Riding on roads isn't like mountain biking where you mostly control the amount of risk you take on. Riding on roads puts you at the mercy of other people's choices. I feel the need to wear a helmet anytime I'm riding on a road for that reason.
I wear a full-face helmet on a mountain bike, too.
My point is that when mountain biking, you encounter varied terrain and obstacles and you decide how to approach that based on your skill and experience. Some approaches are riskier than others. And sometimes you decide the best thing to do is just nope out and ride or walk around whatever it is.
I think you're referring to Ian Walker's study. Yes, motorists on average passed helmeted cyclists closer than non-helmeted ones. The difference in average passing distance wasn't huge (1.3 m vs. 1.2 m) and was still a safe distance.
Does it? That's a supposition, not a scientific fact. Presumably they all paid some attention by passing at a safe distance. I don't see why someone paying more attention would pass further away.
I have not read the study, but I would hope that they had the cyclists wearing the same clothes and riding on the same stretch of road in all tests. Otherwise you will end up with the situation where helmeted riders are more likely to be riding fast on roads that aren't as safe for cycling, Which would naturally lead to differences in driver behavior around them.
When you get side-swept by a car you're going to fall. Getting rammed from the side or behind is not the only collision scenario, and getting side-swept seems like an extremely more likely scenario in London out of all places, where traffic in general is slow.
I'm not sure I agree. I have a family member that had a car turn in front of the without warning (they were in a cycle lane, the car turned across the flow of traffic without looking or indicating), and they hit the side of the car and landed on the other side head first. They were left without any significant injuries - I'm not sure the outcome would have been as favourable without a helmet.
"it is studied" Source please? This sounds like absolute bullshit. I've known so many people who have been killed or permanently disfigured because they didn't wear a helmet while biking in a large city. Cars don't give a fuck about us.
> The distribution of overtaking events shifted just over one-fifth of a standard deviation closer to the rider – a potentially important behaviour if, as theoretical frameworks suggest, near-misses and collisions lie on a continuum.
Looking at the graph in figure 1, "one-fifth of a standard" looks as unimpressive as expected. The distance from the kerb looks much more relevant.
IIUC all the analysis is based on 2355 data gathered by Walker riding a bike himself a few years ago between two cities. It's not a mix of data from different persons or a mix of city and countryside rides. The most interesting part is that Walker published 5 articles about the same data, and he got a different result in each one.
Yes, but you're missing that overtaking events is just one of the metrics in question.
You're right that perhaps it is a big difference between cyclists, my guess would be the number of cars matters more than the number of cyclists. The study has been replicated elsewhere.
> Walker published 5 articles about the same data, and he got a different result in each one.
Uh, no? The 8.5 cm result has been consistent.
At the margin, these things make a difference, especially given that collisions are rare as a fraction for rides taken.
> This sounds like absolute bullshit. I've known so many people who have been killed or permanently disfigured because they didn't wear a helmet while biking in a large city.
When I was at uni and was cycling to a 10am lecture, a small van pulled out of a side road across my path. I was in a cycle lane and had right of way. He simply didn't look in my direction until he had already started to pull out. I was unable to stop or avoid him, so hit the front of his van head on, was briefly airborne, and landed on the road on the other side. Miraculously only scuffs and bruises, although my bike was a write-off. At that point I started wearing a helmet(!!!)
The next year, one of my friends went over the handlebars of her bike during a collision, except she landed head-first on the road, thankfully she was wearing a helmet. The helmet was split, she walked away with nothing other than mild concussion. Another friend and I walked out to rescue her bike later from the accident location, it also was a write-off.
Once you've seen a bike accident up-close there is simply no justification for not wearing a helmet. Even if you haven't seen an accident, wear a helmet!
Wikipedia links to this study[1] which found a difference of about 8,5cm in average, which sounds far from significant from a safety perspective (and again according to Wikipedia this study has been disputed).
There was one study about that, which was... not very robust science. It relied on self-report of the biker (and if I remember correctly, it was just a single one, so not enough data).
Fair enough, although it relied on video data, not self report, and included over 2300 cars. Perhaps it would have been different for different cyclists.
You're right, although I think you would find that it is very common for people to incorrectly generalize all sorts of studies beyond their geographic purview given that most psychological studies are conducted in regions close to major research unis. See also the "WEIRD" phenomenon.
> It relied on self-report of the biker (and if I remember correctly, it was just a single one, so not enough data).
Unless I'm misunderstanding what's meant by "self-reporting", it sounds like regardless of how many riders they got data from, it would say that there are 0 fatalities to bikers because people who are dead don't respond to surveys.
This is not a study of biker fatalities and my intuitive guess is they would be significantly higher for bikers without helmets for a number of reasons.
I agree that they would likely be higher for bikers without helments; I guess I misunderstood what the study was about, but my point was that if you relied on self-reporting for the number of fatalities, nobody would be able to report that they died for obvious reasons.
The study was performed by Ian Walker. Self reporting means he was both the researcher and the cyclist - he rode his bike, reported the data, then analyzed it. There were no surveys or other riders. Unless you count "female Walker", when he wore a wig.
Could you reply with the study showing the opposite using new data? It should be pretty easy given that there is always a study showing you what you want.
"A Trek hybrid bicycle was fitted with a Massa M-5000/95 temperature-compensated ultrasonic distance sensor with its centre 0.77 m from the ground, facing perpendicularly to the direction of travel and feeding into a laptop computer running MultiLab software via a MultiLog Pro data-logger sampling from the sensor at 50 Hz."
This study is done by the same researcher as the first. I applaud Walker for studying this, but both his studies have a sample size of one cyclist - himself, riding in one area of one country. [He did put a wig on sometimes, so maybe you could say the sample size is 2? ]
The problems is that cars passing cyclists isn't the only time adverse car-cyclist interactions occur.
I have been T-boned by a driver approaching from the opposite direction, in full daylight with no visual disruptions, when they failed to "look bike" and turned across my lane. They totally did not see me - so they fact I was wearing a helmet did not factor at all into the situation.
I was flipped through the air and landed 10m down the side road on my back. My backpack took the brunt of of the impact but my head still snapped back and hit the ground. The helmet protected my head and prevented what would have at least been a concussion and possibly a fractured skull.
In my 30+ years of regularly cycling on roads, I'd say the majority of close calls I've had have happened in with cars turning out of side streets of with cars turning across my lane from the opposite direction. Those are due to a combination of the following in my perceived order of likelihood:
- the driver checking for cars/buses/trucks and not looking for motorcycles or bicycles
- the driver seeing the cyclist but totally misjudging their speed and assuming they have time to complete their turn in front of the bike
- the driver being as asshole and cutting off the cyclist.
_Maybe_ the cyclist wearing helmet could affect the second scenario. It doesn't affect the first scenario and assholes are assholes regardless of helmet wearing.
I've had less trouble with close/reckless overtaking. It does happen, but it is highly unlike the car driver completely fails to see a cyclist they are overtaking.
Saying helmets reduce rider safety due to one scenario, where the car driver has to see the helmet and thus the cyclist in order to make a more risky overtaking gap judgement call, seems like a massive stretch to me.
As an active cyclist that was my first thought. Auto drivers texting while driving is my bigger concern. I wear a helmet to hopefully survive that encounter.
There is none, the “risk compensation” theory is a myth invented by Sam Peltzman without any evidence for the phenomenon (but as a good member of the Chicago school of Economics, his goal wasn't to make scientific discovery backed by facts, but to create a narrative against state regulations of any kind)
Other participants take less risk with riders not wearing helmets. There's data on this. For example they leave more room between the bicycle and a car when they are passing.
Is the data you're talking about the data from Ian Walker's study in Bath, England? The sample size was one rider - himself. Other folks have analyzed his raw data and disputed the statistical power of the effect described. That rebuttal has also been re-rebutted. So that's three published studies about this, and three sets of headlines, but as far as I can tell, there's only ever been one actual study that collected data, and it was based on one dude in one area of one country.
There's an easy fix for that; drive in the middle of the lane. At least where I live it's impossible to legally overtake a cyclist without switching lanes so for anyone driving correctly it doesn't make a difference anyway. Of course that's not a hard rule for every situation, but after a couple situations that almost killed me I just try to reduce risks. Car drivers hate us either way.
Because several family members and I have experienced head injuries riding bicycles, none of us have been shot at or attacked with a knife. That said, I'm down for making all private gun possession illegal.
There may be some reporting issues with your data. For example how many helmets prevented would've-been-reported head injuries? How many injuries aren't reported? And how many hours on bicycle are there compared to constantly living around so many guns?
A natural experiment may require comparing similar communities with and with helmet laws.
Shootings and stabbings on the other had are difficult to not report. And can happen regardless of proximity to bicycles.
Ultimately let's do both: get helmets for kids and get rid of so many guns.
Many walkers and joggers wear a lit up harness (or even bicycle lights) to improve their visibility while walking after dark in my area. So yes, some wear safety gear.
If you cycle a lot, you're almost guaranteed to crash at some point. Falling from walking or jogging is extremely unlikely. You also have much better chance of blocking the fall with your arms, as they're not on a handlebar, but rather already balancing your body.
I used to be an EMT. There was one week when I went to two different calls that illustrated this perfectly. Both riders middle aged, both at low speed. One wearing a helmet hit a pothole and had minor facial injuries despite going over the handlebars. The other no helmet and out of practice fell sideways and the first thing to hit the kerb was her head. She's permanently disabled and living in a care facility.
> Statistically 'in real life' extremely rare for this to happen.
Just like most forms of harm; most of the time that you take some form of insurance against a negative event, it's not necessarily because of the likelihood of that event, but the sheer totality of the harm that will occur if that extremely rare event comes to pass.
Sorry, but this is a bad, dumb comment. Your point is valid generally, but not here.
What is the COST of wearing a helmet? $60 purchase and 5 seconds every time you ride. Essentially nothing.
Compare to, e.g. TSA, which has a cost of billions of dollars and millions of person-hours. Unlike helmets, which are known to actually prevent some injuries, TSA is also effectively useless at its intended goal.
> It's hypocritical of you to not be wearing full body chain mail to protect yourself from bullets and stabbings.
In most countries, the risk of shootings or stabbings are orders of magnitude lower than having a fall or accident on a bike on the road with other types of vehicles.
In certain parts of the US, though? Yeah, wearing body armor would probably be a good idea. I think people just generally try to avoid going to those places as their strategy of risk avoidance, which negates the need for any body armor.
A minor fall on a bike that results in a blow to the head can kill you or give you major brain damage. I am not a social person and I know as in we would hug if we saw each other 2 people who had life altering brain damage not wearing a helmet.
The "tiny risk" and potentially large consequences is why people should choose to wear helmets, regardless of experience. You never quite know when an accident is going to happen and it is difficult to account for that. The big risks are easier to account for, to be alert and modify your behaviour accordingly.
I have seen experienced ice skaters go from not wearing a helmet to being fanatical about wearing one, simply because they had an accident and had to deal with the consequences. I have also seen experienced cyclists who would have likely lost their life if they weren't wearing a helmet.
As for the company in question, which (incidently) was insisting that employees not wear helmets, it sounds more like a decision based upon the perceptions of customers. If they were truly interested in hiring people who are safety conscious, they would hire people who are safety conscious rather than those who are willing to ride without a helmet. There are more than a few people who don't wear helmets who have an astronomically high tollerance of risk.
Out of all the people who are vehemently arguing that it is pure idiocy not to wear a helmet, how many of them wear a helmet when driving? I can pretty safely guess that the answer is a big fat zero.
Driving is high risk activity that can lead to severe head injuries. It is even easier to keep a helmet with your car than with your bike. The cost to risk profile here is extremely similar but the resultant behavior is quite different.
People rarely approach risks rationally and risk avoidance behavior is highly influenced by social acceptability.
During my lifetime of skiing, I have seen the shift from nobody wearing helmets to most people wearing them. The ski patrols worked hard to make helmet wearing first socially acceptable and then socially expected (at least in some groups.) The risks didn't changed, there was some rise in awareness, but the biggest change (from my perspective) is social.
This I see the vehement support for helmet wearing as predominantly cultural alignment enforcement rather than reasoned risk avoidance analysis.
Personally, I always wear a helmet skiing because it is more comfortable, plus I ski FAST sometimes. I rarely wear a helmet on a bicycle because I bike slow and strongly try to avoid situations where my safety is in the hands of other drivers. Instead I stick to mostly quiet residential streets, bike paths, or separated bike lines. The helmet has a much larger impact on my risk profile when skiing than biking because of my behaviors.
All that said, I don't think that the company should ban standard safety gear for their riders. Especially since they claim to have good incident tracking, they should be able to find and let go any riders who act recklessly with a helmet.
> Driving is high risk activity that can lead to severe head injuries. It is even easier to keep a helmet with your car than with your bike. The cost to risk profile here is extremely similar but the resultant behavior is quite different.
Just FTR, don't wear a helmet while driving a car. It will massively increase the strain on your spine in the case of a crash and your airbags are not built with helmets in mind. Additionally, car helmets are usually of the full-size kind and reduce your field of vision quite a bit. There's a reason helmets are not recommended for normal driving.
Is there even a need for a helmet in most motor vehicles? Many safety features are already incorporated into the vehicle and the vehicle itself must meet safety standards. Contrast that to bicycles, which are often sold without legally mandated safety features and it is very much possible to purchase a new bicycle which should be considered criminally unsafe.[1]
The only reason why we are asking these questions is because things that are legally required for automakers is left, at best, as a responsibility to the consumer when it comes to bicycles.
[1] To be specific, any department store should be regarded as a death trap prior to a knowledgeable person verifying that it has been assembled properly. Even then one has to be careful since the components are typically intended for very light use.
Anecdotally I bought a very fast electric scooter last year, but initially I didn't have a helmet. It took about two weeks to finally receive a helmet that fit me, and I didn't take it at top speed until then. I definitely feel much more secure riding with the helmet on...and take more risks than I would without it.
At my scale, I know that when I go mountain biking, when I have an helmet, I go faster and take much more risk than when I don't have an helmet. I don't have any data point about road biking, because I never wear a helmet. But thinking about it, I would also take more risks with more protective equipments
From their point of view, it's like if a delivery company banned drivers from installing roll-cages and racing harnesses - the initial question should be, why on earth do you think you need that?
A fall from bicycle height onto concrete can kill you if you hit your head—even if the bicycle is completely stationary. This rule is BS and I expect the company will be pressured to reverse their decision immediately.
Sincerely, a guy who's probably alive because of a bicycle helmet.
