented a number of clients who violated state motorcycle requirements." https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/florida-attorney-opposed-state-helmet-law-dies-motorcycle-crash-not-we-rcna54095 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/florida-attorney-oppose...
  - Kim_Bruning 4y ago
    I think that this article is about human-powered bicycles? In most of the countries I know of where normal commuters don't wear helmets on their bicycles, people do wear them on racing bikes, mountain bikes, mopeds, motorcycles etc. They are in different risk categories.
    - latchkey 4y ago
      The OPs point was more about the bickering than what vehicle. FYI, there are states in the US that don't require motorcycle helmets, which is also part of that bickering. In terms of risk... a head injury is a head injury... it doesn't necessarily matter how fast you're going or on what vehicle. I spent 4 years living in Vietnam. Helmets are mandatory there, but few people wear ones that would actually help you in an accident. They just wear a plastic cap that gets past the law. Other countries in SE Asia are similar.
insane_dreamer 4y ago
The point is not that you shouldn’t wear a helmet — you should whether in the city or not — but that cities enforcing helmet laws should instead be focusing on policies and urban changes that improve the safety of riders by creating a safer riding environment rather than putting all the onus on the cyclists.
philonoist 4y ago
Offtopic: Is there a helmet for Neck safety? I am more concerned about the cranium to spine down.
- Enginerrrd 4y ago
  Kind of. Wearing a dirt-biking helmet and a neck-protector might help, but evidence is limited.
  - philonoist 4y ago
    Yep! I have to be entrepreneur here.
Woodi 4y ago
Everythingwrong.... Safer but drop law. Law but only some peoples are ticketed. Biking is what everybody know it is but helmets change impression and be a thread to healthy occupation. Safety obsession ? More like fear of lawyers and you never know when multi-milion verdict hits you... Looks like law is actual problem in freedom country...
oliwarner 4y ago
The discourse around cycling safety is infuriating. It's bad enough when people jump in with incomplete multivariate comparisons and jump straight to a conclusion. You can't just compare cyclist fatalities between two cities on different sides of the planet without also why people are cycling, what they're cycling on, what's been done to cities and roads to make it safer already, etc, etc. Then you throw helmets in. More cyclists wearing helmets died? But wait, your data only shows hospital admissions from RTAs. How many cyclists in helmets rode away from their accidents? How many more road cyclists wear helmets anyway? Then you do a Dr Ian Walker and start muddying all that with psychology. Then what happens if your enforce helmets?! Everybody stops cycling and obesity rates rocket? What data says that? It's a mess. There are so many variables. Too many variables. We chase after them, trying to explain human behaviour and prove that helmets are magic, or evil; quickly forgetting how easy it is to die by one simple head trauma, and how easy it is suffer that coming off a bike. Yes, safe infrastructure appears to be a massive factor, but cities and countries that need it most can't just regenerate their road networks overnight. We should be talking about helmets as a stop-gap; a way to make cycling safer right now with the goal that regeneration follows to improve things for everyone.

60 points by jameal 4y ago

> “Mentioning whether or not Eric wore a helmet is akin to blaming an egg for cracking against a pan,” wrote Ng’s friend It's funny how reports of ejections from a crashed motor vehicle never mention that the driver wasn't wearing a seat belt as if their death was an act of god but cyclists have to be chastised as a blame shifting exercise to justify continued ostracism.

_Adam 4y ago
https://news.google.com/search?q=%22wasn%27t%20wearing%20a%20seatbelt%22&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen https://news.google.com/search?q=%22wasn%27t%20wearing%20a%2...

blakesterz 4y ago

When it comes to the dangers threatening cyclists, wearing a helmet is like bringing a knife to a gunfight. America’s top-selling vehicle model, the Ford F-Series, weighs up to 7,500 pounds. Its hood stands 4.5 feet tall—at the height of my chin. I get that point. And the other points made here about defense against traffic and cars. But helmets protect against WAY more than getting hit by a truck. They protect you when your foot gets stuck and you fall over backwards onto concrete. They protect you when you flip over and the bike comes back around and the chain ring takes a chunk out of the helmet instead of your head. Helmets stop injuries and many other ways.

