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.
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.
Skateboard helmet saved me from taking a piece of rebar to the temple. Mountain bike helmet saved me from taking a jagged rock to the back of my head. Ski helmet saved me from taking the corner of a park rail to my forehead.
There's there more than one kind of crash and more than one kind of serious/fatal head injury.
That said, a childhood friend of mine who became a sponsored snowboarder suffered a severe head injury while shooting an ad, and is still mentally and physically disabled from it (wheelchair bound to this day).
All to say, I’m well aware of the risks and have a list of anecdotes to support any direction you want to take them, but none of it has made me a fan of helmet laws for adults.
Of course, individual bikers can also still wear a helmet, but they should also demand proper biking infrastructure.
You mean, I think, that it fails to improve it in the way you would like. Or are you actually asserting that making people wear helmets actually reduces safety?
It's totally possible that a helmet saves your life/head with no cars involved. Happened to me a couple months ago.
Helmets should be required and infrastructure should be great.
The argument you are making is appealing, to be sure. I'd even go so far as to say I agree with it. Strictly, it is a non-sequitur to the point that is being made.
The only mention I saw of this in the article is a study where the cyclist wearing a helmet had a shorter average distance between bike and car than when not wearing a helmet.
Do you have another source, or are we going to base legislation on one study by one individual in one city?
That's definitely not a right, so it would be less convincing than just sticking to statistics (or as you refer to them, dances.)
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.
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'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.
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.
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?
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 (Utrecht Vredenburg)
[2] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/z5dvqhYQACY A Quick Intro to Dutch Bike Paths
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.
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.
Statistically, it does not.
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.
Things like protected intersections (https://momentummag.com/protected-intersections-latest-trend...) do not take more space.
Things that play against many American city is that density might not be sufficient, but for cities like SF density is probably enough and you have so much space dedicated to cars that you can reclain.
On Market Street i can see some non protected bike lane that were already reclaimed from car lane. In some years this might turn in protected bike lane.
By just reducing the width of car lanes (which help reduce speeding) you can probably build bike lane in many US streets ...
The goal isn't to create pedestrian and cyclist space from building footprints, it's to repurpose the existing roads and streets away from cars, to pedestrian and cyclist use.
Here are a few links to examples of successful conversions. Please note that no buildings were torn down to make any of this happen.
https://globaldesigningcities.org/publication/global-street-...
https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2022/06/21/seven-stroads-ha...
I live in a suburb of Dallas, Texas. Most people would say it's "fully built out" despite the oodles of new construction happening just slightly farther away from the city center. Still, light rail is being built right through Plano and Richardson and Addison, all existing built-out suburbs. The "Silver Line" will be done in a few years without tearing down tens of thousands of existing homes and businesses.
https://dart.org/about/project-and-initiatives/expansion/sil...
Yes but it needs constant maintenance. Choosing to keep repairing it in order for it to keep serving its current purpose (as a pathway exclusively for large motorised vehicles) might be the easiest option, but it's still a choice that has to be made. Undoubtedly the existence of buildings/residences/other infrastructure puts restraints on what you can do to redesign particular roads etc., but it doesn't make it impossible. And from what I recall, many (most?) of LA's freeways look as though they were simply built over the top of an already "fully built out" city anyway.
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.
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.
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.
Because unless you live and work in some of the pre-WW2 communities/cities/neighbourhoods, you probably live in car-centric suburbs, so the distances involved are impractical.
I was consulting in Atlanta once and people thought I was insane to walk two miles to the office.
Don't get me wrong, the infrastructure is car centric, but the culture is very anti pedestrian and anti bicycle. It is a vicious cycle where the infrastructure pushes people to car culture and that drives the infrastructure. However the flipside of the culture is a lack of sympathy for pedestrians and cycling which creates a lot of tension and with it danger.
In North America, it seems to me, people view cycling as a child's activity or a dangerous sport. People push safety in both cases. In the Netherlands, at all distances, people are more willing to view cycling as an ordinary human activity from a commute to a vacation across the continent.
“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-i...
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.
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.
It means accidents involving a car; many will be car vs pedestrian and car vs [motor]cyclist.
> 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.
Asking the "why" one or two more levels, we end up in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimism_bias. Which suggests you should let someone else evaluate the risk to you.
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.
The problem is cars. Cars kill the people they hit.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/523310/netherlands-numbe...
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.
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]
Edit: actually, repealed last year due to racism [1]
[1]: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/kin...
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.
"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-oppose...
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.
Can you translate that into dutch?
And that comes from someone who rides 10k+ miles a year and always wears a helmet.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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).
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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
No, thanks, keep it!
Wear these if you feel like it:
https://www.gettyimages.de/fotos/michelin-man
I won't!