It's more like if a delivery company banned their drivers from installing seat belts and airbags. Even if you are a perfect driver, other people aren't and on a bike, your will be the one hurting after a crash.
Not at all. Seatbelts are a legal requirement, helmets are not. This is employees wearing body amour, which is seen as either encouraging risk-taking, or giving the illusion that the activity is risky.
In Germany it's actually discussed quite heavily whether to make helmets a legal requirement. I also don't see how you don't think of bikes driving on roads as risky. Even with a helmet, you can get very seriously injured; a helmet will just help you to not die and (hopefully) still walk again afterwards. Feel free to look up images from serious bike accidents; I can't imagine anyone sane risking that, helmet or not.
I cycle 10,000km+ a year in London, so I think I have a better idea about this than the vast majority of HN commenters. I generally wear a helmet, but encouraging and definitely enforcing helmet use is the least effective thing we can do to protect people [0].
Well, if you think wearing a helmet increases risk, why do you wear one?
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to force anyone to wear a helmet. It's completely fine if one wants to take that risk. But forbidding them is just insane.
Also, helmets are not a get-out-of-jail-free-card. They increase your chances of survival in case of a crash, you will still get injured. Protecting people might be the least effective thing compared to eliminating the hazard, but splitting cars and bikes is simply not always an option.
But I stand by my original comment, even if they do think forbidding helmets avoids a few accidents, they should have smelled the shitstorm from a mile away (and people running a bike company should really be more empathetic towards bikers).
Nobody's even "encouraging" (let alone "enforcing") helmet use in this case. This is purely staff riders choosing on their own whether or not they should wear a helmet, and Pedal Me throwing a fit over it over some patently absurd "safety reasons".
I'm pretty sure a professional looking branded helmet would be better for business. This is just a classic case of putting the employee at risk of injury to scire some tiny marketing points. This is an easy decision. Endanger employees or make a tiny bit more money. Factor in one lawsuit and all the profit will be gone.
Yours seems to be based on the assumption that if it is not mandated by law, it is not a good idea that can save lives, which is the criteria by which others are evaluating this
It's also worth noting that biking in a city around cars and bikes and other people IS objectively risky, to the point where it is completely reasonable for someone to choose to wear a single piece of safety equipment over their single most important human organ
> or giving the illusion that the activity is risky.
Urban biking is inherently risky, especially in countries/states/cities with lackluster or nonexistent safe cycling infrastructure.
Wearing a helmet is just trying to reduce the potential damage from unforeseen and unexpected accidents - things that may likely be 100% outside of control of the biker once they are on the road. It's not a matter of "I want to wear a helmet so that I can take more risks" and it's ridiculous that Pedal Me is peddling such an excuse.
This is a pedicab service. A cynic would assume that Pedal Me is mandating this (and thus putting their drivers at risk) because passengers are more nervous about taking a service where the driver wears a helmet and they do not.
This might lower risk for the customers because driver may take less risk without a helmet in some situation but the risk for driver is only increased.
This is optimizing for customers at the cost of drivers.
I don't see any supportive extensive research linked from them .
Just because one person disagrees doesn't mean it isn't reasonable. I've met people who (claim to) believe the earth is flat, but surely no one would consider that belief "reasonable".
So I'm curious what the REASONING is behind your feeling that offering passengers the option to wear a helmet is unreasonable. Personally, I would AGREE that offering passengers on a pedicab the option of a pineapple would be unreasonable. There just isn't any practical correlation between pineapples and pedicabs. But helmets are different: there are large numbers of people who campaign vigorously to persuade others to wear helmets when on a bike; many places even have laws mandating helmets on bikes, at least for some ages. So it is a plausible thing for passengers to want. Given that, why would it be unreasonable to offer it?
One of the hackers news guidelines is to take the generous view of comments rather than reply based on the most negative readings. Often the negative readings can turn out to be an uncommon, Nonstandard interpretation.
Yes The context of the scope of the word “the” in the comment that you’re replying to is not specifically written out, but most people and the poster will infer it to be the context of the binary choice being discussed, either offer or not offer helmets to passengers, and not the global choice of offering them hover boards, bags of octopus, or helmets or etc
I don't understand why I'm not allowed to point out that the comment presumes.
Someon's feelings do not define that which is reasonable for anyone else but theirself. But the comment presumes it is. The comment skips past the arguability of that position as though it were not arguable, and all I said was that this is in fact arguable.
Declaring things "reasonable" based on nothing is like declaring things "common sense" based on nothing. The only way to disagree is to be unreasonable and stupid. It's the kind of thing you say when you're demanding people agree with you, not convincing them to.
It is a consideration, but there are solutions, like disposable caps. There are also sanitizing sprays. It wouldn't be the first time people share helmets.
Also, the idea is to offer an option. Not to make it mandatory unless legislation require it. If your passengers are more comfortable not wearing them, their choice.
Those people aren't riding bikes 8-10 hours a day, 5-6 days a week. If they can't see the difference then maybe they're better off without a pedicab, I would be afraid to deal with customers who were that smooth brained.
The obvious solution is to require passengers to wear helmets, as well as the drivers. But this brings us to the core of the endless helmet debate, which is that lots of people are deeply repulsed by wearing a goofy ass helmet and getting nasty helmet hair while out on the town. And the data shows that if you require helmets, lots of people stop cycling — in this case, people would stop using bike taxis.
This feels a bit like the narrator in "Fight Club" explaining "the formula" car manufacturers use.
> Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
Pedal Me has done the math on what the average settlement for a traumatic brain injury to it's staff is going to be, multiplied by the probability of such an event, and has decided that they'll make more money without helmets.
It ignores that much of the risk comes from outside of the drivers control. It ignores that driver behavior could otherwise be monitored to ensure safety.
It would just be nice if it was honest- a driver with a helmet on doesn't match the sexy appeal they're going for. That people might say "if the driver needs a helmet why don't I, the rider?".
Are they? First time I'm hearing about those. Is there actual demand for this?
I live in their target area and I can't ever recall a time where I wanted to combine the risks & downsides of biking and ordering a cab.
If I want to bike (note: I wouldn't recommend it in Central London), I'd get the Santander bikes or the various bike-for-hire ones littering the streets and just do it myself.
If I wanted to spend time fiddling with my phone, I may as well just order an Uber instead of this thing? The prices would be similar considering they both have to pay drivers and driver wages represent a significant chunk of the sticker price of any manned transport-for-hire service so I really don't see why anyone would get this thing instead of a good old Uber.
I think the point is that you'll have less traumatic brain injuries without helmets than with helmets because you'll have less accidents over all and less severe ones.
If a cyclist have a helmet he and everyone around him behaves dumber. This was researched.
> less traumatic brain injuries without helmets than with helmets because you'll have less accidents over all and less severe ones.
Less accidents overall? I can believe that, maybe. But you'll need to back up "less severe ones".
If a new driver who's phone distracted them for a split second is going to hit me on my bike, I feel like it's going to be more severe if I don't have a helmet on.
> If a cyclist have a helmet he and everyone around him behaves dumber. This was researched.
This seems like an extraordinary claim, given that safety systems in all other places have no such effects (or at least, not as significant). I would very much like to see this research, and even then I would be very wary of it.
Either way, it's irrelevant given the levels of training that they are claiming they demand of their drivers. Given those claims, it's obvious that they helmets + training would be safer than just the training, if the training is good enough to protect the drivers at all.
> This seems like an extraordinary claim, given that safety systems in all other places have no such effects (or at least, not as significant).
There are examples where safety systems cause increased risk.
Football helmets are one. The helmet doesn't protect very well against concussions and the presence of the helmet makes it more likely for players to use their heads as a weapon.
I don't know about this bike helmet example since the actual data isn't available, but there are definitely times when counterintuitively having a safety feature is riskier.
> It ignores that much of the risk comes from outside of the drivers control.
True; on the other hand I remember (I don't have a handy reference, sorry) a study showing that car drivers were leaving less space around cyclists wearing a helmet (hence increasing the probability of a collision) than around those without...
It seems completely debunked in that case at least.
I can imagine how somebody could have thought risk compensation might be a thing in the short term - such as when seatbelts were a new invention. I've seen the kind of thing like people demonstrating how their active cruise control won't let their new car crash into the car in front, which is a pretty dumb idea (even if it will almost certainly work). But that seems to wear off pretty quickly, and then having it just becomes the default and you don't think of it anymore, so I imagine any risk compensation would quickly evaporate.
With bicycle helmets, they're mandatory here for riding out on the street, so it was just always the default. Anecdotally, putting on a helmet was and is just something we always did, and never changed the perception of risk because it was just the normal default. I don't even think about it, just like how I always put on the seatbelt and then don't think about it anymore.
> I've seen the kind of thing like people demonstrating how their active cruise control won't let their new car crash into the car in front, which is a pretty dumb idea (even if it will almost certainly work)
Guilty as charged lol (though in my case it's to better understand how ACC behaved in various situations, given my unfamiliarity with it.
The risk compensation myth was crafted in the 70s as an argument against guardrails! And it was indeed reused as an argument again seatbelts a few years later. And of course, there has never been any data to substantiate these arguments.
Must be a cultural thing. If someone tried this here in Denmark, they would get such a shitstorm. Helmets are generally understood to increase cyclist safety.
Yeah, my dad almost died like that. On a separated bike path in very good condition, he would have only been going about 30 km/h given where it was (he can't actually remember what happened due to TBI but managed to make a full recovery after four months of hospital and rehab). Comparing the size of the foam on the impact side of the helmet vs. the other side was amazing, it was squashed to a fraction of the size. If that had been skull straight onto the concrete it would have been lights out pretty much instantly.
Technically you are correct that wearing a helmet does reduce risk of head injury somewhat. However -when infrastructure for cycling is already very safe- you start seeing all sorts of strange statistical effects; and it is not immediately obvious that helmets are a net benefit.
I looked around a bit to see if I could find a paper that takes a balanced view. This particular paper seems to be a bit more from your perspective where wearing helmets might be of some utility. However it does leave the impression that it is would actually be somewhat hard to break even on wearing helmets in the Netherlands. https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s...
The first document explains that people who take risks (like riding at high speeds or on a mountain bike) DO wear helmets in the Netherlands. Which is the reason why helmet wearers show up in hospital more often.
The second is a recent paper that applies evenly to people who ride a bike "normally", [From experience: at low speeds on segregated infrastructure at around 15 km/h or so]. My interpretation is that it concludes that wearing a helmet would improve safety for cyclists somewhat; however it would not (currently) be risk-cost-effective according to their measure; and would require intervention to break even.
There's a couple takeaways from the first article. The cyclists with helmets are the serious ones riding for sport. I'd also guess commuters who are going long distances wear helmets. These cyclists are putting in far more miles than unhelmeted cyclists. I see the same thing in my city; very casual bikers don't wear helmets. Commuters and sport cyclists do. And those groups are putting in the most miles by far.
If zero people rode bikes without helmets, you'd see 0 cyclists without helmets in the hospital. All those injured will be wearing helmets. It's a terrible measure.
You've got the gist of it. I'm trying to point out how .nl statistics come out funny because the infrastructure has been made so safe.
Commuters actually make up the majority of cyclists in the Netherlands, there are a lot of them (cycle commuting is heavily encouraged for all kinds of people at all ages), and they don't wear helmets. Despite the large number of commuters on bicycles, commuting is (apparently) so safe that the commuters are heavily outnumbered by the sports cyclists in the hospital statistics.
It is still a somewhat misleading measure of course. You probably should not conclude that wearing a helmet is highly unsafe. ;-)
And... that's the point I'm making. Take measures from the Netherlands with a few grains of salt, because the situation is atypical. On the one hand it's really cool that it's atypical, but then you do need to watch out. The numbers don't line up with the intuition of someone from a typical cars-are-more-important-than-safety country at all; so it's easy to make funny assumptions and draw wrong conclusions.
What I see in those videos looks just like my university, a bunch of people on what we call beach cruisers going a very short distance. Their speed indicates they aren't going far and aren't in much of a rush. Are people in the Netherlands strict about arrival times? Do they usually move at a slower pace?
In my city commuters go fast. We're going a few miles on a commute at least.
They're going quite a few miles on bike alone. 30-60 min commutes are not uncommon. Kids, Adults, Seniors. Hot or cold, rain or shine.
The time culture is similar to Germany: you have to be punctual. This means you need to leave on time in order to arrive on time. As a general rule in real-world traffic: Speeding might not actually help you arrive all that much quicker, you just feel like you do. An objective instrument (such as a GPS) may well inform you otherwise.
Also, on a bike: if you're traveling longer distances, you need to pace yourself, lest you run out of steam half-way.
The infrastructure is good though, in municipal zones the cycle distance (and time!) can often be shorter than the car-distance; because bikes can take more short-cuts and are easier to park. And for longer distances it's possible to eg. park your bike at a station and continue by bus or train.
This viewpoint (that helmet wearers take bigger risks) only holds validity when helmet wearing is a choice.
In my country (Australia), helmet wearing is mandatory and the vast, vast majority seem to follow this rule. I've never felt "more protected" wearing a helmet, as I wouldn't ride without one. It's a default state.
Okay, true story. Years ago I struggled with this exact logic regarding skiing with helmet. After serious consideration I decided to start skiing so carefully that I do not need a helmet. As you may guess at this point, The very first day I left my helmet home, I got into an accident and got a skull fracture.
I started using my helmet again after that.
(But another safety related thing I have started to really doubt. Skiing alone is supposed to be risky. I do ski alone, quite a lot actually. I have gotten into my share of accidents of various seriousness. And not a single of them has been when I have been alone.)
I had this exact talk with my rich buddy in high school once 15 years ago :) . He was heading for a ski trip that my family couldn't have afforded in my wildest dreams.
In German speaking countries we went from 15% to 3% of the ski accidents with hospitalization being related to head injuries, this within the past 15/20 years.
This correlates very well with the increase of helmet usage.
Do you happen to know the overall change in accidents? That's the big question behind the motivation for this change. There's no doubt that helmets would reduce the percent of all accidents that are head related, but does some reduced concern about safety result in more accidents overall?
From the biggest Ski insurance/interest group in Germany (the ones from the Ski federation), the stats show a 50% decrease since the 80's.[0]
The trend is stable/slight increase in the past 5 years.
For the head injuries, it reduced from 2/1000 skier to about 1/1000 skier/year. It follows the general trend of the number of accidents per skier/year.
Looking at the material and the quality of the slopes in the past 40 years, they are definitely a big driver of this change, they improved a lot!
I have never had a serious accident but started wearing a helmet. I don't think there's a large risk either way because I don't do a lot of tree skiing. But I wouldn't call it ridiculous. No more so than wearing a bike helmet.