LanceH 4y ago
They are hard and slick on the outside to allow your head to slide along with your body, instead of snapping; protecting your neck.
pkulak 4y ago
But by that logic we should always wear helmets. You're always at some risk of head injury.
- acomjean 4y ago
  But when walking around you aren't cruising at 10+ miles and hour in an area with multi thousand pound vehicles going a multiple of your speed.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- happytoexplain 4y ago
  There is no implication in the parent that you should wear a helmet when the risk of head injury is greater than zero (i.e. always). They only imply that bike-riding is high enough risk to warrant it.
  - pkulak 4y ago
    The implication that riding a bike puts you at higher risk of head injury than any other moderate activity is precisely what I take issue with. I'd bet good money that showering, walking up stairs, and even driving a car are all at least as dangerous to the ol' noggin.
- FrontierPsych 4y ago
  I wore a mask during the height of the pandemic and didn't mind that one bit. I liked it. I asked my grocery store clerks, who always wore masks during the height of the pandemic, if anyone got covid. None did, because they all wore masks. And they waited on tens of thousands of customers weekly. Meanwhile, 35 out of 40 of Donald Trump's inner circle got Covid because they didn't wear masks. So some people want to wear helmets and some don't. I say, whatever you want to do is fine. But just like the masks in the pandemic, don't you come whining to me if you realize after you get f-ed up that maybe you should have after all worn the mask or the helmet. Don't want to hear any none no whining no way negative uh-uh go away shut up.
acomjean 4y ago
I wear one. One day when I was you, in the spring I slipped on some sand and went down. the helmet hit first basically saving my nose. I've also been hit on the head by an acorn. Thats mild, but it could be startling enough to loose control, but it was just a noise for me.
Apes 4y ago
It's so much worse than even what you say. This article is just a continuous slow flow stream of gas lighting. Like, if the problem you notice is 7,500 pound vehicles designed to kill pedestrians, isn't the logical solution to anyone with a functioning brain to propose restricting those vehicles? What kind of lead paint eating logic does it take to conclude that the best solution is to get rid of bike helmets?
- Kim_Bruning 4y ago
  The author of the article actually doesn't propose taking away helmets. Instead the author says: "Only a suite of infrastructure changes can combat the deadliest risk to cyclists. Not helmets alone." I think the author is actually a bit careful. It is actually quite possible to make the infrastructure so safe that helmets offer little additional protection -and thus people stop wearing them-. This is (rather in a nutshell) what has happened in the Netherlands. This situation still so far from the typical (North America) experience at this moment that I would fully understand if you don't quite believe it. However, hopefully you can see there has to be some reason why all the people in eg. this video [1] aren't wearing helmets. They can't all be crazy, after all. See also [2] for a very short summary of specific bicycle infrastructure. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynwMN3Z9Og8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynwMN3Z9Og8 (Utrecht Vredenburg) [2] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/z5dvqhYQACY https://www.youtube.com/shorts/z5dvqhYQACY A Quick Intro to Dutch Bike Paths

Havoc 4y ago

Long article discussing various societal aspects and knock on effects, but ultimately the key bit is towards the end: >Regardless, experts I spoke to were unanimous about what these flaws don’t mean: that helmets are useless. They all believe you should wear one.

emmelaich 4y ago
Should is fine. Must is not.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

The conclusion makes it clear that every expert they spoke to made it unambiguously clear that helmets should be worn: > Regardless, experts I spoke to were unanimous about what these flaws don’t mean: that helmets are useless. They all believe you should wear one. This is one of those articles that reads like a lot of claims against something, even though the conclusion is very clearly in favor of it. There are some valid concerns about how bike safety needs to extend beyond just the helmet, but the middle sections trying to suggest that maybe helmets are bad just feels like bait.

twiss 4y ago
The conclusion is not in contradiction with the rest of the article. What makes sense for society to do (improve infrastructure) is not necessarily the same as what might make sense for an individual to do (wear a helmet, especially if the infrastructure is insufficient).
aksss 4y ago
Every expert would tell me not to ride a OneWheel at a high rate of speed. Doesn’t mean I won’t. Doesn’t mean I’d support city ordinances banning them. Risk evaluation is weird that way, and your answer will depend on your role in the conversation. What I would recommend for you may not be the best for me. So putting a pin in that, there are arguably more important considerations when evaluating the proposition that, “somebody should make a law”, than expert risk analysis for the genpop.
- tommiegannert 4y ago
  > Risk evaluation is weird that way, and your answer will depend on your role in the conversation. What I would recommend for you may not be the best for me. Asking the "why" one or two more levels, we end up in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimism_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimism_bias. Which suggests you should let someone else evaluate the risk to you.
pwinnski 4y ago
In a society shaped by misguided efforts to keep bike riders safe, the smart move for any individual cyclist is to wear a helmet. Better for all would be to reshape society so that helmets weren't required, but in the US, at least, that's not where we are, so for now: wear a helmet.