Imagine applying this same non-logic to car seat belts, motorcycle helmets, rock climbing harnesses, et multa alia. If you don't want to wear a helmet, that's fine, but don't bother trying to justify it with anything other than "I don't want to", because you really can't.
Even strong and careful skiers wipe out occasionally. A helmet is the difference between shaking it off and brain injury.
I've skied in Austria for the past 15 years and never wore a helmet for the first 8 years. I now have my own helmet. And I made sure it even has MIPS.
You can be as cautious as you want and never make a mistake, but if someone else skies into you you could still smash your head very hard. That's why you should wear a helmet. Not because of your own capabilities, but because of the capabilities of the people around you and the risk just being too high.
I wouldn't wear a helmet while cycling though. It's quite safe in The Netherlands.
My old boss was an experienced skier on an organised cross country ski tour and got killed by an avalanche. It was in a low avalanche risk area with no avalanches forecast, and he was wearing all safety equipment, including one of those balloons. Medical help was almost immediate and nobody else on the tour was seriously injured.
The fact is that experienced back country skiers are more likely to die in an avalanche.
Part of this is complacency, but honestly most of it is just probability. The more you do something, the more chances you have for just the wrong combination of factors to happen.
I'm sorry, and pardonner mou Français, but what in the actual fuck?
Should delivery drivers not wear seatbelts because they might not be as afriad that they'll fly through the windshield? Should linemen not wear harnesses because they might be more confident working on power lines? Should warehouse workers not wear hi-vis jackets because they might be more confident working around forklifts? Should construction workers not wear helmets because they might be more confident working in areas with falling objects?
And I love the "if something bad happens, it's obviously the rider's fault" mentality here. I guess cars never hit bikes, right? Or bikes hitting other bikes? Or other accidents that, you know, are entirely unavoidable or otherwise have nothing to do with the rider being at fault?
If I was a staff rider, I'd be putting that helmet on and telling Pedal Me to eat an OSHA-sized bag of dicks if they have a problem with it. Banning helmets "for safety reasons" might not be the absolute dumbest thing I've read this year, but it's up there.
> And then they would fire you, hand you a substantial financial settlement for your wrongful termination, and you will be able to collect unemployment benefits while you take your sweet time to find a company that's not garbage.
I understand where you’re coming from, but I’d like to see some data rather than “what the actual fuck”. I believe there are some cases where safety protections make people act dumber - and now I’m curious if this is or is not one them. I don’t take a position either way, but I don’t feel like shouting that you’d tell your employer to eat a bag of dicks really contributes much here.
This would make sense for situations where the main risk was the driver/operator of the machine, but when it comes to cycling on the road (especially in crazy Central London traffic) I would expect the risk to primarily come from cars.
For which there is some evidence [1] that you are less likely to be involved in an accident doe to external causes when not wearing a helmet than when wearing one - in essence the same effect that helmet wearing has on the cyclist (taking greater risks) it also has on drivers passing cyclists.
> I believe there are some cases where safety protections make people act dumber
And I don't believe that to be a justification for removing those safety protections entirely. This ain't some data science problem to be solved; this is ethics and morality, and there is precisely nothing ethical or moral about demanding that your employees make themselves less safe and then having the gall to pretend that this somehow makes them safer.
> I don’t feel like shouting that you’d tell your employer to eat a bag of dicks really contributes much here.
You're right: all employees telling their employers to eat an OSHA-sized bag of dicks if they try prohibiting basic safety equipment would contribute far more greatly to society than just one. But we gotta start somewhere.
You believe that if the evidence indicates more people would die with the helmets, it would still be morally verboten even though it would be a statistical certainty your omission of action is basically causing people's deaths when we are talking about large numbers of people?
Crazy. I suspect you are actually reasoning from your thought that people are more likely to die without helmets and ignoring the premise of the question, or at least I hope that is what you are doing.
if even 1 incident occurs which was unavoidable by an unhelmeted cyclist which harms them more than they would have been harmed wearing a helmet, then the policy is unconscionable
claiming you're removing safety equipment to reduce risky behavior is the tail wagging the dog. there are other ways to reduce risky behavior which do not have such tragic consequences as side effects to them.
Let's say you do an A/B test on this policy and find 15 more people die with the helmet allowed policy, but in the other side, one person died who if they had chosen a helmet they likely wouldn't have. You're saying it is unconscionable to pick the policy where the 15 wouldn't have died?
Do the other things to reduce risky behavior, certainly, but if this is an uncorrelated improvement I don't see why that wouldn't be worth taking.
Note, I doubt that this is actually true, but I wanted to highlight your moral apriori claims as ridiculous.
> Note, I doubt that this is actually true, but I wanted to highlight your moral apriori claims as ridiculous.
You failed to do that:
You didn’t address the agency problem where the 15 chose to engage in risky behavior while that 1 was coerced into dying — and ignoring the role of agency in the Trolley Problem is amateur hour. The helmets didn’t kill anyone, their following choices while wearing helmets did; which is in contrast to mandating no helmet, that is directly responsible for a death.
What you did was make a ridiculous argument that ignored the crux of the issue and pretend that the other person was wrong.
Despite this bare denial, I believe "coerced into dying" to be an accurate description of someone coerced into not wearing a helmet dying of head injuries from an unavoidable accident
sorry, that's not a coercion I'm willing to make. First, do no harm. Come back when you've tried safer ways to reduce risky behavior.
I pretty clearly articulated exactly what was unconscionable:
> if even 1 incident occurs which was unavoidable by an unhelmeted cyclist which harms them more than they would have been harmed wearing a helmet, then the policy is unconscionable
if you can think of a scenario in which what I described as unconscionable happens, then I would find that scenario unconscionable.
> Do the other things to reduce risky behavior, certainly, but if this is an uncorrelated improvement I don't see why that wouldn't be worth taking.
whereas I DO see why such a helmet ban would be a risk not worth taking, it is at the top of this post.
> You believe that if the evidence indicates more people would die with the helmets
That ain't what was argued. The commenter above argued that helmets encourage people to take more risks. Even assuming that to be true, the sane answer is to train people to ride safely even when wearing helmets, not to ban helmets.
> it would be a statistical certainty your omission of action is basically causing people's deaths
I think there has to be substantial if not overwhelming evidence of increased risk before it would be moral to ban employees from using a given piece of safety equipment. And given the long history of companies not caring for the welfare of their workers, the evidence should be peer reviewed and coming from independent researchers rather than clearly biased sources
I think that even bigger effect is that casual riders won't opt out cycling when helmets are mandatory. That is where helmets add least safety and comparably most unpracticality. When you are going to buy milk and some sausage in leisure pace or when you are going to work in speed guaranteed to not make you sweaty.
Those are safest rides, they are good for your health and the ones that drop first.
The problem is that as another commenter points out, passengers wouldn't feel safe next to a helmet-wearing driver while not wearing one themselves.
The proper solution here is to provide helmets for passengers as well, but that raises more problems - they needs to be a way to sanitize them, multiple sizes might need to be available (I assume they need to be sized properly for adequate protection?), etc.
The aforementioned problems are hard (read: expensive) or impossible to solve, so while the ethical idea might be to just not offer this service at all, the objective here is to make money whatever-it-takes (or most likely, raise money, as I doubt this thing is profitable) as opposed to providing a good transport service (maybe because there's no actual demand for this?).
> The problem is that as another commenter points out, passengers wouldn't feel safe next to a helmet-wearing driver while not wearing one themselves.
Too bad? If your business model depends on this then you just have to suck it up and deal with it, not compromise worker safety.
> The proper solution here is to provide helmets for passengers as well, but that raises more problems - they needs to be a way to sanitize them, multiple sizes might need to be available (I assume they need to be sized properly for adequate protection?), etc.
If customer safety conflicts with worker safety, and the company cares about neither, even by contemporary standard it's a particularly callous corporation with a particularly unsound business plan.
> the objective here is to make money whatever-it-takes..
This. Definitely. However if it came to court, as indeed it might, and they tried to argue helmets cause risky behavior, it wouldn't take Johnny Cochrane to get them slapped with a massive fine and laughed out of court.
They're gambling that the cost of safely resolving the issue will be more than any legal costs. Talk about preventing risky behavior!
I very much doubt this service is sustainable so most likely this is just a stop-gap/desperate hack until they reach their "exit", whether yet another round of VC money, a buy-out by a bigger idiot or quietly shutting down.
I bet they all know this isn't viable and just hope this problem disappears before an accident actually happens and brings this in front of a court.
> EDIT: also, this doesn't explain prohibiting helmets for cargo bikes, too.
I think it's a PR thing. They don't want prospective passengers seeing their branded bikes as dangerous enough to justify wearing a helmet, regardless of whether that particular bike is currently transporting passengers.
(1) Masks are more effective at preventing transmission than reception.
(2) Different individuals have different levels of concern, which might lead one to choose a mask and another to choose not to wear one.
(3) Different individuals face different levels of risk. The person who is immunocompromised may wear a mask even when it would make no sense for other people.
(4) The customer may encounter 2-3 service employees in a day; the service employee may encounter hundreds of customers in the same time.
And that's without even getting into political issues (in the US, where mask-wearing has become politicized).
An acquaintance of mine worked in a casino that banned mask wearing by employees early on during the pandemic out of concern for worrying customers. Unfortunately several of his coworkers died of COVID before the lockdowns shut everything down.
"We're sorry your husband got a concussion, but at least his passenger felt safe!"
This isn't the 70s. Just give everyone helmets. Passengers included. And yes you should clean them. If you're running a business I'm sure you can afford some little bottles of alcohol spray.
But if it's about safety, why don't actual car taxi cab companies provide helmets for their passengers? It's easier to get a serious head injury in a car than on a bicycle.
I happen to subscribe to this logic. I will often specifically choose bus seats that I think will fare better in a crash, as I feel at risk without belts. I'm surprised others don't feel the same. I'm also worried those vertical grab poles for standing passengers will become effective skull crushers in a crash.
>> The problem is that as another commenter points out, passengers wouldn't feel safe next to a helmet-wearing driver while not wearing one themselves.
I actually laughed out loud reading this.
So what? It’s the company’s job to ensure safety for the riders and the staff. There are many places in the world where it’s actually illegal not to wear a helmet.
If you get into a business like this; and you didn’t factor this in, you’re a plain and simple idiot and your business deserves to fail if you make it the staff’s problem.
Shame on these idiots. I’d never heard of these guys before, and my first impression is one of the worst I could have. How is this even worth it for them from a PR side?
> I'm sorry, and pardonner mou Français, but what in the actual fuck?
Do you wear a helmet when you drive inside your car? If not, why not? It might make you much safer in case of a crash, according to your reasoning.
Wearing a helmet can itself become a leading factor to cause an incident, and it's clearly what they are hinting at in the linked article: that data seems to indicate that riders wearing helmets may be getting more incidents on average. Then it's a simple equation: number of incidents x gravity of the incident in both A/B scenarios, and compare which one is the most favorable. It's not a question you answer with a "what the actual fuck" kind of reasoning.
This sounds like one of those papers that got published with just barely "significant statistical evidence" but never had follow-up to verify, meaning you can't really draw conclusions for it.
The study was barely scientific. The researcher was his own test subject, and the result has never been replicated. Also, most crashes probably occur under conditions where the driver can't be aware of whether the cyclist is wearing a helmet or not. "The cyclist suddenly came out of nowhere" is a common defense.
In order to show that helmets *cause* accidents, they need to create a randomized study where they force employees to flip a coin to decide whether to wear a helmet or not.
Otherwise, here's one plausible scenario: Employees who work in tiny suburbs with small roads and very little traffic feel safer, and this are less likely to wear a helmet. They get in less crashes because their town has fewer and safer drivers. Employees working in the city have more crashes simply because of being in a busy city, so they are more likely to wear helmets.
Right now, you cannot prove that helmets cause crashes and not the above.
I have some issues with that study. One major one is they basically rule out half the effects of helmets as a "logical fallacy":
> Risk compensation, as it is typically defined and understood, is only one of six possible scenarios, namely a usual non-helmet wearer puts on a helmet and increases their risk taking. Importantly, evidence in the opposite direction, i.e., taking a helmet off leads to less risky behaviour, is not evidence in support of risk compensation as it is a type of logical fallacy
After reviewing that article none of the studies are convincing either way. The only studies that actually look for causality are the ones which only measure speed to asses risk. Those are also the one that I would qualify as positive results but were listed as negative results because of that above mentioned logical fallacy.
So while is is possible to untangle these effects, it has yet to be done properly to show a clear result either way.
No, I really don't untangle anything. Safer riders ride safer, but they can and do sometimes have accidents and the road will not check your safety record before impact to see if it should hurt your more or less.
Research on helmets has been ongoing for 40 years, and has even led to ANSI standards for helmet design and protection. The UCI requires hemets in amateur and professional events. This isn't about risk taking behavior, it is simply about if you do have an accident, you won't be killed, turned into a vegetable or concussed when you hit your head.
> The effects of helmet wearing are higly contingent based on the geography and demographics.
I'm pretty sure that hitting your head on Ugandan cement will damage your head roughly the same as American Cement or European cement. S
Additionally, I've never seen any research showing any kind of demographic relationship to severity of head injuries in bicycle accidents. Nor have I once saw research that did anything other than present some statistical noise about distance cars give you based on helmet or not. Close shaves are not accidents or injuries, so even the basis of the research is questionable.
> Additionally, I've never seen any research showing any kind of demographic relationship to severity of head injuries in bicycle accidents.
The effects of a helmet on overall safety when ridden at low speed on dedicated bike paths is very different from when ridden at high speeds in traffic with no bike lane.
Thus the the design of the city and streets (geography is perhaps not the perfect term for this) and the what/how of the local culture's bike riding behavior (perhaps demographics is a bad term for this, not sure of a better one.) have huge impacts on how much a helmet affects your safety simply because the risk profiles are very different.
The data is messy due to regional variability plus the difficulty of reliably removing the confounds mentioned above. I would never discourage someone from wearing and will actively encourage it when riding in bicycle hostile areas. At the same time, I think the push for helmet laws and helmet education is often a cop out to avoid talking about how we need to redesign cities to support safe bicycling. If we did the later, we would see much larger safety gains and the former would be much less necessary.
Who here is saying helmets should be mandated even for bicycles, let alone cars? Why are the only options "pursue safety to its absolute maximum" v. "don't pursue it at all"? Why can't that decision be left to the individual rider, rather than forcing riders to forego safety equipment for astoundingly-lissencephalic rationale like "helmets reduce safety"?
I know this will astonish you, but when I ride a bike, I don't always put a helmet on.
Whether I do or not has a lot to do with how likely it is that I might get in an accident. Wild right? Why would I opt for more safety gear in a more dangerous situation.
> Do you wear a helmet when you drive inside your car? If not, why not?
Cars already have airbags and seatbelts which help a lot for the kind of collisions that would otherwise result in head injuries.
> It might make you much safer in case of a crash, according to your reasoning.
I don't see what in their comment could be construed to say that helmets make you much safer regardless of vehicle.
> Wearing a helmet can itself become a leading factor to cause an incident
Is there a source for this? Should be a randomized A/B test as you mentioned, not just a correlation - wearing a hi-vis jacket or other precautions taken more often in dangerous situations probably also correlate with accidents.
Even if helmets do cause accidents through increased carelessness, some may still take issue to intentionally making a scenario more dangerous such that people are more careful. It's kind of settling for a local minimum, rather than aiming to reduce inherent risk alongside aligning people's risk estimates to not overestimate the precautions.
I don't perceive the benefit from risk reduction of helmets in cars to overcome the hassle hurdle. But I wouldn't advocate banning others from wearing helmets in cars if they so wished.
My bicycle helmet sits on top of my head, and has nothing to do with peripheral vision. Do you wear yours pulled down low over your forehead? If so you're doing it wrong.
I think you've been fitted into the wrong helmet. Do you really think MTB riders have any more difficulty turning their heads? It's not the case. And to back up what the other person said: modern road and XC/enduro MTB helmets do not obstruct peripheral vision unless it also has a non-retractable visor. Even modern full-face helmets limit vision less than you might think.
A competent bike helmet costs little, but not nothing; maybe $20 to start, and a little extra weight, and it messes up your hair a bit, takes seconds to put on if already adjusted and maybe a minute otherwise. May remove a bit of vision, but only vertically up.
A competent car helmet is probably a motorcycle helmet, which is more like $100 to start, but it impacts hearing, reduces vision in all directions, is a significant weight, usually doesn't adjust much for sizing, takes longer to put on (especially if you wear eyeglasses).
A bike helmet in a car would likely be more trouble than anything, it would interfere with the headrests and probably increase neck injuries.
I once organized a workshop on reasoning about uncertainty and in it a woman attended who was in charge of cycling safety for a large government organization of some EU country. She confirmed that, statistically speaking, cycling without a helmet is safer than with but mentioned this as a good example of likely confounding factors and a case where you cannot take the statistics itself for policy making.
But besides that, even if the average nation-wide number of accidents can be taken as a basis for nation-wide policy making because confounders can be ignored (a huge assumption), you can still not use this data reliably for individual decision making or policy making for smaller groups without further analysis. You need to account the variance, where the confounders occur, and what these confounding factors are. For example, regarding individual decision making, it could be the case that certain people who cycle with helmets on the average cycle more recklessly, but you cycle even more carefully with a helmet and are better protected. If so, you cannot take the average to inform your cycling. The same holds for other groups, such as professional cyclists for a company like in this article.
To give another example, consider accident statistics of self-driving cars versus human drivers nationwide. The human driver statistics include each and every reckless and drunk driver in the country, including many people with whom you'd never share a car ride. At the same time, you might have been driving accident-free for more than 40 years. For you personally, or a specific group you belong to, self-driving cars could thus be way more dangerous than driving yourself.
> Do you wear a helmet when you drive inside your car? If not, why not? It might make you much safer in case of a crash, according to your reasoning.
Would it? I've never heard anyone recommend this, but if this did actually reduce the likelihood of a serious head injury in the event of a car crash, then I would seriously consider wearing a helmet while I drive a car. I have no problem wearing one while I ride a bicycle or motorbike.
Not that it correlates much to every day driving, since both speeds and driving patterns differ, but e.g. NASCAR drivers wear helmets (along with that whole neck protection setup that latches to the helmet).
I don't know, however, if a helmet may work worse in conjuction with an airbag though. So personally I think I'd stay away from helmets in cars (but I really have too little data to make an informed decision).
Having said that, in the case of this company, perhaps they could offer their passengers a "Hövding" device? (Hövding being the swedish word for a chieftain, but "hövve" is also slang for head, and in the case of this product it is a... "backpack/necklace thingy" that is a wearable airbag. Supposedly works really well, but probably comes with a price tag matching this function.
Motor vehicle accidents are a leading cause of traumatic brain injury related deaths. If you are under 55 the obly higher cause is suicide. (If you qre older than 55, your chances of a TBI related death from an accidental fall start to skyrocket with age.) There is a reason why race car drivers wear helmets, and it isn't just to have another place to plaster sponsor logos.
I am not aware of any studies looking specifically at the effects of helmet wearing on TBI rates of regular drivers, but then good data on that for bicycles is also hard to come by but that doesn't stop people from pushing for bicycle helmets.
Race car drivers are at a lot higher risk of a collision, spin, vehicle fire, or rapid disassembly in general than general traffic. And in many forms of racing, they usually go significantly faster than general traffic too. Helmets, neck restraints, five point harnesses, and flame retardant suits all reduce risk of injuries, and would likely reduce risk in general traffic as well, but the risks seem low enough that the expense (including time to equip) of that additional equipment is too much to justify its general use. Although, if there were an easier intervention to help with neck injuries, it might likely be adopted.
> And in many forms of racing, they usually go significantly faster than general traffic too.
Yet, lethal TBIs are more likely to come from motor vehicle accidents than from bicycle accidents.
> the risks seem low enough that the expense (including time to equip) of that additional equipment is too much to justify its general use.
Yet, somehow this argument is deemed irrelevant when helmets for bicycles are discussed.
There really is not a compelling reason why helmet usage in a car is different from on a bicycle. The main difference is social acceptability, not any objective risk analysis.
> Yet, lethal TBIs are more likely to come from motor vehicle accidents than from bicycle accidents.
Is that per mile, per minute, or per lethal TBI? Also, is a collision between a bicycle and a motor vehicle a motor vehicle accident or a bicycle accident?
Of course, bike helmets protect against more than just brain injury. They also protect against road abrasion of some portion of the head, which is not usually a factor for car occupants, except if they're ejected or they're in a car that rolls over and doesn't have an roof or an effective roll bar.
Bike helmets are much lower expense and hassle than car helmets (which are mostly motorcycle helmets) and neck restraints, etc. If it's a public use bike system, especially the leave anywhere bikes, the expense and hassle gets overwelming, and helmets for customers of a pedal cab would be similar.
I've got a bike helmet with integrated lighting, which adds functionality and is kind of neat, although it was much more expensive than a good enough helmet.
Per lethal TBI, I don't think the data exists for per mile or per minute.
> Also, is a collision between a bicycle and a motor vehicle a motor vehicle accident or a bicycle accident?
Good catch, looking at their methods, they do include IDC-10 codes for pedestrian and bicyclist injuries due to motor vehicles in that number so I am not sure how many of those are actual vehicle occupants and I can't find any data at the moment that breaks those numbers down per IDC code group.
> Bike helmets are much lower expense and hassle than car helmets (which are mostly motorcycle helmets) and neck restraints,
No, it rightfully illicits that response. Wearing a safety device shouldn't make an activity less safe.
Your "simple equation" relies on your variables being solid. And they aren't.
It's important to stress that the behavioural studies from Bath (that show helmeted riders take more risks in simulations, that cars give them less space) are not data about whether helmeted users are at greater risk. Or that comparisons between US and NZ riders and outcomes are comparable because of vastly different road and rider profiles.
It's also hard to show how much helmets are helping because zero-harm accidents are rarely reported, so if we assume that they function correctly, and do reduce harm in impacts, we simply don't know how many near-misses there are.
You can look at hospital admission data two studies show 75 and 78% of cyclists admitted with serious-enough head/neck injuries hadn't worn a helmet. That still needs adjusting for total accidents, and proportion of helmeted riders on the road in the first place. Again, poor reporting makes this tough.
You also have to be aware that some studies and stats are polished up by people fervently for and against mandatory helmet laws. Biased reporting doesn't help anyone. There's a good selection here: https://www.helmets.org/stats.htm (domain suggests a strong bias, but I'm not sure).
Pedal Me doesn't provide a good argument here. It seems more like they're worried what their customers will think (do they need helmets too?) and nothing to do with actual safety outcomes.
> No, it rightfully illicits that response. Wearing a safety device shouldn't make an activity less safe.
American Football vs Rugby and the difference in CTE is often cited as the prime example of where this is true. Helmets and shoulder pads encourage riskier hits.
American Football is all about set plays. You line up and then charge at each other, meaning you have two lines effectively charging at each other and can focus all your effort on this one effort.
Rugby is much more fluid, so the amount of direct head-on-head collisions is much lower, and the distance someone typically runs before tackling someone is much lower as the 'engagements' are more frequent.
American Football is like going from 0-60mph every 10 minutes, whereas rugby is about sitting at 30mph constantly.
I don’t want to be rude, but wide receivers and running backs get CTE as much as other positions and their movement patterns are nearly identical to rugby.
I agree linemen are a novel concept, but they’re not the only victims.
I was not suggesting it's only linemen. I think my point still stands about NFL being all about 'set plays'. NFL is all "set up, set up, set up, RUN, TACKLE, STOP", whereas rugby is more "run run tackle run tackle run tackle stop".
Combine that with the fact when a Rugby player makes an extended run, they aren't often tackled directly head or side-on, it's more perhaps an "anchor" tackle from the back to pull them down. In american football, the safeties and deep players have more opportunity to get head-on with a receiver while the ball is in flight, while a rugby full-back having to watch and run horizontally while the player is running means they are less likely to be directly head-on.
Further combine that with the fact that Rugby governing bodies have penalised 'high tackles', and the rate of CTE drops significalty.
>I think my point still stands about NFL being all about 'set plays'. NFL is all "set up, set up, set up, RUN, TACKLE, STOP", whereas rugby is more "run run tackle run tackle run tackle stop".
Is your core argument that rugby is safer because the players are more tired at any given point so they don't hit as hard? Other than that, I am struggling to figure out the mechanism between stopping more frequently and football being more dangerous.
>Combine that with the fact when a Rugby player makes an extended run, they aren't often tackled directly head or side-on, it's more perhaps an "anchor" tackle from the back to pull them down. In american football, the safeties and deep players have more opportunity to get head-on with a receiver while the ball is in flight, while a rugby full-back having to watch and run horizontally while the player is running means they are less likely to be directly head-on.
I'd suggest you watch videos like [0] to diligence your claim that head-on tackles aren't common in rugby.
The nuance that you are missing is the power equation - American football's best tacklers focus on short-duration, high-work contact (i.e. maximizing power) to knock an offensive player off their feet [1]. Think of it like placing a nail. You can swing a metal hammer and a rubber mallet (of the same mass) against the same nail and the metal hammer will always drive it better because the dt portion of the power equation (i.e. the denominator) is smaller.
The metaphor extends: rugby players may put in the same amount of work (or more!) on a given tackle, but the dt part of their power equation is much higher than in the NFL because humans are squishy (in practice this is also why you see so much more form tackling in rugby - it's hard to generate enough power to just knock someone over without wearing pads).
Ultimately, high power hits are what cause the rapid, high energy head movements that cause CTE and those are just easier to do in pads.
Often cited, sure, but I don't see cyclists (myself included) put a helmet on and start taking on 18-wheelers. What I'm trying to say is it matters how true these studies are. Say we accept there's an increased risk of having an accident, the data also shows that if you have an accident you're much more likely to die without a helmet.
I think a lot of people —including experienced cyclists— would be surprised how easily a silly little fall, a knock against a car, can just kill you.
So even if a helmet makes you marginally more likely to be involved in an accident, being a professional vulnerable road user, all day is no joke. I'd like to have safety equipment when my number comes up.
As a frequent mountain biker, I can attest that wearing additional safety gear results in me taking more risks. I ride downhill faster, I take corners more aggressively, I take more jumps and I am less cautious over dangerous terrain. When wearing only shorts, a jersey, and a standard helmet, without pads or a full-face helmet, I ride subdued.
Some of this difference is due to the innate and insidious sense of invulnerability with protective gear. It comes naturally even the first time you don it. It's a common source of accidents and something that must be trained out of you.
Being able to get back up unscathed from bad falls also reinforces your future confidence, or lack thereof, which I can also attest from having fallen many times both with and without protective gear.
I'd still never ride without (at least) a standard helmet. If helmets do factually cause more accidents, which is plausible for the reasons I just mentioned, I'd support making helmets mandatory for employees through legislation. It doesn't matter if the numbers support the opposite conclusion: maximizing individual safety in the eventuality of a crash is paramount. If you have ever had a head impact while wearing a helmet, you will understand why.
The first person fired for wearing a helmet is going to be so damn lucky. That settlement money will end up being equivalent of several lifetimes with of work.
There is absolutely no way that their logic holds up in court.
Almost everywhere in the US is at will so there’s likely no successful lawsuit in the situation you describe.
Sadly, it’s likely the first driver who dies without a helmet will result in their family filing a giant lawsuit. But that payout will be paid by insurance that is probably already factoring in the probability of such a payout.
They might if a bicycle helmet was an osha recognized protective equipment. But it seems like the company did their homework and said it’s not. If there’s some regulation for helmets then it’s a different story.
My work doesn’t require a helmet, even though it would protect me. If I wore a helmet and my employer fired me, OSHA wouldn’t give a shit.
Yet another example of the terrible and lasting impact the so called
risk compensation myth has had on society. Another great contribution of the Chicago school of Economics to the misery of the world.
I wonder what the largest negative impact from this kind of thought has been.
My guess is it is going to be related to PrEP and HIV rates. PrEP is extremely effective and yet stigmatized due to the worry that it will decrease condom wearing.
So if a staff rider is hit by a car and they die from their head slapping against the ground, is this not a mega risk to this business that they didn't have a policy to mitigate a simple risk.
Maybe relevant: the Netherlands is probably the country with the highest use of bicycles for transport, yet no one, except for cyclists on racing bikes/MTBs or foreign tourists, ever wears a bike helmet. This is because they're only marginally effective at preventing injury, and the disadvantage of reduced cycling use if helmets are mandated results in far worse public health outcomes. See also https://dutchreview.com/culture/cycling/5-reasons-why-the-du...
Hey now, don't bring reason here. We reject effective technology to stop speeding, phone use, distracted driving and regulations to make cars and trucks have no more than necessary power, weight and effective sightlines but since cyclists wear a styrofoam hat they are safe. Except those pedestrians are dying at an accelerated rate, I think they should get a helmet too.