_Adam 4y ago

The article tries extensively to dance around the fact that all else being equal, if your head is hitting the ground you're better off wearing a helmet. In the worst cases, you aren't worse off. Acceleration is what kills, and because you can't change the starting speed nor the end speed (0 m/s), all you can change is time. That doesn't mean they have to be enforced legally, of course. So rather than attacking the merits of helmets, the argument made in the article would be more compelling if it focused on the unalienable right of humans to get severely injured doing stupid stuff for fun or profit.

treeman79 4y ago
Got hired into a company to replace a guy that didn’t wear a helmet. He came in to visit about a year later. He could sort of talk and walk a little by that point. Few years earlier my office Kate declared on Friday he was going to buy a motorcycle. Came in Monday with a broken leg. To each their own. But I’ll stick to a car with a high safety rating.
- karamanolev 4y ago
  Ah, cars. Heralded as the future for humanity, the awesome big steel cans they are.
- cassepipe 4y ago
  Public transportation is rather safe if you live in a city where it exists. Then you don't have to contribute to the car society and all its ills
threetonesun 4y ago
Ask any mountain biker and they'll give you this conclusion from experience, almost all of us have had some low-speed awkward crash where a helmet was the difference between getting up and walking away or laying in the woods with an open head wound. If I'm riding on the road do I expect a helmet to help if I'm run over or hit at high speed? Not really. But if someone clips me and I hit the pavement I'd rather something than nothing.

davidw 4y ago

At an individual level, helmet wearing makes sense, but at a societal level, designing infrastructure better is where it's at in terms of keeping people safe, and that's probably a far bigger win.

toast0 4y ago
As a sometimes frequent cyclist, I'm hoping a helmet is going to protect me from solo accidents more than car v bike; better bike infrastructure isn't going to help much with solo accidents (although it would eliminate trolley rail v bike, so there's one). Actually, if there was better infrastructure, I'd probably be able to travel at higher speed, and therefore have more danger in solo accidents. Making me ride on the shitty pavement at the edge of the road, and watch out for cars everywhere slows me down, and reduces my danger. :P In car v bike, a helmet may or may not help, I'm definitely going to lose, either way. Thankfully, I've never had a car v bike, but I've had plenty of solo crashes, although I think I've been lucky enough not to hit my head.
- davidw 4y ago
  > Making me ride on the shitty pavement at the edge of the road, and watch out for cars everywhere slows me down, and reduces my danger. :P Statistically, it does not.
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  > Actually, if there was better infrastructure, I'd probably be able to travel at higher speed, and therefore have more danger in solo accidents. That really doesn't happen in the Netherlands, however. I mean, ya, those grannies on bikes seem aggressive, but they aren't going very fast, Dutch bikers wearing suits are not like Americans bikers wearing spandex. Biking as a normalized transportation thing means speed isn't as common compared to biking as some kind of recreational sport.
FrontierPsych 4y ago
I never understood the whole "designing infrastructure better" thing. Most large cities are fully built out. You can't design infrastructure better as the infrastructure is already there. Maybe on brand new places being built, but that won't help Chicago or San Francisco or Los Angeles. You can't just use eminent domain and take out all buildings and highrises on both sides of Market Street in San Francisco to build a 10 foot wide roadway only for bicycles on each side. It's the same with public transportation as well, especially light rail. To put in light rail in some cities, you would have to rip up tens of thousands of homes and businesses. I never did get this whole argument. It's like saying that you should make a better infrastructure for the human body. I for one, would like it if my anus would be right over my achilles tendon, that way if I shit my pants, it wouldn't dribble all down my leg, it would just be there on the ground already with minimum fuss.

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midasuni 4y ago

Head injuries are a leading form of death for car occupants, so why don’t we wear helmets when driving? “While car accidents contribute about 14% of the aggregate TBI cases in the US, they are the leading cause of TBI-related deaths among children and young adults” https://treatnow.org/knowledgebase/car-accidents-and-brain-injury-statistics-2020/ https://treatnow.org/knowledgebase/car-accidents-and-brain-i...