The response here are hilarious, like "they also have better infrastructure" - wow, you are soo close to getting it!
To me, that seems like a clear difference in infrastructure. If a biker shares a stretch of asphalt with a car, that's a risk for the biker and they need a helmet. In the Netherlands, this is widely understood and bikes get their own infrastructure everywhere. Only then you don't need helmets anymore at all.
while there is a lot, bikes do not get their own infrastructure everywhere. most likely the street you live on has no bike path. many city streets have bike lanes but not separated from the road
i bet the more useful metrics are length of trip, average speed of the cars around you, and if you need to cross stop signs/intersections. dutch bike trips are often very short and the speed limits are low. you do not share the road with 35mph+ traffic as is common in america. intersections are the place where people get hurt on bikes the most and it’s more likely in american biking you will cross them. this one is where the separate infrastructure really comes in to play
Yes, riding a bike in New York City traffic is generally dangerous. I fixed it by moving out of New York City.
Except for the time on a quiet suburban street when my drivetrain inexplicably locked up (never figured out what actually happened) and threw me over the handlebars, or the time when there wasn't much traffic around but there was some slippery garbage truck sludge exudate that I didn't see, which I wiped out on. My helmet saved me in both of those situations too.
It turns out that shit happens in general no matter who or where you are, and that dressing for safety actually does keep you safe. An inflated sense of ability to protect oneself does not amount to protection in the event of a crash.
It is still oddly too much and each time on head. Most bike falls don't end up hitting head either. You seem to be crashing more often then ordinary and the amount of times you hit the head is higher then ordinary.
And yes I use bike fairly often. I know multiple people who use bike fairly often. The only people actually hitting protective gear that often are the ones doing mountain biking. (Which seems to be genuinly dangerous even with the gear.)
They don't protect from the part where the car directly hits the rest of your body straight on, or the bike itself. Every single part that happens immediately after that - such as the fall, flying through the air, or what have you, the parts that always come afterwards - is where the helmet can provide life-saving protection.
The Netherlands probably also have some of the safest roads for cyclists.
Nonetheless I recommend to always wear gloves when riding a bike. They weigh nothing, fit in every bag/pocket and if you ever crash you'll be glad you wore them. Hands are very likely to get injured in an accident and it's not fun to not use them for a couple of days.
No doubt Pedal Me contractors operating in Dutch cities might choose to not wear a helmet. That'd be fine. But that choice should be left to the contractor, not the company.
This completely misses the forest for the trees and misattributes causality. The Dutch don't wear helmets because the traffic culture and infrastructure are completely different, not because of some questionable statistic no one has heard of. In the Netherlands you feel safe as a cyclist. Drivers look out for you because they're also all cyclists at other times. Cycling is so prevalent that it's hard to explain to anyone who hasn't experienced it.
Can you elaborate? The US has such a high incarceration rate for in European eyes often benign offenses that I find that statement hard to believe even though I don't know the Dutch laws (I'm German). E.g. I can't imagine a Dutch person being incarcerated for injuring a cyclist unless it's on alcohol/drugs. I can totally imagine that for the US though. But I might be totally wrong. Would be really curious for some details.
My opinion on this might also be heavily and incorrectly influenced by popular media sprinkled with a few factual statistics that reinforce the bias.
When we lived in the Netherlands, my wife rode her bike infront of a car at an unmarked crossing where the car had every right of way. The car driver sued for repair fees, but in the end, the car driver had to pay her compensation instead. It doesn't matter that he had right of way, he was the "stronger" side and hurt someone weaker by not being cautious enough. There's obviously more nuance to the laws there, but this is a good example of the common mentality.
The US is enormous, with almost no public transit outside of dense metro areas. As a result, cars hold a sacred place in society and jurisprudence. It is simply impossible to live without a car when your driveway is 10 miles long and the nearest "town" is 30 miles away.
You can get a neverending stream of OUIs and keep your license after paying fines in most cases. We often joke that the best way to get away with murder is to run someone down and tell the judge that "they came out of nowhere".
But lord help you if you get caught walking down the street with a joint in your bag.
> You can get a neverending stream of OUIs and keep your license after paying fines in most cases.
What is that based on? People I know who have had DUIs had a lot of trouble and cost, their driving was highly restricted, and a second DUI would have stopped them from driving and maybe put them in jail (IIRC).
This is about the presumed record holder, so it’s the worst kind of citation, but a WI man was convicted of his 18th OWI (presumably operating while impaired)
That article contains a common trope: an official expressing shock and surprise at the offender’s record and uncertainty as to how they still had a license.
Cases of potential death do not count as "benign", at least in my book.
Shoplifting and really any property crime that doesn't result in imminent grave harm can be safely considered "benign". Ditto for victimless crimes like drug possession.
I think part of the problem in the USA and Canada is that our road laws are exceedingly motorist-centric. Things that don’t seem to make sense, like drivers getting a slap on the wrist for killing cyclists, do make sense if you consider that the laws don’t expressly promote and prioritize the safety of cyclist on all road ways.
As a general rule US public policy is enormously biased towards being pro automobile. Putting drivers in jail (ie for less than extreme recklessness) impedes that goal. It was very eye opening when I lived abroad and the law was actually biased against the “stronger” party in a traffic accident (ie truck > car > motorbike > bicycle > pedestrian ). It makes sense to me to essentially require more responsibility in proportion to the damage you are able to cause.
Operators of heavier vehicles have a duty of care toward smaller vehicle rider.
Compare this with New York City where if you negligently kill someone with your car, the police won't even issue a ticket unless you're drunk. Then comes the civil lawsuit in which the surviving family will probably settle for your car insurance policy limits (e.g. $100,000, far lower than German limits that are in the millions of Euros).
Cyclists are protected by law, such that even if an accident is the fault of the cyclist, the car driver is still 50% liable. This in combination with the infrastructure, which separates cyclists and cars as much as possible, makes the Netherlands very safe for cyclists.
Note that younger children still usually wear a helmet, since they are more likely to have an accident on their own (i.e. falling over).
I live in a small city and have cycled to school since I was 6 years old. At first with a parent, but from about 9 years old I would cycle by myself. I have never seen anyone wear a helmet in that time.
My experience in NA was that killing a pedestrian or a cyclist with your car is actually the easiest way to get away with murder. At worst you’ll get away with a 500$ fine, at best nothing. And “wooops didn’t see them, the sun was in my eyes” is a valid defense.
Not OP, but I’d like to note that a woman in the US was convicted of vehicular manslaughter when she crossed a street on foot with her 4 year old son and they were struck by a drunk driver.
Aren’t the at fault vehicular manslaughter laws in the US the same for drivers who hit cars, cyclists, and pedestrians? If you kill a cyclist in the US and you’re at fault, that’s likely jail time (same for hitting a car or pedestrian).
If you are convicted of vehicular manslaughter, you are very likely going to serve time.
However, if you hit and kill and cyclist in the US, you are not likely to be charged with vehicular manslaughter, so long as you were sober and weren’t actively trying to hit them.
In the Netherlands and several other European countries, there is presumed/strict liability on the part of the automobile driver. Regardless of fault, a car driver has responsibility for any accident between their car and a bicycle. There is of course more nuance to this, but that's the basic overlying principle.
A joke I heard a few times was "If a bike fell out of the air onto a parked car, the car owner is going to court."
Which sounds terrible, and goes against "innocent until proven guilty" rule. Also, in some situations it gives the driver perverse incentive to finish the cyclist off (and therefore get rid of the only witness), instead of, say, calling an ambulance.
No. The maximum prison sentence in such a case would be 8, 6, or 2 months in the Netherlands, depending on how reckless the driver was (and up to 4 years if drunk). If you then kill the cyclist you're looking at a maximum of 25 years.
It’s not a matter of what’s actually written in the laws but of police/prosecutorial discretion.
Whatever laws are on the books are virtually never actually enforced against motorists, because motorism (and disdain/resentment against cyclists) is deeply embedded in the culture.
The default reaction of the median American (or at least, the median law enforcer) to any accident involving a motorist and a cyclist, regardless of actual fault, is “fucking bikers always breaking laws, running red lights and stop signs, if they want to take our lanes and slow us down, why don’t they think they have to follow rules like a REAL vehicle,” etc.
The last time I did jury duty the judge and staff made sure everyone knew how to use the free parking. A jury of motorists isn't going to judge a fellow motorist harshly.
No. It will be slap on the wrist time if there are any consequences at all. All it requires is a driver to lie about some mitigating cause they weren't responsible for.
I roughly agree with you but this hypothesis would suggest:
- more helmet wearing in less cycling-friendly cities like Rotterdam which, IIRC, is an example of such a place in the Netherlands
- more helmet wearing (in the sense that the ratio between Dutch helmet wearing and helmet wearing in other Western European countries is higher) at points in the past when bicycle infrastructure was less protected. Though this is confounded by lots of things.
The "must wear helmets" advocacy is never focused on conditions or nuanced ideas about when it is OK not to wear helmets.
Instead, it is focused on make people feel as afraid of biking as possible. Literally all these debates are focused on making people afraid no matter of what conditions, speed. Whether you go mountain bike competition or whether you are 50 years old manager slowly commuting in skirt and business hairstyle.
I live here and I'll say that almost all bicycle delivery drivers where helmets in NL. Lost of riders wear helmets here, but I agree that most people just riding to work or going shopping do not.
I will also note that probably the largest bicycle delivery service in NL has helmets for sale for its riders.
That page is about the idea of helmet mandates, not about the safety of an individual decision to wear one.
I think people most on the thread understand that there are negative consequences to mandates. The question is about whether you as a rational individual should choose to wear one.
I think the answer to that is an irrefutable yes, if you want to reduce your risk of catastrophic head injury. But that doesn’t mean it should be mandated. We take calculated risks all the time, and the law can’t know all the variables and circumstances for each person at each moment. The mandate is ineffective because the most important safety factor for bicycles is frequency of cycling — the more bikes there are on the road, the more everyone is aware of them. But if you still had all those cyclists and put helmets on them, they would be slightly safer.
If you ever visit Amsterdam you'll see there are hardly any cars on the road and those that are have to drive at something like 5 miles an hour to avoid all the pedestrians and bicycles.
As a Dutch cyclist I would certainly use a helmet on American roads (or not use a bicycle at all). Furthermore, in the Netherlands the delivery drivers that use bicycles are asked to wear a helmet by their employer. Riders of E-bikes that are able to accelerate without pedalling and those that are able to accelerate above 25 km/h are required to wear a helmet by law. I'm certain that the majority of the Dutch would think it is completely insane that a delivery company is prohibiting the use of helmets on their E-bikes, even if it was in the Netherlands.
I am a Dutch cyclist and almost got a ticket for not wearing a helmet while under 18 (I was 16 or 17) in San Francisco. The policewoman was nice, though, and let me go.
Keeping in mind that American drivers aren't used to cyclists, it wasn't that bad in my (minimal) experience. But, of course, bikes are a little more prevalent there so that this experience won't stretch too far land inwards.
That isn't to say that a policy of requiring helmets is good on net (because people may ride less), but in any accident that you hit your head, you would greatly benefit from wean a helmet.
This is junk science. The authors simply did the ANSI drop-test in a lab test. In the real-world, 99% of bike crashes with death/severe injury are the result of car-crashes -- which the ANSI drop-test does not model correctly at all.
They are claiming 90% risk reduction based on a laboratory model. That model obviously does not track with reality (show me any country where bike helmets reduced death/injury by that amount). If a model does not correlate with the real world, then it is by definition...junk.
They're marginally effective on Dutch roads, which were overhauled to be cyclist-safe decades ago, with new roads being safe by default. The Dutch approach unfortunately does not reflect even remotely on North American cities. You need a helmet, because stroads[1] guarantee accidents.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] thread[the tweet]: https://twitter.com/pedalmeapp/status/1489594692857647113?s=...
I don’t think there’s any riding situation where you can think you’re in complete control of the risk.
My point is that when mountain biking, you encounter varied terrain and obstacles and you decide how to approach that based on your skill and experience. Some approaches are riskier than others. And sometimes you decide the best thing to do is just nope out and ride or walk around whatever it is.
Even better if you are a woman in summer dress. Then the drivers give you way more space and are super careful around you. It was researched.
Citation needed please.
It doesn’t mean the research wasn’t bullshit nor correctly understood what happened there.
glad I could help out here
Helmets absolutely protect against cars. If I'd been hit, I'd have fallen. Head hits ground, you're fucked.
> The distribution of overtaking events shifted just over one-fifth of a standard deviation closer to the rider – a potentially important behaviour if, as theoretical frameworks suggest, near-misses and collisions lie on a continuum.
Looking at the graph in figure 1, "one-fifth of a standard" looks as unimpressive as expected. The distance from the kerb looks much more relevant.
IIUC all the analysis is based on 2355 data gathered by Walker riding a bike himself a few years ago between two cities. It's not a mix of data from different persons or a mix of city and countryside rides. The most interesting part is that Walker published 5 articles about the same data, and he got a different result in each one.
You're right that perhaps it is a big difference between cyclists, my guess would be the number of cars matters more than the number of cyclists. The study has been replicated elsewhere.
> Walker published 5 articles about the same data, and he got a different result in each one.
Uh, no? The 8.5 cm result has been consistent.
At the margin, these things make a difference, especially given that collisions are rare as a fraction for rides taken.
To be clear, I am not saying that it is safer to ride without a helmet, just an interesting study of behavior.
I get that you know people who are harmed by cars (as do I), but your appeal to pathos & anecdote should not have a bearing here.
When I was at uni and was cycling to a 10am lecture, a small van pulled out of a side road across my path. I was in a cycle lane and had right of way. He simply didn't look in my direction until he had already started to pull out. I was unable to stop or avoid him, so hit the front of his van head on, was briefly airborne, and landed on the road on the other side. Miraculously only scuffs and bruises, although my bike was a write-off. At that point I started wearing a helmet(!!!)
The next year, one of my friends went over the handlebars of her bike during a collision, except she landed head-first on the road, thankfully she was wearing a helmet. The helmet was split, she walked away with nothing other than mild concussion. Another friend and I walked out to rescue her bike later from the accident location, it also was a write-off.
Once you've seen a bike accident up-close there is simply no justification for not wearing a helmet. Even if you haven't seen an accident, wear a helmet!
[1] https://doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.aap.2006.08.010
The study is disputed by one researcher, the paper I linked contains a rebuttal and I think it is convincing.
Here is a study investigating this methodology of studying car behavior and ultimately concluding it is useful: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00014...
Not sure about the time or season though.
Unless I'm misunderstanding what's meant by "self-reporting", it sounds like regardless of how many riders they got data from, it would say that there are 0 fatalities to bikers because people who are dead don't respond to surveys.
Individual studies are on average fairly useless.
I'll be waiting :)
Here is another study, where they measured the distance to overtaking cars with a distance sensor:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00014...
"A Trek hybrid bicycle was fitted with a Massa M-5000/95 temperature-compensated ultrasonic distance sensor with its centre 0.77 m from the ground, facing perpendicularly to the direction of travel and feeding into a laptop computer running MultiLab software via a MultiLog Pro data-logger sampling from the sensor at 50 Hz."
I have been T-boned by a driver approaching from the opposite direction, in full daylight with no visual disruptions, when they failed to "look bike" and turned across my lane. They totally did not see me - so they fact I was wearing a helmet did not factor at all into the situation.
I was flipped through the air and landed 10m down the side road on my back. My backpack took the brunt of of the impact but my head still snapped back and hit the ground. The helmet protected my head and prevented what would have at least been a concussion and possibly a fractured skull.
In my 30+ years of regularly cycling on roads, I'd say the majority of close calls I've had have happened in with cars turning out of side streets of with cars turning across my lane from the opposite direction. Those are due to a combination of the following in my perceived order of likelihood:
- the driver checking for cars/buses/trucks and not looking for motorcycles or bicycles - the driver seeing the cyclist but totally misjudging their speed and assuming they have time to complete their turn in front of the bike - the driver being as asshole and cutting off the cyclist.
_Maybe_ the cyclist wearing helmet could affect the second scenario. It doesn't affect the first scenario and assholes are assholes regardless of helmet wearing.
I've had less trouble with close/reckless overtaking. It does happen, but it is highly unlike the car driver completely fails to see a cyclist they are overtaking.
Saying helmets reduce rider safety due to one scenario, where the car driver has to see the helmet and thus the cyclist in order to make a more risky overtaking gap judgement call, seems like a massive stretch to me.
As a regular biker, close passes are also a smaller of my concerns compared to most of the other hazards on the road.
Is there any data to substantiate this?
Risk compensation is a known theory in psychology. But as is normal for psychology, arguments fly back and forth, and there is no settled consensus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation#Bicycle_helm...
The thing I'm afraid of is a car hitting me at high speed cause they didn't see me, that would probably kill me.
That's why I've glued 3-inch shards of broken glass to my steering wheel.
We live in a world of safety fanaticism.
Which reminds me I need to get a helmet for my youngest, even though she's only a rider.
Because several family members and I have experienced head injuries riding bicycles, none of us have been shot at or attacked with a knife. That said, I'm down for making all private gun possession illegal.
There's like 27000 bicycle head injuries in the US.
I'm surprised you haven't googled it.
Here's the head injury source. You can easily Google shooting and stabbings per year and add them together. https://www.nsc.org/safety-first-blog/bicycle-safety-statist...
Its pretty clear you should pick up some Kevlar and chain mail for your kids.
A natural experiment may require comparing similar communities with and with helmet laws.
Shootings and stabbings on the other had are difficult to not report. And can happen regardless of proximity to bicycles.
Ultimately let's do both: get helmets for kids and get rid of so many guns.
Statistically 'in real life' extremely rare for this to happen.
Just like most forms of harm; most of the time that you take some form of insurance against a negative event, it's not necessarily because of the likelihood of that event, but the sheer totality of the harm that will occur if that extremely rare event comes to pass.
What is the COST of wearing a helmet? $60 purchase and 5 seconds every time you ride. Essentially nothing.
Compare to, e.g. TSA, which has a cost of billions of dollars and millions of person-hours. Unlike helmets, which are known to actually prevent some injuries, TSA is also effectively useless at its intended goal.
There's more gunshots and stabbings than people injuring their head on bicycles.
You can buy a suit of chainmail for the same price as a modern bicycle.
Its minimal cost.
In most countries, the risk of shootings or stabbings are orders of magnitude lower than having a fall or accident on a bike on the road with other types of vehicles.
In certain parts of the US, though? Yeah, wearing body armor would probably be a good idea. I think people just generally try to avoid going to those places as their strategy of risk avoidance, which negates the need for any body armor.
to be absolutely safe you should wear both full body chainmail and a bicycle helmet.
For me the main cost is having to carry around a bulky helmet when I'm off the bike and ugly indentations on my hair and forehead.
I have seen experienced ice skaters go from not wearing a helmet to being fanatical about wearing one, simply because they had an accident and had to deal with the consequences. I have also seen experienced cyclists who would have likely lost their life if they weren't wearing a helmet.
As for the company in question, which (incidently) was insisting that employees not wear helmets, it sounds more like a decision based upon the perceptions of customers. If they were truly interested in hiring people who are safety conscious, they would hire people who are safety conscious rather than those who are willing to ride without a helmet. There are more than a few people who don't wear helmets who have an astronomically high tollerance of risk.
Driving is high risk activity that can lead to severe head injuries. It is even easier to keep a helmet with your car than with your bike. The cost to risk profile here is extremely similar but the resultant behavior is quite different.
People rarely approach risks rationally and risk avoidance behavior is highly influenced by social acceptability.
During my lifetime of skiing, I have seen the shift from nobody wearing helmets to most people wearing them. The ski patrols worked hard to make helmet wearing first socially acceptable and then socially expected (at least in some groups.) The risks didn't changed, there was some rise in awareness, but the biggest change (from my perspective) is social.
This I see the vehement support for helmet wearing as predominantly cultural alignment enforcement rather than reasoned risk avoidance analysis.
Personally, I always wear a helmet skiing because it is more comfortable, plus I ski FAST sometimes. I rarely wear a helmet on a bicycle because I bike slow and strongly try to avoid situations where my safety is in the hands of other drivers. Instead I stick to mostly quiet residential streets, bike paths, or separated bike lines. The helmet has a much larger impact on my risk profile when skiing than biking because of my behaviors.
All that said, I don't think that the company should ban standard safety gear for their riders. Especially since they claim to have good incident tracking, they should be able to find and let go any riders who act recklessly with a helmet.
Just FTR, don't wear a helmet while driving a car. It will massively increase the strain on your spine in the case of a crash and your airbags are not built with helmets in mind. Additionally, car helmets are usually of the full-size kind and reduce your field of vision quite a bit. There's a reason helmets are not recommended for normal driving.
The only reason why we are asking these questions is because things that are legally required for automakers is left, at best, as a responsibility to the consumer when it comes to bicycles.
[1] To be specific, any department store should be regarded as a death trap prior to a knowledgeable person verifying that it has been assembled properly. Even then one has to be careful since the components are typically intended for very light use.
Anecdotally I bought a very fast electric scooter last year, but initially I didn't have a helmet. It took about two weeks to finally receive a helmet that fit me, and I didn't take it at top speed until then. I definitely feel much more secure riding with the helmet on...and take more risks than I would without it.
This seems insane. Even if the data supported this, anyone from the PR department should have seen how much bad press this generates from a mile away.
Sincerely, a guy who's probably alive because of a bicycle helmet.
https://lmb.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/FJKHORIVUAI799Z.j...
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to force anyone to wear a helmet. It's completely fine if one wants to take that risk. But forbidding them is just insane.
Also, helmets are not a get-out-of-jail-free-card. They increase your chances of survival in case of a crash, you will still get injured. Protecting people might be the least effective thing compared to eliminating the hazard, but splitting cars and bikes is simply not always an option.
But I stand by my original comment, even if they do think forbidding helmets avoids a few accidents, they should have smelled the shitstorm from a mile away (and people running a bike company should really be more empathetic towards bikers).
Yours seems to be based on the assumption that if it is not mandated by law, it is not a good idea that can save lives, which is the criteria by which others are evaluating this
It's also worth noting that biking in a city around cars and bikes and other people IS objectively risky, to the point where it is completely reasonable for someone to choose to wear a single piece of safety equipment over their single most important human organ
Urban biking is inherently risky, especially in countries/states/cities with lackluster or nonexistent safe cycling infrastructure.
Wearing a helmet is just trying to reduce the potential damage from unforeseen and unexpected accidents - things that may likely be 100% outside of control of the biker once they are on the road. It's not a matter of "I want to wear a helmet so that I can take more risks" and it's ridiculous that Pedal Me is peddling such an excuse.
This might lower risk for the customers because driver may take less risk without a helmet in some situation but the risk for driver is only increased.
This is optimizing for customers at the cost of drivers.
I don't see any supportive extensive research linked from them .
I suppose it's also not reasonable to provide seatbelts to passengers as well as the driver of a taxi?
No. Which means it's not automatically "the reasonable thing", just an opinion.
So I'm curious what the REASONING is behind your feeling that offering passengers the option to wear a helmet is unreasonable. Personally, I would AGREE that offering passengers on a pedicab the option of a pineapple would be unreasonable. There just isn't any practical correlation between pineapples and pedicabs. But helmets are different: there are large numbers of people who campaign vigorously to persuade others to wear helmets when on a bike; many places even have laws mandating helmets on bikes, at least for some ages. So it is a plausible thing for passengers to want. Given that, why would it be unreasonable to offer it?
Yes The context of the scope of the word “the” in the comment that you’re replying to is not specifically written out, but most people and the poster will infer it to be the context of the binary choice being discussed, either offer or not offer helmets to passengers, and not the global choice of offering them hover boards, bags of octopus, or helmets or etc
Someon's feelings do not define that which is reasonable for anyone else but theirself. But the comment presumes it is. The comment skips past the arguability of that position as though it were not arguable, and all I said was that this is in fact arguable.
Whatever your problem with that is, isn't valid.
I'd worry about lice.
Also, the idea is to offer an option. Not to make it mandatory unless legislation require it. If your passengers are more comfortable not wearing them, their choice.
> Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
Pedal Me has done the math on what the average settlement for a traumatic brain injury to it's staff is going to be, multiplied by the probability of such an event, and has decided that they'll make more money without helmets.
It ignores that much of the risk comes from outside of the drivers control. It ignores that driver behavior could otherwise be monitored to ensure safety.
It would just be nice if it was honest- a driver with a helmet on doesn't match the sexy appeal they're going for. That people might say "if the driver needs a helmet why don't I, the rider?".
Edit: this was a tongue in cheek reference to the follow-up line in Fight Club (after the scene alluded to by OP).
I live in their target area and I can't ever recall a time where I wanted to combine the risks & downsides of biking and ordering a cab.
If I want to bike (note: I wouldn't recommend it in Central London), I'd get the Santander bikes or the various bike-for-hire ones littering the streets and just do it myself.
If I wanted to spend time fiddling with my phone, I may as well just order an Uber instead of this thing? The prices would be similar considering they both have to pay drivers and driver wages represent a significant chunk of the sticker price of any manned transport-for-hire service so I really don't see why anyone would get this thing instead of a good old Uber.
I'm sure one can make a case for it — but do you really feel that way as a default?
Why do you remain, if so?
If a cyclist have a helmet he and everyone around him behaves dumber. This was researched.
Less accidents overall? I can believe that, maybe. But you'll need to back up "less severe ones".
If a new driver who's phone distracted them for a split second is going to hit me on my bike, I feel like it's going to be more severe if I don't have a helmet on.
Without the helmet you die on the road. With the helmet you die at the hospital.
This seems like an extraordinary claim, given that safety systems in all other places have no such effects (or at least, not as significant). I would very much like to see this research, and even then I would be very wary of it.
Either way, it's irrelevant given the levels of training that they are claiming they demand of their drivers. Given those claims, it's obvious that they helmets + training would be safer than just the training, if the training is good enough to protect the drivers at all.
There are examples where safety systems cause increased risk.
Football helmets are one. The helmet doesn't protect very well against concussions and the presence of the helmet makes it more likely for players to use their heads as a weapon.
I don't know about this bike helmet example since the actual data isn't available, but there are definitely times when counterintuitively having a safety feature is riskier.
[1] https://philosophia.uncg.edu/phi361-matteson/module-1-why-do...
True; on the other hand I remember (I don't have a handy reference, sorry) a study showing that car drivers were leaving less space around cyclists wearing a helmet (hence increasing the probability of a collision) than around those without...
Some people have suggested even that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation#Seat_belts
I can imagine how somebody could have thought risk compensation might be a thing in the short term - such as when seatbelts were a new invention. I've seen the kind of thing like people demonstrating how their active cruise control won't let their new car crash into the car in front, which is a pretty dumb idea (even if it will almost certainly work). But that seems to wear off pretty quickly, and then having it just becomes the default and you don't think of it anymore, so I imagine any risk compensation would quickly evaporate.
With bicycle helmets, they're mandatory here for riding out on the street, so it was just always the default. Anecdotally, putting on a helmet was and is just something we always did, and never changed the perception of risk because it was just the normal default. I don't even think about it, just like how I always put on the seatbelt and then don't think about it anymore.
Guilty as charged lol (though in my case it's to better understand how ACC behaved in various situations, given my unfamiliarity with it.
AFAIK, in the Netherlands helmets are considered to slightly reduce safety in the general case (but this is not a strong effect).
The general objective is to make infrastructure sufficiently safe so that helmets become redundant.
Even experienced cyclists take the occasional fall :)
“A major cause of head injuries is going over the handlebars, which is not possible with a 3 metre long bike.
Helmets protect against falls. They don't protect against cars.
Also look at the amount of car vs. bike accidents where the cyclists head smashes against the windshield. A helmet protects in that case too.
As an example of one of the more funny&misleading statistics: People who wear bicycle helmets in the Netherlands actually end up in hospital more often. https://waronthemotorist.wordpress.com/2012/06/28/who-are-al...
I looked around a bit to see if I could find a paper that takes a balanced view. This particular paper seems to be a bit more from your perspective where wearing helmets might be of some utility. However it does leave the impression that it is would actually be somewhat hard to break even on wearing helmets in the Netherlands. https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s...
The second is a recent paper that applies evenly to people who ride a bike "normally", [From experience: at low speeds on segregated infrastructure at around 15 km/h or so]. My interpretation is that it concludes that wearing a helmet would improve safety for cyclists somewhat; however it would not (currently) be risk-cost-effective according to their measure; and would require intervention to break even.
If zero people rode bikes without helmets, you'd see 0 cyclists without helmets in the hospital. All those injured will be wearing helmets. It's a terrible measure.
Commuters actually make up the majority of cyclists in the Netherlands, there are a lot of them (cycle commuting is heavily encouraged for all kinds of people at all ages), and they don't wear helmets. Despite the large number of commuters on bicycles, commuting is (apparently) so safe that the commuters are heavily outnumbered by the sports cyclists in the hospital statistics.