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
Do helmets protect against TBI? A piece of metal going 50 mph is a different beast from blunt-force trauma.
paulryanrogers 4y ago
Because cars have more and more airbags?
jbandela1 4y ago
Seatbelts and airbags in modern cars are basically doing what a helmet tries to do which is protect your head from hitting something hard (like the windshield or steering wheel etc. In a modern car driving along a normal road, I don't think a helmet would add much additional protection. Speaking from experience treating traumatic brain injuries, the brain injuries that are common in a car (as long as you are wearing a seatbelt and don't get the) is something called diffuse axonal injury (DAI) also know and traumatic axonal injury (TAI) which is diffuse brain injury caused by the (de)acceleration/rotational acceleration. A helmet would not be much help against those types of injuries.
crackercrews 4y ago
> Head injuries are a leading form of death for car occupants, so why don’t we wear helmets when driving? What percent of bicyclists have been in an accident that would benefit from a helmet? Must be at least 10x the percent of car occupants who have been in such an accident.
oliwarner 4y ago
It is critical to understand that "car accidents" does not mean "occupants in car accidents". It means accidents involving a car; many will be car vs pedestrian and car vs [motor]cyclist.

magicalhippo 4y ago

I've only been in one bicycle accident. I was being a dumbass and attempted a sudden stop on a small iron bridge, when it had rained the previous night after a dry spell. The wooden deck was thus very slippery, and about one second after touching the brakes the bike was horizontal and I smacked the side of my body and helmet against the wooden deck. Since it happened so quickly, my hands were still holding the handlebars when I hit the deck. While not concrete, that wood wasn't exactly pliable and while I have no idea what would have happened without a helmet, I'm quite glad I didn't get to find out.

zwieback 4y ago
This is how I broke my hip, it was so fast I couldn't even get my feet out of the pedals. I've been riding my bike for 50 years and I wear a helmet when I feel like it could potentially help but most of the time I don't. Statistically what I do makes no sense at all but wearing a helmet is enough of an annoyance that I only do it in specific situations.
- latchkey 4y ago
  You crashed unexpectedly, yet you think you can predict when you're going to need to wear a helmet.
  - zwieback 4y ago
    No, my point was that what I'm doing makes no sense and I suspect lots of people are in the same boat. Of course helmets help in the specific situation a helmet is for but it's hard to convince people to change their habit for something that's rare and unexpected.
    - magicalhippo 4y ago
      Sure it's rare and unexpected. But if it does happen, the consequences of not wearing a helmet can be significant. Similar reason why I wear a seat belt. Being involved in a car crash is rare and unexpected, but the consequences of not wearing a seat belt when involved in a crash can be significant, so I use it.

emmelaich 4y ago

I've been riding bikes for over 50 years. I'm legally required to wear a helmet but I don't when I'm just poking along the local parks on the way to the shops. I could get fined :-( There's a strong cycling culture around here. Some of them ride in packs on some major roads. I'd never do that, with or without a helmet. Recently there was a major incident. One death, a bunch injured. The dead one had their head severed. The helmet didn't help. [edit: I usually do wear a helmet for any major ride]

jeffbee 4y ago
In what jurisdiction are adult bicyclists required by law to wear helmets?
- ryukafalz 4y ago
  Australia, for one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_helmets_in_Australia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_helmets_in_Australia
- cldellow 4y ago
  King County, Washington (Seattle) Edit: actually, repealed last year due to racism [1] [1]: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/king-county-repeals-mandatory-bicycle-helmet-law/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/kin...

iamleppert 4y ago

Why don't they use the revenue from the helmet tickets of the privileged, white riders (who clearly have the money to buy a helmet) to provide free helmets to brown and black riders? That seems to me like the better solution and would drastically improve equality.

twiss 4y ago
Why not use it for building better biking infrastructure instead? The entire article is about how that'd have a better ROI.
- crackercrews 4y ago
  I get the point you're trying to make. But they never actually talk about ROI. Helmets are cheap. Infrastructure is expensive. I would be surprised if infrastructure changes had a higher ROI than helmets. It's just that some people don't want to wear helmets. That's what this was all about.
  - twiss 4y ago
    Infrastructure changes happen anyway. Roads get widened, reorganized, and maintained all the time. It's just a question of what the available space should get allocated to. The Netherlands didn't change their infrastructure overnight. They changed the infrastructure standards instead, and whenever a road needs to be redone, they upgrade it to the new standards. This took ~30-50 years, but had amazing results. Of course it can be done faster if you want, and then it will be more expensive as well. But if you want to do it cheaply, you can absolutely get a very high ROI this way.
BoorishBears 4y ago
I'm black, I wear a $200 helmet. Certain races are disproportionally affected by inequality, but treating my race as equivalent to poverty is pretty damn insulting.

happytoexplain 4y ago

I've never bounced off a title so hard. "Safety obsession" is an absurd phrase in this context. No society on earth is "obsessed" with the safety of adults, in the way we use the word "obsessed" to e.g. describe helicopter parents. One can easily argue that specific rules are ineffective or have unintended effects, as the body of the article appears to at a glance, but that's not a problem with being somehow overly-dedicated to safety - it's a problem with making rules. Making rules is a hard problem.

karamanolev 4y ago
Regardless of the merits of the article, as a European, "safety obsessed" describes my experiences in the US. Not a good or a bad thing, each society makes its own choices, but for me, the US is safety obsessed. And that comes from someone who rides 10k+ miles a year and always wears a helmet.
nostrebored 4y ago
Our society in the U.S. is absolutely obsessed with safety. The level of risk aversion in western society today is crazy. Part of our safety obsession is helicopter parenting.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  If the US were truly obsessed with safety, they'd ban guns and make cars much more inconvenient to own and use. As it is, any moron can buy a gun or drive a car with pretty much zero training. As an American, I honestly have no idea what you're talking about: the US is by far the least safe society among developed nations. If you want to see risk-averse to a fault, come to Japan. US society is anything but risk-averse. It has its elements of risk-aversion (notably your helicopter parenting, which is actually completely absent here in Japan, as little kids routinely walk around alone here), but overall, it is anything but. I'd say the helicopter parenting is actually a reaction, by a portion of parents, to the extreme danger present in daily life in America. By contrast, no one blinks an eye here in Tokyo when little kids ride the subway by themselves because it's so safe.

thoiu23oi4u234 4y ago

[flagged]

emmelaich 4y ago
You're agreeing with the article. Regarding the law, if it's selectively enforced it is worse than no law.
fallingknife 4y ago
If you can afford a bike, you can afford a helmet https://www.amazon.com/s?k=bike+helmet https://www.amazon.com/s?k=bike+helmet. I don't think there should be a law either, but the whole thing about it being unfair to minorities is complete garbage.

mperham 4y ago

The problem isn't bikes or helmets. You can count on one hand the number of cyclists who die every year in the Netherlands and no one wears a helmet there. The problem is cars. Cars kill the people they hit.

deadbunny 4y ago
You must have a lot of fingers. https://www.statista.com/statistics/523310/netherlands-number-of-cyclist-road-fatalities/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/523310/netherlands-numbe...
- mperham 4y ago
  I meant to say "die due to lack of helmet as the only factor". They die because they are hit by cars.
- twiss 4y ago
  Although I don't want to trivialize any of these deaths, I think it's important to note that the elderly (especially people over 70) are overrepresented in these statistics: https://opendata.cbs.nl/#/CBS/nl/dataset/71936ned/table?dl=76B4D https://opendata.cbs.nl/#/CBS/nl/dataset/71936ned/table?dl=7... In my opinion, it's great (and in general very healthy) that the elderly are still biking a lot in the Netherlands. However, it does seem that it's a bit riskier for them than for the general population.

munk-a 4y ago

> Helmet mandates intimidate potential riders, they argued, by framing cycling as an activity so dangerous it necessitates body armor. But that's sort of the point in America. The act of not being in a car is a non-standard and dangerous option compared to the rest of the world.

valtism 4y ago
It's also like arguing that seat belts discourage potential drivers, by framing it as an activity so dangerous it necessitates safety mechanisms. Of course it's dangerous. I would personally barely ever ride without a helmet. I see so many arguments like this postulating on hypothetical situations where life without helmets would be better, but they all come across as justifications for not really wanting to wear a helmet. I think it's very important to have them required by law, so that it is not seen as a cool or rebellious thing to not wear one. It's just normal.
- Kim_Bruning 4y ago
  I disagree. I think the opposite should happen. I think that governments should make the roads so incredibly safe that helmets become (largely) redundant. Only a couple of countries have gotten near to this goal so far, sadly (and we can still always do better).