It is still a somewhat misleading measure of course. You probably should not conclude that wearing a helmet is highly unsafe. ;-)
And... that's the point I'm making. Take measures from the Netherlands with a few grains of salt, because the situation is atypical. On the one hand it's really cool that it's atypical, but then you do need to watch out. The numbers don't line up with the intuition of someone from a typical cars-are-more-important-than-safety country at all; so it's easy to make funny assumptions and draw wrong conclusions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xD-uImSUlPo <- eg. arbitrary busy cycle crossing(s?) in Utrecht. Seems to be mostly commuters and university students.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAKMNr0P5r4 <- or eg here on dedicated paths, Nieuwegein. A lot of school children at that particular point in time by the look of it.
What I see in those videos looks just like my university, a bunch of people on what we call beach cruisers going a very short distance. Their speed indicates they aren't going far and aren't in much of a rush. Are people in the Netherlands strict about arrival times? Do they usually move at a slower pace?
In my city commuters go fast. We're going a few miles on a commute at least.
The time culture is similar to Germany: you have to be punctual. This means you need to leave on time in order to arrive on time. As a general rule in real-world traffic: Speeding might not actually help you arrive all that much quicker, you just feel like you do. An objective instrument (such as a GPS) may well inform you otherwise.
Also, on a bike: if you're traveling longer distances, you need to pace yourself, lest you run out of steam half-way.
The infrastructure is good though, in municipal zones the cycle distance (and time!) can often be shorter than the car-distance; because bikes can take more short-cuts and are easier to park. And for longer distances it's possible to eg. park your bike at a station and continue by bus or train.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3-tUMgwCt8 <- bike parking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDXB0CY2tSQ <- start of video narrates a commuting trip (bike+train) to a business park near Amsterdam.
[edit] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UxCbmT9elk <- a commute with more biking in it
In my country (Australia), helmet wearing is mandatory and the vast, vast majority seem to follow this rule. I've never felt "more protected" wearing a helmet, as I wouldn't ride without one. It's a default state.
I started using my helmet again after that.
(But another safety related thing I have started to really doubt. Skiing alone is supposed to be risky. I do ski alone, quite a lot actually. I have gotten into my share of accidents of various seriousness. And not a single of them has been when I have been alone.)
My first time ever wearing a helmet on the slopes I slammed head-first into a tree. Got up, laughed it off, and rode away. Better lucky than good.
This correlates very well with the increase of helmet usage.
The trend is stable/slight increase in the past 5 years.
For the head injuries, it reduced from 2/1000 skier to about 1/1000 skier/year. It follows the general trend of the number of accidents per skier/year.
Looking at the material and the quality of the slopes in the past 40 years, they are definitely a big driver of this change, they improved a lot!
[0]: https://www.stiftung.ski/sis-lab/asu-unfallanalyse/
Even strong and careful skiers wipe out occasionally. A helmet is the difference between shaking it off and brain injury.
You can be as cautious as you want and never make a mistake, but if someone else skies into you you could still smash your head very hard. That's why you should wear a helmet. Not because of your own capabilities, but because of the capabilities of the people around you and the risk just being too high.
I wouldn't wear a helmet while cycling though. It's quite safe in The Netherlands.
Sometimes the universe just wants you dead.
Part of this is complacency, but honestly most of it is just probability. The more you do something, the more chances you have for just the wrong combination of factors to happen.
Should delivery drivers not wear seatbelts because they might not be as afriad that they'll fly through the windshield? Should linemen not wear harnesses because they might be more confident working on power lines? Should warehouse workers not wear hi-vis jackets because they might be more confident working around forklifts? Should construction workers not wear helmets because they might be more confident working in areas with falling objects?
And I love the "if something bad happens, it's obviously the rider's fault" mentality here. I guess cars never hit bikes, right? Or bikes hitting other bikes? Or other accidents that, you know, are entirely unavoidable or otherwise have nothing to do with the rider being at fault?
If I was a staff rider, I'd be putting that helmet on and telling Pedal Me to eat an OSHA-sized bag of dicks if they have a problem with it. Banning helmets "for safety reasons" might not be the absolute dumbest thing I've read this year, but it's up there.
And then they would fire you and you will have to find a company that allow helmets and everyone will be happy
FTFY
> At pedal me, we believe in looking after our people properly. That’s why our team are employees, not contractors.
[1] https://www.cyclist.co.uk/in-depth/1365/is-it-safer-to-wear-...
And I don't believe that to be a justification for removing those safety protections entirely. This ain't some data science problem to be solved; this is ethics and morality, and there is precisely nothing ethical or moral about demanding that your employees make themselves less safe and then having the gall to pretend that this somehow makes them safer.
> I don’t feel like shouting that you’d tell your employer to eat a bag of dicks really contributes much here.
You're right: all employees telling their employers to eat an OSHA-sized bag of dicks if they try prohibiting basic safety equipment would contribute far more greatly to society than just one. But we gotta start somewhere.
Crazy. I suspect you are actually reasoning from your thought that people are more likely to die without helmets and ignoring the premise of the question, or at least I hope that is what you are doing.
claiming you're removing safety equipment to reduce risky behavior is the tail wagging the dog. there are other ways to reduce risky behavior which do not have such tragic consequences as side effects to them.
Let's say you do an A/B test on this policy and find 15 more people die with the helmet allowed policy, but in the other side, one person died who if they had chosen a helmet they likely wouldn't have. You're saying it is unconscionable to pick the policy where the 15 wouldn't have died?
Do the other things to reduce risky behavior, certainly, but if this is an uncorrelated improvement I don't see why that wouldn't be worth taking.
Note, I doubt that this is actually true, but I wanted to highlight your moral apriori claims as ridiculous.
You failed to do that:
You didn’t address the agency problem where the 15 chose to engage in risky behavior while that 1 was coerced into dying — and ignoring the role of agency in the Trolley Problem is amateur hour. The helmets didn’t kill anyone, their following choices while wearing helmets did; which is in contrast to mandating no helmet, that is directly responsible for a death.
What you did was make a ridiculous argument that ignored the crux of the issue and pretend that the other person was wrong.
All I can say is I am glad that the actual people making decisions seem to also prefer fewer people dying over non-coercion.
Despite this bare denial, I believe "coerced into dying" to be an accurate description of someone coerced into not wearing a helmet dying of head injuries from an unavoidable accident
sorry, that's not a coercion I'm willing to make. First, do no harm. Come back when you've tried safer ways to reduce risky behavior.
> if even 1 incident occurs which was unavoidable by an unhelmeted cyclist which harms them more than they would have been harmed wearing a helmet, then the policy is unconscionable
if you can think of a scenario in which what I described as unconscionable happens, then I would find that scenario unconscionable.
> Do the other things to reduce risky behavior, certainly, but if this is an uncorrelated improvement I don't see why that wouldn't be worth taking.
whereas I DO see why such a helmet ban would be a risk not worth taking, it is at the top of this post.
That ain't what was argued. The commenter above argued that helmets encourage people to take more risks. Even assuming that to be true, the sane answer is to train people to ride safely even when wearing helmets, not to ban helmets.
> it would be a statistical certainty your omission of action is basically causing people's deaths
1. "statistical certainty" is an oxymoron.
2. correlation != causation
2. Yes, this is why we have RCTs.
“In sum, this systematic review found little to no support for the hypothesis bicycle helmet use is associated with engaging in risky behaviour.”
Those are safest rides, they are good for your health and the ones that drop first.
The proper solution here is to provide helmets for passengers as well, but that raises more problems - they needs to be a way to sanitize them, multiple sizes might need to be available (I assume they need to be sized properly for adequate protection?), etc.
The aforementioned problems are hard (read: expensive) or impossible to solve, so while the ethical idea might be to just not offer this service at all, the objective here is to make money whatever-it-takes (or most likely, raise money, as I doubt this thing is profitable) as opposed to providing a good transport service (maybe because there's no actual demand for this?).
Too bad? If your business model depends on this then you just have to suck it up and deal with it, not compromise worker safety.
> The proper solution here is to provide helmets for passengers as well, but that raises more problems - they needs to be a way to sanitize them, multiple sizes might need to be available (I assume they need to be sized properly for adequate protection?), etc.
Too bad? Cost of doing business.
This. Definitely. However if it came to court, as indeed it might, and they tried to argue helmets cause risky behavior, it wouldn't take Johnny Cochrane to get them slapped with a massive fine and laughed out of court.
They're gambling that the cost of safely resolving the issue will be more than any legal costs. Talk about preventing risky behavior!
I bet they all know this isn't viable and just hope this problem disappears before an accident actually happens and brings this in front of a court.
EDIT: also, this doesn't explain prohibiting helmets for cargo bikes, too.
I think it's a PR thing. They don't want prospective passengers seeing their branded bikes as dangerous enough to justify wearing a helmet, regardless of whether that particular bike is currently transporting passengers.
A first world country has zero excuse.
Wouldn't the same apply to mask wearing? Yet we consistently see service employees wearing them and customers not.
No, for a ton of reasons. Off the top of my head:
(1) Masks are more effective at preventing transmission than reception.
(2) Different individuals have different levels of concern, which might lead one to choose a mask and another to choose not to wear one.
(3) Different individuals face different levels of risk. The person who is immunocompromised may wear a mask even when it would make no sense for other people.
(4) The customer may encounter 2-3 service employees in a day; the service employee may encounter hundreds of customers in the same time.
And that's without even getting into political issues (in the US, where mask-wearing has become politicized).
This isn't the 70s. Just give everyone helmets. Passengers included. And yes you should clean them. If you're running a business I'm sure you can afford some little bottles of alcohol spray.
By this logic, no one would feel safe riding a bus when the driver has a seatbelt and you don't.
I actually laughed out loud reading this.
So what? It’s the company’s job to ensure safety for the riders and the staff. There are many places in the world where it’s actually illegal not to wear a helmet.
If you get into a business like this; and you didn’t factor this in, you’re a plain and simple idiot and your business deserves to fail if you make it the staff’s problem.
Shame on these idiots. I’d never heard of these guys before, and my first impression is one of the worst I could have. How is this even worth it for them from a PR side?
I thought they had two sizes, but maybe not the new ones.
Do you wear a helmet when you drive inside your car? If not, why not? It might make you much safer in case of a crash, according to your reasoning.
Wearing a helmet can itself become a leading factor to cause an incident, and it's clearly what they are hinting at in the linked article: that data seems to indicate that riders wearing helmets may be getting more incidents on average. Then it's a simple equation: number of incidents x gravity of the incident in both A/B scenarios, and compare which one is the most favorable. It's not a question you answer with a "what the actual fuck" kind of reasoning.
In order to show that helmets *cause* accidents, they need to create a randomized study where they force employees to flip a coin to decide whether to wear a helmet or not.
Otherwise, here's one plausible scenario: Employees who work in tiny suburbs with small roads and very little traffic feel safer, and this are less likely to wear a helmet. They get in less crashes because their town has fewer and safer drivers. Employees working in the city have more crashes simply because of being in a busy city, so they are more likely to wear helmets.
Right now, you cannot prove that helmets cause crashes and not the above.
In reality there are confounds both directions. The effects of helmet wearing are higly contingent based on the geography and demographics.
Here is a review (from just 3 years ago) of such studies:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136984781...
> Risk compensation, as it is typically defined and understood, is only one of six possible scenarios, namely a usual non-helmet wearer puts on a helmet and increases their risk taking. Importantly, evidence in the opposite direction, i.e., taking a helmet off leads to less risky behaviour, is not evidence in support of risk compensation as it is a type of logical fallacy
After reviewing that article none of the studies are convincing either way. The only studies that actually look for causality are the ones which only measure speed to asses risk. Those are also the one that I would qualify as positive results but were listed as negative results because of that above mentioned logical fallacy.
So while is is possible to untangle these effects, it has yet to be done properly to show a clear result either way.
Research on helmets has been ongoing for 40 years, and has even led to ANSI standards for helmet design and protection. The UCI requires hemets in amateur and professional events. This isn't about risk taking behavior, it is simply about if you do have an accident, you won't be killed, turned into a vegetable or concussed when you hit your head.
> The effects of helmet wearing are higly contingent based on the geography and demographics.
I'm pretty sure that hitting your head on Ugandan cement will damage your head roughly the same as American Cement or European cement. S
Additionally, I've never seen any research showing any kind of demographic relationship to severity of head injuries in bicycle accidents. Nor have I once saw research that did anything other than present some statistical noise about distance cars give you based on helmet or not. Close shaves are not accidents or injuries, so even the basis of the research is questionable.
The effects of a helmet on overall safety when ridden at low speed on dedicated bike paths is very different from when ridden at high speeds in traffic with no bike lane.
Thus the the design of the city and streets (geography is perhaps not the perfect term for this) and the what/how of the local culture's bike riding behavior (perhaps demographics is a bad term for this, not sure of a better one.) have huge impacts on how much a helmet affects your safety simply because the risk profiles are very different.
The data is messy due to regional variability plus the difficulty of reliably removing the confounds mentioned above. I would never discourage someone from wearing and will actively encourage it when riding in bicycle hostile areas. At the same time, I think the push for helmet laws and helmet education is often a cop out to avoid talking about how we need to redesign cities to support safe bicycling. If we did the later, we would see much larger safety gains and the former would be much less necessary.
Oh I'm so tired of this meme!
Plenty of times causation is found through correlation. Plenty. Of. Times.
Because I have a seatbelt, an airbag, and a reinforced shock absorbing shell around me.
I'm not going multiples of walking speed on something standing upright only thanks to gyroscopic forces, so no.
Also even when running I have way better maneuverability than as a cyclist.
Generally limbs > wheels when it comes to getting out of trouble.
I wear a helmet when skiing though.
My car has other safety measures in place to protect me from head injuries. A bicycle does not.
Whether I do or not has a lot to do with how likely it is that I might get in an accident. Wild right? Why would I opt for more safety gear in a more dangerous situation.
Cars already have airbags and seatbelts which help a lot for the kind of collisions that would otherwise result in head injuries.
> It might make you much safer in case of a crash, according to your reasoning.
I don't see what in their comment could be construed to say that helmets make you much safer regardless of vehicle.
> Wearing a helmet can itself become a leading factor to cause an incident
Is there a source for this? Should be a randomized A/B test as you mentioned, not just a correlation - wearing a hi-vis jacket or other precautions taken more often in dangerous situations probably also correlate with accidents.