nostrebored 4y ago

What we should care about is the aggregate public health impact of the intervention. In the case of bicycles and motorcycles I think people attribute magical safety benefits to helmets that don’t exist. Similar to protective gear in hockey actually increasing injuries I suspect that the impact of helmets is bimodal: some people respect the risk of going XX mph nearly unprotected and others view their protective gear as a shield. I’m also willing to bet that the biggest change in safety for bike helmets is actually people outside of the urban areas most likely to have safety mandates

analog31 4y ago

I've been an avid cyclist for 50 years, am a daily year-round bike commuter in a mid sized city in the Midwest, and use my bike for both transportation and recreation. "Single minded devotion to the helmet" makes for engaging controversy, but it isn't what I observe out here in the trenches. People wear helmets, but they almost always choose routes with less car traffic when possible. In my opinion, route choice is probably the single most important cycling safety measure. What it suggests to me is that real riders are actually making pretty good safety choices.

rascul 4y ago
I don't ride much currently, but when I did, I would go out of my way for routes that were easier and safer to ride, usually due to less traffic. I was able to relax a bit and it was a nicer and more enjoyable ride.
- analog31 4y ago
  I have a rule of thumb, to avoid any route where two or more lanes of traffic are going in the same direction. Those are the places where traffic is fast and heavy, and people are not completely in control of their cars. Also, those are the places where car crashes tend to occur -- especially at intersections. And I figure if cars can crash into other cars, which they do, then they can crash into bikes.

BlackFly 4y ago

I grew up in Canada, where helmets are required by law and barely anybody cycles to commute. I immigrated to the Netherlands where cycling is a casual and de facto mode of transportation and helmets feel gratuitous and unnecessarily hampering. I'm currently visiting my family in Canada where the sidewalks are so icy simply stepping out of the house risks head injury, but nevertheless wearing a helmet to protect myself as a pedestrian seems gratuitous and unnecessarily hampering. Casual skating? Little to no helmets. Amateur ice hockey? People start wearing helmets. Yes, wearing a helmet will protect you from a head injury from falling, but some things should be people centered and "it protects you" is really reductive. North America is really centered around automobile usage, even pedestrians are relegated to beg buttons and cycling nor simply walking about often doesn't feel like the casual activity that it can be.

twiss 4y ago
Are you https://www.youtube.com/@NotJustBikes https://www.youtube.com/@NotJustBikes? ;)
- BlackFly 4y ago
  I am not, but when I first came across that channel I was relieved to hear a kindred spirit.
oliwarner 4y ago
You appear to have confused "requiring a helmet" with "has great cycle infrastructure, terrain, climate, population density and generations of social pressure". The Dutch cycle because it's easier than driving. The reason it's safer comes down to many factors. Just the city planning and redevelopment to make it safe counts for most of it. They didn't get to this point by not requiring helmets.
- BlackFly 4y ago
  I haven't confused anything. There are some debates in the Netherlands to require helmets and these debates focus on the injury prevention aspect to the exclusion of any other concern. By comparing cycling to the injury risk of falling on ice or just tripping over your own feet, I'm appealing to people's intuition on the importance of balancing the mild inconvenience of a helmet, with the low risk of falling and the severity of injury of falling. The article establishes that helmets are not designed for collision injury mitigation but instead falling. Helmet usage on ice typically increases with vigor of activity, and in the Netherlands you see the same intuition with helmet use: low velocity commuters rarely wear helmets, almost all high speed sports cyclists wear one. Laws and these debates on usage instead rarely show such common sense.

throw7 4y ago

So if whites were ticketed more for wearing helmets that would be perfectly fine? I don't like this newspeak. I suppose there is this ideal ticketing distribution we are not told of that would keep the law on the books? I am pro helmet, but anti-nanny laws. I don't wear my helmet when I'm making a local trip to the grocery, but will on longer varied rides. God help me if I were ticketed for not wearing a helmet. I ski too... and don't wear a helmet... I'm not a maniac on the slopes. My 2 cents.

1shooner 4y ago
I think the point is that for average, white, middle-class people, the helmet is part of the little bike hobby kit you keep in your garage, but in reality there are many people perhaps more economically and legally vulnerable that have a greater need to ride a bike and less convenient access to safety equipment.

LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago

Can't have them. Automatically bad hair day. Also impairs my 'third eye' as in sense of hearing, thus my situational awareness. Also one more piece of kit to lug around. No, thanks, keep it! Wear these if you feel like it: https://www.gettyimages.de/fotos/michelin-man https://www.gettyimages.de/fotos/michelin-man I won't!

NoPicklez 4y ago

There was a post recently in Australia where someone posted a picture of their helmet broken, saying they were glad to have been wearing a helmet. There were countless posts of people having been involved in all sorts of accidents either from automobiles or themselves and all said that their life may have been altered following the accident had they not been wearing a helmet. Having grown up in Australia where they're mandatory, I don't think twice about it. I find the bickering about helmet safety in the US something very similar to your gun laws and gun violence. Stop bickering and splitting hairs and wear a damn helmet. You have to wear them when you're on two wheels with an engine.

latchkey 4y ago
Reminds me of this one... "A Florida attorney who opposed the state’s helmet law dies in a motorcycle crash. He wasn’t wearing a helmet. Ron Smith, who spent over a decade fighting Florida laws that required the use of helmets, represented a number of clients who violated state motorcycle requirements." https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/florida-attorney-opposed-state-helmet-law-dies-motorcycle-crash-not-we-rcna54095 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/florida-attorney-oppose...
- Kim_Bruning 4y ago
  I think that this article is about human-powered bicycles? In most of the countries I know of where normal commuters don't wear helmets on their bicycles, people do wear them on racing bikes, mountain bikes, mopeds, motorcycles etc. They are in different risk categories.
  - latchkey 4y ago
    The OPs point was more about the bickering than what vehicle. FYI, there are states in the US that don't require motorcycle helmets, which is also part of that bickering. In terms of risk... a head injury is a head injury... it doesn't necessarily matter how fast you're going or on what vehicle. I spent 4 years living in Vietnam. Helmets are mandatory there, but few people wear ones that would actually help you in an accident. They just wear a plastic cap that gets past the law. Other countries in SE Asia are similar.

insane_dreamer 4y ago

The point is not that you shouldn’t wear a helmet — you should whether in the city or not — but that cities enforcing helmet laws should instead be focusing on policies and urban changes that improve the safety of riders by creating a safer riding environment rather than putting all the onus on the cyclists.

philonoist 4y ago

Offtopic: Is there a helmet for Neck safety? I am more concerned about the cranium to spine down.

Enginerrrd 4y ago
Kind of. Wearing a dirt-biking helmet and a neck-protector might help, but evidence is limited.
- philonoist 4y ago
  Yep! I have to be entrepreneur here.

Woodi 4y ago

Everythingwrong.... Safer but drop law. Law but only some peoples are ticketed. Biking is what everybody know it is but helmets change impression and be a thread to healthy occupation. Safety obsession ? More like fear of lawyers and you never know when multi-milion verdict hits you... Looks like law is actual problem in freedom country...

oliwarner 4y ago

The discourse around cycling safety is infuriating. It's bad enough when people jump in with incomplete multivariate comparisons and jump straight to a conclusion. You can't just compare cyclist fatalities between two cities on different sides of the planet without also why people are cycling, what they're cycling on, what's been done to cities and roads to make it safer already, etc, etc. Then you throw helmets in. More cyclists wearing helmets died? But wait, your data only shows hospital admissions from RTAs. How many cyclists in helmets rode away from their accidents? How many more road cyclists wear helmets anyway? Then you do a Dr Ian Walker and start muddying all that with psychology. Then what happens if your enforce helmets?! Everybody stops cycling and obesity rates rocket? What data says that? It's a mess. There are so many variables. Too many variables. We chase after them, trying to explain human behaviour and prove that helmets are magic, or evil; quickly forgetting how easy it is to die by one simple head trauma, and how easy it is suffer that coming off a bike. Yes, safe infrastructure appears to be a massive factor, but cities and countries that need it most can't just regenerate their road networks overnight. We should be talking about helmets as a stop-gap; a way to make cycling safer right now with the goal that regeneration follows to improve things for everyone.