Even if helmets do cause accidents through increased carelessness, some may still take issue to intentionally making a scenario more dangerous such that people are more careful. It's kind of settling for a local minimum, rather than aiming to reduce inherent risk alongside aligning people's risk estimates to not overestimate the precautions.
A competent car helmet is probably a motorcycle helmet, which is more like $100 to start, but it impacts hearing, reduces vision in all directions, is a significant weight, usually doesn't adjust much for sizing, takes longer to put on (especially if you wear eyeglasses).
A bike helmet in a car would likely be more trouble than anything, it would interfere with the headrests and probably increase neck injuries.
But besides that, even if the average nation-wide number of accidents can be taken as a basis for nation-wide policy making because confounders can be ignored (a huge assumption), you can still not use this data reliably for individual decision making or policy making for smaller groups without further analysis. You need to account the variance, where the confounders occur, and what these confounding factors are. For example, regarding individual decision making, it could be the case that certain people who cycle with helmets on the average cycle more recklessly, but you cycle even more carefully with a helmet and are better protected. If so, you cannot take the average to inform your cycling. The same holds for other groups, such as professional cyclists for a company like in this article.
To give another example, consider accident statistics of self-driving cars versus human drivers nationwide. The human driver statistics include each and every reckless and drunk driver in the country, including many people with whom you'd never share a car ride. At the same time, you might have been driving accident-free for more than 40 years. For you personally, or a specific group you belong to, self-driving cars could thus be way more dangerous than driving yourself.
Would it? I've never heard anyone recommend this, but if this did actually reduce the likelihood of a serious head injury in the event of a car crash, then I would seriously consider wearing a helmet while I drive a car. I have no problem wearing one while I ride a bicycle or motorbike.
I don't know, however, if a helmet may work worse in conjuction with an airbag though. So personally I think I'd stay away from helmets in cars (but I really have too little data to make an informed decision).
Having said that, in the case of this company, perhaps they could offer their passengers a "Hövding" device? (Hövding being the swedish word for a chieftain, but "hövve" is also slang for head, and in the case of this product it is a... "backpack/necklace thingy" that is a wearable airbag. Supposedly works really well, but probably comes with a price tag matching this function.
I am not aware of any studies looking specifically at the effects of helmet wearing on TBI rates of regular drivers, but then good data on that for bicycles is also hard to come by but that doesn't stop people from pushing for bicycle helmets.
Yet, lethal TBIs are more likely to come from motor vehicle accidents than from bicycle accidents.
> the risks seem low enough that the expense (including time to equip) of that additional equipment is too much to justify its general use.
Yet, somehow this argument is deemed irrelevant when helmets for bicycles are discussed.
There really is not a compelling reason why helmet usage in a car is different from on a bicycle. The main difference is social acceptability, not any objective risk analysis.
Is that per mile, per minute, or per lethal TBI? Also, is a collision between a bicycle and a motor vehicle a motor vehicle accident or a bicycle accident?
Of course, bike helmets protect against more than just brain injury. They also protect against road abrasion of some portion of the head, which is not usually a factor for car occupants, except if they're ejected or they're in a car that rolls over and doesn't have an roof or an effective roll bar.
Bike helmets are much lower expense and hassle than car helmets (which are mostly motorcycle helmets) and neck restraints, etc. If it's a public use bike system, especially the leave anywhere bikes, the expense and hassle gets overwelming, and helmets for customers of a pedal cab would be similar.
I've got a bike helmet with integrated lighting, which adds functionality and is kind of neat, although it was much more expensive than a good enough helmet.
Per lethal TBI, I don't think the data exists for per mile or per minute.
> Also, is a collision between a bicycle and a motor vehicle a motor vehicle accident or a bicycle accident?
Good catch, looking at their methods, they do include IDC-10 codes for pedestrian and bicyclist injuries due to motor vehicles in that number so I am not sure how many of those are actual vehicle occupants and I can't find any data at the moment that breaks those numbers down per IDC code group.
> Bike helmets are much lower expense and hassle than car helmets (which are mostly motorcycle helmets) and neck restraints,
Your "simple equation" relies on your variables being solid. And they aren't.
It's important to stress that the behavioural studies from Bath (that show helmeted riders take more risks in simulations, that cars give them less space) are not data about whether helmeted users are at greater risk. Or that comparisons between US and NZ riders and outcomes are comparable because of vastly different road and rider profiles.
It's also hard to show how much helmets are helping because zero-harm accidents are rarely reported, so if we assume that they function correctly, and do reduce harm in impacts, we simply don't know how many near-misses there are.
You can look at hospital admission data two studies show 75 and 78% of cyclists admitted with serious-enough head/neck injuries hadn't worn a helmet. That still needs adjusting for total accidents, and proportion of helmeted riders on the road in the first place. Again, poor reporting makes this tough.
You also have to be aware that some studies and stats are polished up by people fervently for and against mandatory helmet laws. Biased reporting doesn't help anyone. There's a good selection here: https://www.helmets.org/stats.htm (domain suggests a strong bias, but I'm not sure).
Pedal Me doesn't provide a good argument here. It seems more like they're worried what their customers will think (do they need helmets too?) and nothing to do with actual safety outcomes.
American Football vs Rugby and the difference in CTE is often cited as the prime example of where this is true. Helmets and shoulder pads encourage riskier hits.
American Football is all about set plays. You line up and then charge at each other, meaning you have two lines effectively charging at each other and can focus all your effort on this one effort.
Rugby is much more fluid, so the amount of direct head-on-head collisions is much lower, and the distance someone typically runs before tackling someone is much lower as the 'engagements' are more frequent.
American Football is like going from 0-60mph every 10 minutes, whereas rugby is about sitting at 30mph constantly.
I agree linemen are a novel concept, but they’re not the only victims.
Combine that with the fact when a Rugby player makes an extended run, they aren't often tackled directly head or side-on, it's more perhaps an "anchor" tackle from the back to pull them down. In american football, the safeties and deep players have more opportunity to get head-on with a receiver while the ball is in flight, while a rugby full-back having to watch and run horizontally while the player is running means they are less likely to be directly head-on.
Further combine that with the fact that Rugby governing bodies have penalised 'high tackles', and the rate of CTE drops significalty.
Is your core argument that rugby is safer because the players are more tired at any given point so they don't hit as hard? Other than that, I am struggling to figure out the mechanism between stopping more frequently and football being more dangerous.
>Combine that with the fact when a Rugby player makes an extended run, they aren't often tackled directly head or side-on, it's more perhaps an "anchor" tackle from the back to pull them down. In american football, the safeties and deep players have more opportunity to get head-on with a receiver while the ball is in flight, while a rugby full-back having to watch and run horizontally while the player is running means they are less likely to be directly head-on.
I'd suggest you watch videos like [0] to diligence your claim that head-on tackles aren't common in rugby.
The nuance that you are missing is the power equation - American football's best tacklers focus on short-duration, high-work contact (i.e. maximizing power) to knock an offensive player off their feet [1]. Think of it like placing a nail. You can swing a metal hammer and a rubber mallet (of the same mass) against the same nail and the metal hammer will always drive it better because the dt portion of the power equation (i.e. the denominator) is smaller.
The metaphor extends: rugby players may put in the same amount of work (or more!) on a given tackle, but the dt part of their power equation is much higher than in the NFL because humans are squishy (in practice this is also why you see so much more form tackling in rugby - it's hard to generate enough power to just knock someone over without wearing pads).
Ultimately, high power hits are what cause the rapid, high energy head movements that cause CTE and those are just easier to do in pads.
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOFO_MzZi50 [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3Bh9LHMEeY
I think a lot of people —including experienced cyclists— would be surprised how easily a silly little fall, a knock against a car, can just kill you.
So even if a helmet makes you marginally more likely to be involved in an accident, being a professional vulnerable road user, all day is no joke. I'd like to have safety equipment when my number comes up.
Some of this difference is due to the innate and insidious sense of invulnerability with protective gear. It comes naturally even the first time you don it. It's a common source of accidents and something that must be trained out of you.
Being able to get back up unscathed from bad falls also reinforces your future confidence, or lack thereof, which I can also attest from having fallen many times both with and without protective gear.
I'd still never ride without (at least) a standard helmet. If helmets do factually cause more accidents, which is plausible for the reasons I just mentioned, I'd support making helmets mandatory for employees through legislation. It doesn't matter if the numbers support the opposite conclusion: maximizing individual safety in the eventuality of a crash is paramount. If you have ever had a head impact while wearing a helmet, you will understand why.
Sadly, it’s likely the first driver who dies without a helmet will result in their family filing a giant lawsuit. But that payout will be paid by insurance that is probably already factoring in the probability of such a payout.
My work doesn’t require a helmet, even though it would protect me. If I wore a helmet and my employer fired me, OSHA wouldn’t give a shit.
About the story behind this harmful myth https://slate.com/technology/2021/11/risk-compensation-debun...
My guess is it is going to be related to PrEP and HIV rates. PrEP is extremely effective and yet stigmatized due to the worry that it will decrease condom wearing.
The response here are hilarious, like "they also have better infrastructure" - wow, you are soo close to getting it!
1. The road infra is entirely structured around making it safer for cyclists in NE
2. They don't BAN the use of helmets. That study is NOT a justification to BAN them.
3. No one is suggesting that they be mandated either.
i bet the more useful metrics are length of trip, average speed of the cars around you, and if you need to cross stop signs/intersections. dutch bike trips are often very short and the speed limits are low. you do not share the road with 35mph+ traffic as is common in america. intersections are the place where people get hurt on bikes the most and it’s more likely in american biking you will cross them. this one is where the separate infrastructure really comes in to play
Except for the time on a quiet suburban street when my drivetrain inexplicably locked up (never figured out what actually happened) and threw me over the handlebars, or the time when there wasn't much traffic around but there was some slippery garbage truck sludge exudate that I didn't see, which I wiped out on. My helmet saved me in both of those situations too.
It turns out that shit happens in general no matter who or where you are, and that dressing for safety actually does keep you safe. An inflated sense of ability to protect oneself does not amount to protection in the event of a crash.
And yes I use bike fairly often. I know multiple people who use bike fairly often. The only people actually hitting protective gear that often are the ones doing mountain biking. (Which seems to be genuinly dangerous even with the gear.)
You T-bone a car.
It helps.
Nonetheless I recommend to always wear gloves when riding a bike. They weigh nothing, fit in every bag/pocket and if you ever crash you'll be glad you wore them. Hands are very likely to get injured in an accident and it's not fun to not use them for a couple of days.
My opinion on this might also be heavily and incorrectly influenced by popular media sprinkled with a few factual statistics that reinforce the bias.
With more power comes more responsibility, put into practice.
You can get a neverending stream of OUIs and keep your license after paying fines in most cases. We often joke that the best way to get away with murder is to run someone down and tell the judge that "they came out of nowhere".
But lord help you if you get caught walking down the street with a joint in your bag.
What is that based on? People I know who have had DUIs had a lot of trouble and cost, their driving was highly restricted, and a second DUI would have stopped them from driving and maybe put them in jail (IIRC).
https://www.grievelaw.com/WisconsinOWI/Laws/Record
That article contains a common trope: an official expressing shock and surprise at the offender’s record and uncertainty as to how they still had a license.
Shoplifting and really any property crime that doesn't result in imminent grave harm can be safely considered "benign". Ditto for victimless crimes like drug possession.
Compare this with New York City where if you negligently kill someone with your car, the police won't even issue a ticket unless you're drunk. Then comes the civil lawsuit in which the surviving family will probably settle for your car insurance policy limits (e.g. $100,000, far lower than German limits that are in the millions of Euros).
Note that younger children still usually wear a helmet, since they are more likely to have an accident on their own (i.e. falling over).
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/06/14/raquel-nelson-finally...
What’s missing in US laws vs Netherlands?
If you are convicted of vehicular manslaughter, you are very likely going to serve time.
However, if you hit and kill and cyclist in the US, you are not likely to be charged with vehicular manslaughter, so long as you were sober and weren’t actively trying to hit them.
A joke I heard a few times was "If a bike fell out of the air onto a parked car, the car owner is going to court."
Certainly the perception is that drivers don’t face jail time in such a situation.
Whatever laws are on the books are virtually never actually enforced against motorists, because motorism (and disdain/resentment against cyclists) is deeply embedded in the culture.
The default reaction of the median American (or at least, the median law enforcer) to any accident involving a motorist and a cyclist, regardless of actual fault, is “fucking bikers always breaking laws, running red lights and stop signs, if they want to take our lanes and slow us down, why don’t they think they have to follow rules like a REAL vehicle,” etc.
No. It will be slap on the wrist time if there are any consequences at all. All it requires is a driver to lie about some mitigating cause they weren't responsible for.
- more helmet wearing in less cycling-friendly cities like Rotterdam which, IIRC, is an example of such a place in the Netherlands
- more helmet wearing (in the sense that the ratio between Dutch helmet wearing and helmet wearing in other Western European countries is higher) at points in the past when bicycle infrastructure was less protected. Though this is confounded by lots of things.
Instead, it is focused on make people feel as afraid of biking as possible. Literally all these debates are focused on making people afraid no matter of what conditions, speed. Whether you go mountain bike competition or whether you are 50 years old manager slowly commuting in skirt and business hairstyle.
https://www.fietsersbond.nl/de-fiets/accessoires/fietshelmen...
https://www-fietsersbond-nl.translate.goog/de-fiets/accessoi...
I live here and I'll say that almost all bicycle delivery drivers where helmets in NL. Lost of riders wear helmets here, but I agree that most people just riding to work or going shopping do not.
I will also note that probably the largest bicycle delivery service in NL has helmets for sale for its riders.
https://shop.thuisbezorgd.nl/nl/helmen
I think people most on the thread understand that there are negative consequences to mandates. The question is about whether you as a rational individual should choose to wear one.
I think the answer to that is an irrefutable yes, if you want to reduce your risk of catastrophic head injury. But that doesn’t mean it should be mandated. We take calculated risks all the time, and the law can’t know all the variables and circumstances for each person at each moment. The mandate is ineffective because the most important safety factor for bicycles is frequency of cycling — the more bikes there are on the road, the more everyone is aware of them. But if you still had all those cyclists and put helmets on them, they would be slightly safer.
It's nothing like riding a bike in the U. S.
Keeping in mind that American drivers aren't used to cyclists, it wasn't that bad in my (minimal) experience. But, of course, bikes are a little more prevalent there so that this experience won't stretch too far land inwards.
That isn't to say that a policy of requiring helmets is good on net (because people may ride less), but in any accident that you hit your head, you would greatly benefit from wean a helmet.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM