With proper infrastructure and cycling culture a helmet adds little benefit. Meanwhile it has several negatives including making cycling a more burdensome activity. Such as having to have your helmet, have to carry it with you in the store or leave it on the bike in the rain or to be stolen, etc. Mandatory helmet laws do more to reduce cycling then they do to protect cyclists.
Their cars are custom built (e.g. F1) and don't have air bags or crumple zones and are open top.
Their cars are modified to be lighter weight, so air bags and other safety equipment is removed. Instead they are fitted with roll cages and wear a helmet.
They're also racing around at high speeds where rolling a car is a real possibility.
Yes, let's equate that to a road car with a proven safety record (NCAP) tests.
Let's see how many tests of a cyclist smashing their head into the ground shows that it's harmless...
What's the difference from a seat belt law? As long as I'm paying for everyone elses' healthcare (which is the norm in developed countries), their personal risk taking is my concern. Even in places without publically funded healthcare, everyone pays for others' risks through premiums so the difference isn't as big as it would seem.
Bicycling makes you fitter and healthier, reducing overall disease burden, as well as providing mental health benefits, reduced traffic, consequently reduced air pollution which also is a major win for public health.
Cars literally don't do any of those things. They're convenient (at least when your city isn't subject to awful traffic) and that's it.
You found a risk reducing law that probably does make sense. Very small investment (Volvo relinquished the patent, thanks Volvo) and very large benefit.
But this "their personal risk taking is my concern" argument of yours makes me shiver. I'd never want someone else's risk taking to be my concern: I've got more important stuff to attend to, thank God.
All right, let's suppose for a minute that self-interest is literally the only thing to be considered.
Your personal risk preferences impact me in a variety of ways:
* my cost of living goes up, because damage control is much more expensive than prevention; someone has to pay for it, and dead people can't.
* my personal risk goes up, because resources I might need such as emergency doctors' time are occupied dealing with the consequences of your decisions instead.
* my quality of life goes down, e.g. I have to spend more time waiting in traffic jams while the bodies are scraped off the roads.
If you take your risks in a space I am forced to share with you, whether physical, societal or economical, your choices affect me.
And we will live in the most boring Brave New World where all danger is eliminated because of this reasoning.
Sports will be gone, only the gym survives as it has the lowest risk factor. No more alcohol and drugs. And there will be condom police checking up on you when you cozy up with anyone except your wife.
Sure, go and try to make it happen. But I will also try to subvert it :)
There was a commedian saying cars should be make more dangerous for the driver: "that will teach 'm". He claimed car's driver safety features made them less safe for everyone else, as driving like an idiot had little negative outcome for the driver.
"Put a sharp pin in the steering wheel and forbid belts and airbags." he jokingly argued.
I dunno, people are generally wired to ignore high-severity but low-frequency bad events. You can drive like an idiot for a long time and have nothing happen.
Interesting take, so we should allow people to ride without helmets and then when they're bleeding out on the street we should just leave them there if they can't pay.
You can contribute voluntarily to charities to help people pay medical debt, to charities that provide free medical assistance or there could be free/less expensive medical treatment given by universities as training to medical students
A priori, you don't know if someone won't be able to pay for treatment, so there's no reason someone should be left to die
The important part is that things should be voluntary and not forced
Even in the US you would be paying for the risktaking of others because their premiums depend on whether everyone in their insurance pool wears a seatbelt or not.
I don't know if this is legal now in the US, but insurance should be allowed to charge more for people with higher risk-taking, either because of past offenses, or other behaviors
Motorists and street furniture in bike lanes are not the only things helmets protect you from. Pedestrians, other cyclists, mechanical failure, rubbish in the road, oil patch, black ice; any number of things can result in you hitting the ground even when entirely separated from motor vehicles. Meanwhile, more and more people are using e-bikes and spending a larger proportion of their time on the bike doing 20-30mph or more.
Hitting concrete with your body at speed is not going to be great for you regardless of the exact cause or exact body part. Just wear the helmet, pity's sake. Why be a meat crayon?
You do you. I want helmets for those who want helmets.
I'm fine without, thank you for being considerate.
The article makes a point, I agree with: don't put barriers on cycling.
I agree wholeheartedly. And I have trouble with most safety laws: they can be recommendations, but not laws (yes seat belt was mentioned, I know, I know).
That's a fallacious argument. There is no activity that could not be made more safe by wearing a helmet. Yet we don't because the arguments like yours are simple and wrong.
how is this wrong? A helmet protects your head and thus your brain.
It makes sense wear helmets in situations where your head is more prone to be damaged (e.g. construction work, or in this case biking).
Multiple cases have been documented of children strangulating themselves wearing a bike helmet while mucking about on playgrounds and the like. Entire education campaigns have set out to prevent the wearing of helmet in activities that turned out to be made less safe by them.
But I agree with your general point, if the marginal safety gain during cycling was enough to make them mandatory, few activities would remain without mandatory protective headwear (my last bike-related head injury happened while walking through the kitchen during maintenance).
Are you implying to always wear a helmet? When you are in a car, in public transportation, walking down the street, going down the stairs or just always? The last time, I hit my head was in a house.
The closest I came to a concussion was when I slipped while walking on ice.
It is quite likely, I spend at least 10,000 of biking so far without a helmet. I had some small accident, but non where I got any brain damage. In most cases the accidents was the result of my own stupidity: being too hurried, not watching the traffic, or doing putting on a rain coat while biking.
I do not like taking risks and I think i am a risk avoiding person.
Here in the Netherlands, I guess that my risk for getting involved in an accident, is not any higher than walking and other forms of transportation. I am not using an e-bike and I usually bike at a speed of about 15km/h. I do not use a racing bike, but a bike where you sit in an upright position allowing you to look around easily. I also take care of using routes that are safe. Here in the Netherlands, where are more bikes than cars, and biking is an important means of transportation for daily commutes and doing shoppings. We have good infrastructures for bikes.
I wear a helmet 99.9% of the time on a bike. They are not zero hassle. If you live somewhere where stuff gets nicked in public and you’ve got a nicer helmet, you bring it inside your destination with you. They mess up hair too.
They’re not GOOD reasons but let’s not pretend there aren’t any at all.
Several of the reasons are shown elsewhere in this thread, but here's one I haven't seen here yet:
Because I like my head not freezing when it's ten degrees below freezing? When I bring this up, sometimes people tell me about thin membrane caps that fit under the hat, but they don't work when it's actually really cold out. Helmets absolutely do not fit over warm-weather hats (or any hats, really). (Other people have said "why would you be biking if it's below freezing", which shows that they don't understand the entire conversation.)
I've got a thin balaclava I've worn under a bike helmet down to 0°F that's kept me warm enough. Let out the band on the helmet a few clicks and it fits perfectly.
I think I might be quite warm naturally but those thinner caps that fit below the helmet work just fine for me when I bike in cold Sweden in the winter. -10 °C and below.
The helmet itself gives some wind protection which helps as well I think.
Helmet hair. Once my hair gets compressed by a helmet, nothing other than a shower can fix it, and we don't have showers at work [not an issue as I'm remote now].
I live less than a mile from my former cubicle, and my old commute was mostly through a park with two road crossings. There was no reason to wear a helmet.
If I'm on a longer road ride, or riding off-road, I religiously wear a helmet. If I'm riding lift-assisted downhill, I wear a full-face helmet.
Though for many people wearing a cycling helmet would not change their present riding practices, there's an expectation children / people on small profile bikes would benefit the most from wearing one, (ie safer,) however there are good reasons not to make them mandatory.
As already mentioned it can interfere with constant checking habit for extra safety, as well as cold weather appropriate headgear. Personally I gave up cycling once compulsory helmet laws were introduced in Australia since for sun protection I had an already heavy enough wide brim weather proof hat. It's probably not that common, but I have a weakened neck from a poorly treated bad whiplash (forced over the edge of road on a bicycle with a wooden road marker being right at the spot my head / neck area would land.) Additionally trying a helmet (not all helmets are the same and possibly there are brands out that have addressed certain problems) I found the straps sitting proud interfered with other distant road noises, not an issue in town traffic, but it would certainly drown out vehicles approaching from behind driving on non urban roads, with many drivers not looking for cyclists sharing that road.
Not very practical for daily commutes. If I would not feel safe biking, I would rather wear a helmet than a device like this.
Here in the Netherlands, biking (without support) at speeds around 15km/h if you are in good health and of sound mind, is not more dangerous than walking or traveling by some other means. Recently, the number of traffic causalities has gone up, that those are mostly related to the use of e-bikes by elderly people and younger people. I feel that if you need support for biking when you do not have the strength (due to old age), you probably are not fit for biking at all. Many young people using e-bikes remove the speed restriction allowing them to bike at speed up to 30 km/h. At those speeds, the chance of accidents go up very quickly.
True, a helmet is better in all kinds of ways. It doesn't need a battery, it still works even when things hit you rather than you hitting things, and it's an order of magnitude cheaper to replace after a knock.
But if someone will wear one of these things who wouldn't otherwise wear anything at all...
Cycle routes in the Netherlands are awesome! Things are slowly improving here, but we're still a long way from that level of care placed into the design.
I think the article and the arguments presented don't really make much sense, but I do find interesting that it says the article was published on Oct 5, 2022, yet there are comments going back as far as November 2019.
Is Google's search team really this naïve? Google keeps cached versions of sites it crawls. An algorithm to catch these date changes would not be difficult to implement.
It might not necessarily be about tricking Google's algorithm. It could also be to make users stick around. People might be less likely to read an article (and potentially click another link on the site and generate another ad impression) if see that the article is "old".
Most people make cursory updates to the body of the text as well. Like my sibling comment said, updating the date also helps your search engagement by showing a more recent date. That said it’s considered best practice to show the original and updated date.
I think the entire point is that it shouldn't "help search engagement" if it's an older article that's been "updated for present year" just to game search results.
>cursory updates to the body of the text
Still pretty straightforward to algorithmically determine if this has happened.
Why would that be surprising? When people search for something, they tend to want more recent info, more recent coverage, more recently made lists, etc.
The article seems clearly from 2020. It leads with a concern over something from "last year" that is dated 2019.
On its topic, I was expecting to mostly disagree. That said, the case is compelling. To condense, it is basically saying don't turn it into a partisan conflict between riders and police. That plays out in predictably bad ways for communities.
I find this article riddled with circular and poor logic.
Mandatory helmet laws do not prevent people from riding bikes. Just like mandatory seat belt laws did not prevent anyone from driving cars!
"Lastly, we know these “quality of life” laws are disproportionately enforced in communities of color and in lower income communities." - what the hell?! Yes, helmet and safety laws are the reason why police officers disproportionately enforce various laws against communities of color. /s Let's blame this and not deal with the real problem: reform of police enforcement.
To deal with bike safety, we need to make everyone wear bike helmets until we reach critical mass in cycling adoption. /Some/ protection is better than nothing at all.
In the meantime, we need to implement better traffic calming and separation of automobile and cycling/pedestrian traffic. Kids die every year because in many areas, they have no choice but to bike on the side of a road that has cars whizzing past 60+ mph with less than 12 inches of separation in between.
The "failed" part of the experiment is that far fewer people ride bicycles in Australia today than did before helmet laws (edit, incorrect, it's per capita reduction, not absolute) in absolute numbers, not even per capita, adjusted for population growth.
The laws are successful in that they get people to wear helmets, but they are an abject failure in terms of participation in cycling.
Gonna need some evidence for that causal link you're suggesting here. Counterpoint: Plenty of bike paths get plenty of use. We didn't even have these bike paths when the helmet laws came in.
I misread the thing I was looking at, it is per-capita, not absolute. Here is a graph of the number of people cycling to work, the peak is the late 80s/early 90s before the helmet laws:
Totally this. The helmets sold at the bicycle store aren't gonna help much if you get in an accident with a van. Separate the roads for different uses. Cycling infrastructure is solved in many places. The culture of blaming cyclists needs to end
Absolutely not true on the efficacy assertion. I've been run over while out training on my bike, went through a windshield head first. Without a helmet on my brain matter would have been in the lap of the driver.
I've got hundreds of thousands of miles in my legs and I won't get on a bike without a helmet on even going around the block.
On the infrastructure yes, agree. I'd be happy with simple stuff like ubiquitous bikes lanes and 10 foot wide shoulders...
I'm very glad to hear you're still with us and the helmet helped you.
Manufacturers however do warn that they aren't designed to mitigate dangers it vehicular collisions, and studies show that vehicle drivers are kinder to cyclists without helmets. Sources here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2020/07/10/bicycle-...
With regards to the 12 inches of space, the UK has recently passed a law requiring a 5ft gap when passing a cyclist. As a motorist it really does make me think about how I'm going to pass safely and whether it is even possible to do.
What I'd really like to see is cyclists giving themselves that much space. If I had a penny for every time someone's squeezed through between my wing mirror and the kerb in start/stop traffic with just an inch or two to spare...
As with many other things, the way forward here is to copy the Scandinavian countries and separate cyclists from motorists entirely. Sadly, though, there are too many groups fighting this kind of change.
> What I'd really like to see is cyclists giving themselves that much space.
If I had a penny for every time someone's squeezed through between my wing mirror and the kerb in start/stop traffic with just an inch or two to spare...
This really gets pulled out every single time someone points out the proper distance required for passing a cyclist and it’s wrong.
First, passing a cyclist with a car and passing a car with a cycle are asymmetric things. The cyclist needs space to actually go a straight line, the path of a bicycle is never straight - and it sways more at slower speeds.
The cyclist also needs space in both directions to make a turn, for example to avoid an obstacle. If you take that space to one side, they cannot even safely turn the other direction.
Cars have a significantly higher draft than cyclists. They’re bigger, heavier and scarier. If the cyclist twitches as you pass them, you were too close.
Cars just don’t fall over. Cyclists do. Slippery patch on the road, whatever. And when they fall, they need space.
The car driver passing the cyclist has no idea how skilled the cyclist is. And unskilled cyclists need more space to maneuver - or make mistakes when scared and fall. See above. The cyclist passing the car knows their skill. And even unskilled cars do not randomly fall over.
The danger is asymmetric. A car even slightly touching a cyclist is likely to end up with a major injury or death. A cyclist slightly touching a car is a dent and a scratch.
This is why in many places, there’s a mandatory minimum distance when for a car passing a cyclist, but none for cyclist passing a car.
I'm absolutely not denying the cyclist needs space and motorists have to give them space. I completely agree with this. I completely agree that the danger is asymmetric.
I'm saying the cyclist still needs that space even when they are moving faster than the cars around them, because they are still in danger even when they are the fastest moving thing in the vicinity.
Cars have blind spots, and cyclists that overtake with insufficient clearance fit precisely into them. Cyclists can still wobble, fall or slip even when they are the ones doing the overtaking, and they still get hurt. Danger is present even when the motorised vehicle is only moving at low speed, because parts of the cyclist and/or bike can still get snagged on parts of the motor vehicle if the cyclist wobbles or falls into it.
I firmly believe insufficient clearance between cyclists and cars is a situation that we can and should avoid with sensible design of cycle paths, roads and junctions. In the sad absence of such, enough clearance has to be maintained to avoid collision if either party stops suddenly or the cyclist wobbles or falls.
In slow or start/stop traffic, the car is generally trapped between other cars and has nowhere to move to; the cyclist is the only party with any control over the situation.
I don't think the argument was that the cyclist passing close would endanger the car, it's that cyclist seem to sometimes have a disturbing disregard for their OWN safety when it comes to the choices THEY make.
Squeezing by cars in start/stop traffic is one of the more debatable ones. There's also rampant red light running. Driving without lights at night, wearing dark clothes, is the one where I see absolutely no upside for their behavior.
I agree, some Cyclist do seem to have little regard for their own safety - but it’s their own safety. A car making a close pass endangers someone else’s safety.
As a cyclist and a driver, I've never had a cyclist throw something at my car just for existing. My brother has been shot at with a pellet gun. I've had cars swerve at me to run me off the road.
There are a lot of psychos out there with a straight up violent hatred for cyclists and a way too many people justifying it because a cyclist was a danger to themselves at some point.
Last week, while driving my car, I had a car behind me flash his headlights and honking at me because I decided not to pass a cyclist in front of me in an area I assessed as too narrow to pass safely. So sometimes even automobilists experience psycho attitudes towards cyclists by proxy.
> Squeezing by cars in start/stop traffic is one of the more debatable ones.
Where I live, this is called "filtering", and it's encouraged by both cycling organisations and motoring organisations. If the ICE traffic has stopped, then the worst that can happen is that you misadjust some motorist's wing mirror, and they have to wind their window down to fix it.
> Driving without lights at night, wearing dark clothes, is the one where I see absolutely no upside for their behavior.
Agreed! If you dress up as a piece of tarmac and proceed down a tarmac road made for cars, without lights, you should expect cars to treat you like a piece of road, because that's what you look like.
> and it's encouraged by both cycling organisations and motoring organisations.
This shouldn't really come as a surprise. It's much safer for the cyclist to get ahead of traffic.
It's a very nervy situation to have traffic slowly start moving again and you being on your bike squeezes near this accelerating train of cars.
Even worse is to be between 2 cars. If the one in front of you suddenly breaks and you can't break on time, you hit them. If you do break on time, you run the risk of getting rammed by the car behind you and squashed into the car in front of you.
> If the cyclist twitches as you pass them, you were too close.
If I feel the breeze as you pass me, you were too close. Actually I think that's quite a good metric, because it ties together your speed and closeness.
> The car driver passing the cyclist has no idea how skilled the cyclist is.
If the cyclist changes bikes, then even the cyclist doesn't know. And cyclists change bikes quite a lot, because cycle thieves. You have to get used to a new bike; each machine has different steering geometry and balance.
I assume you also wonder why there is an area marked on the train platform you should not stand in, yet people enter it all the time when a train is stopped.
On the other hand, I can guarantee you that many, if not most, urban cyclists have had cars attempt to ram their bikes in both slow- and fast-moving traffic.
You do not have the same visibility of the lateral extent of your car as a cyclist has of the lateral extent of their bicycle. I've maneuvered at somewhat high speed through gaps that were only like 5 cm wider than me on each side. You can't do that on a car; you just don't have that kind of line of sight.
I am very very aware that I lack the visibility a cyclist has. This is precisely what makes having cyclists in my blind spot utterly terrifying. It is even worse when I am driving something larger than a car, and when the traffic is slow-moving rather than entirely stationary.
Well, one thing at a time. What you were originally talking about was about cyclists making close passes. A cyclist doesn't need to hang around in your blind spot to pass you closely.
If I put my hand on a table, and someone slams a hammer next to it, I would be justified in being upset about the near-miss as it had a big chance of hurting me.
If the hammer is on the table, and I put my hand next to it, there is really no reason for anyone to be angry. I didn't hurt the hammer. And I'm not a hypocrite, as in this case the chance of hurting myself was zero.
They don't just have arguments, they have data to back it?
Your post is compelling, in comparing it to seatbelt laws. That said, you probably don't know those as well as you think you do. For an easy example, public transit that is often targeting lower income areas often does not require seat belts. Indeed, I've never been in a bus that required them. Even car seat laws often have carve outs for cabs.
Worse, though, your post is ultimately a false dichotomy. There is no need to pick one. We should reform police to be less "us versus them," we should make better traffic calming choices. All the while we should encourage helmets. This article even does that. The claim is not to make it criminal and not to weaponize enforcement. Because they have strong evidence that that doesn't work.
> Mandatory helmet laws do not prevent people from riding bikes. Just like mandatory seat belt laws did not prevent anyone from driving cars!
There's a big difference between a helmet and a seat belt; the seat belt is part of the car; you have to carry the helmet, have it with you at all times, before and after riding. The net result is a drop in the number of riders, which has an impact on overall safety.
I came to this article thinking it would be BS but it turns out to be quite reasonable. Yes, helmets protect rider and all riders should wear one; but making helmets mandatory have unintended consequences which result, as a whole, in making bikes less safe for everyone.
So carry it or tie it to your bike. There are folding helmets and pretty light helmets. I crashed recently. It made a difference to my skull.
I had a motorcycle for well over a decade. We have helmet laws here and I carried that heavier helmet or placed it on my bike. It was fine. Part of the cost of having a bike.
I've had hundreds of crashes on a bike and hundreds of others crashes and wipeouts doing other activities. A helmet has never once come in handy. So I've come to believe that knowing how to wipe out, as a reflexive skill, is far more critical to safety than strapping some styrofoam to your head.
Unfortunately you can't glance at a cyclist and decide affirmatively that they're an idiot for riding without wipeout skills.
It only takes one crash where the helmet was needed for you to never need one again...if you didn't wear one.
We went through this same nonsense with motorcycles. Stop acting like it's the end of the world to put a piece of foam and plastic on your head for a little bit.
I’m surprised at all the comments comparing this to motorcycle helmets. To me, the big difference with a bicycle and a motorcycle is that I can run as fast or faster than I ride by bicycle around my local neighbourhood.
If someone asked me to wear a helmet while running, I would find that ridiculous. Same thing when riding my (non-road) bike.
How often do you sprint over uneven terrain? Or do you just ride your bike very slowly?
Bike speeds > 20km/h are normal and easily achievable for the untrained on flat ground. Downhill, you'll quickly go past 30km/h. This isn't something that you're doing while running for longer periods of time while you're still half-asleep.
Helmets annoy me too, but "the fastest runners can peak at speeds higher than what I reach every other day on my bike and they don't wear helmets" is a weird argument.
I ride my bike slowly around my local neighbourhood, often on shared paths with pedestrians. This is usually under 20 km/h, probably under 15, or even less when it’s busy.
For rides where I go faster, I will take my road bike and wear a helmet.
For rides where I go slower, I would prefer not to wear a helmet, but mandatory helmet laws don’t make that distinction.
I agree- it does feel like “biking” encompasses an awfully wide range of riskiness.
As you alluded, even between bike trips, I weigh the risks differently when I think about a casual spin down a protected lane or a recreational trail as compared to an aggressive commute inches apart from vehicle traffic.
My local bike share program has started blurring things even more for me lately as they introduce progressively zippier e-bikes. Any more, it’s trivial for me to move with traffic on these huge heavy clunkers of bikes, while to my impulses it still feels like the low-effort casual kind of ride I’d instinctively rate as not warranting a helmet.
Still, I’m glad to be judging for myself how to mitigate the specific risks of a specific ride.
You're very lucky. The worst wipeout I ever had was on the side of a small town street. I was accelerating, the chain popped of my gears, and I basically flipped the bike over and ground to a stop on my helmet. My reactions and training absolutely helped me; I knew how to roll into it and how to not break my wrists. But without that helmet, I would have ground a hole into my skull.
I hear from 1000s of internet people who are totally triggered by my occasional lack of a helmet. My ability to avoid hitting my head using reflexive skill cultivated over many years of practice never gets the credit it deserves. It has come in handy on so many occasions.
Let me assure you, if you've decided cycling safety is a binary contingent on whether or not you're wearing a helmet, you're doing it wrong. It's no better than superstition. There are so many other variables.
My wipeout: I heard a chink behind me, and thought I had dropped my keys, so I looked over my shoulder. I lost control, and my face hit the road. Not my head, my chin.
I got three stiches in my chin. I lost two teeth; one was driven through my lip, and I had 13 stiches in that lip (there are three layers in a lip: outer skin, muscle, inner skin). I needed two root-canals. I fractured my mandible, which is now joined to the maxilla on only one side. I was concussed, and wound up sleeping about 15 hours a day for the next 3 months. I couldn't chew for ages.
A motorbike helmet might have helped; but not a bicycle helmet.
This is as naive as drivers refusing to wear seatbelts. In serious crashes, you cannot control your body in the first place.
Of course, the helmet is only 10% of cycling safety. But it's for that important 10% when your head crashes into the ground. Suggesting that it would never come in handy is naive.
Since you seem to believe in the power of personal anecdote, I am an experienced cyclist and have crashed directly on to my head before. It was just once, but it prevented a serious head injury.
It's one thing to decide that a helmet is a good idea and choose to wear one.
It's another thing to make a law forcing everyone to agree with you, or else.
The paradoxical result shown in this article, which has been seen repeatedly, is that forcing people to wear helmets does more harm, by discouraging people from riding bicycles, than the benefit it creates by pushing some small number of the bicyclists who remain to take safety precautions they would otherwise have neglected.
This is a libertarian talking point. I strongly disagree but I doubt I can change your mind here (or vice versa).
The reasons for requiring this for the "greater good" are:
* Younger people are easily influenced and without such a law wouldn't use a helmet, seatbelt, etc.
* Costs of healthcare after a bad crash can be serious. Yes, my country like pretty much everyone outside the US, has single payer. We would foot the bill, regardless.
* It's proven that regulation and legislation can help. Regulation for seat-belts, airbags, crash testing, etc. has saved many lives. IMO this is what government is about, saving people. Sometimes from their stupidity and ignorance.
It shows correlation not causation and not "research". There's no such proof.
The key sentence in the article is: " Financial struggle for popular bike sharing systems"...
That's where the money is and that's who made up that nonsense. Lots of people die because of those terrible motorized bikes and scooters. They're trying to get cyclists to fight their regulatory requirements by making up fake science.
Good eye. I bet you're right about the PR origins of this specific article, and I can see why that would make you skeptical.
For me, however, this idea is old news. People have been investigating this issue for years and the results seem to be generally consistent. I have been reading reports about the link between helmet laws, reduced cycling rates, and reduced overall safety for at least five years now.
I live in Seattle, where the surrounding county passed a mandatory helmet law back in 1993. After decades of experience, this law was seen to do more harm than good, and the Board of Health decided earlier this year to repeal it.
> That's where the money is and that's who made up that nonsense. Lots of people die because of those terrible motorized bikes and scooters. They're trying to get cyclists to fight their regulatory requirements by making up fake science.
I think it's entirely plausible that the article was written by a PR company, and that is one possible reason (though not the only) they were paid to do it.
I'll quibble with you on a few points though:
Much research only find correlation. Just because it's not conclusive about causation doesn't mean it's not research.
As much "those terrible motorized bikes and scooters" might have lead to people dying (I've heard the anecdotal horror stories, I've just not looked at the data, so I'm ignorant to the overall effect), there have been plenty of attempts (some successful) at non-motorized bike sharing systems. One could reasonably imagine that when those systems are successful, it is likely there's a net increase in cycling within the community, thereby increasing overall safety of cycling via the "safety In Numbers" effect cited in the article, not to mention a possible reduction in the amount of driving. It therefore follows that one could make an argument that improving the success rate of such systems helps improve bike riding safety (though I'd like to see THAT data). It might even be true (and again, I have not seen any data on this) that for all the terrible deaths from motorized bikes & scooters, that adoption of them still increases the safety for cyclists, because if the alternative is the same person being in a car/truck/SUV, then a cyclist being hit by a motorized bike or scooter, even if they get hit more often, might be far less dangerous.
I think we shouldn't presume any particular PR motive for the article necessarily means it is not in line with the interests of cyclists. Ad hominems aren't don't really undermine the arguments presented in the article.
No they won't. You can argue they would do that for walking around everywhere but there's a cost/benefit ratio that's recommended by experts and backed by statistics. You can take anything to an extreme and I agree that some regulation does.
> would also support mandating the use of helmets for all passengers in a car.
We do also do that too.
Every car is built with a fancy headrests and seatbelts and airbags -- the entire car is literally a helmet, and we require this on every new vehicle sold for decades. (And we require the seatbelt be worn too, legally enforceable by law in most areas)
When an occupant of the car is small enough such that the built-in helmet-worthiness of the car might be rendered insufficient, we also require they get extra helmet-like protections wrapped around their head/neck/body - see https://www.dmv.com/car-seats for specifics -- and even these are also legally enforceable by law in most areas
I understand the point being made and certainly there are very many safety devices mandated for cars, but the fact remains, that the vast majority of cars do not have airbags for rear seat passengers for example, and given the volume of auto accidents, it would be hard to imagine that mandating helmet usage would not significantly reduce injuries and fatalities.
Of course all of this is simply to say, that there is a line, where the marginal safety gain is outweighed by the cost, both economic and otherwise. Different people and organizations are going to have differing opinions on where this line should be, but arguing purely on the side of harm reduction misses a great deal. This is aside from personal responsibility, liberty, etc.
> Younger people are easily influenced and without such a law wouldn't use a helmet, seatbelt, etc.
I did feel this aspect of the effect of regulation was not well addressed in the article at least. I think there's an implication that the effect of regulation has been to reduce cycling, and therefore the effect on youth has been more to discourage cycling altogether than to encourage cycling with helmets, but I don't think that's well established. IIRC, the positive effects of seat belt laws are generally much more pronounced after a generation or two.
> It's proven that regulation and legislation can help. Regulation for seat-belts, airbags, crash testing, etc. has saved many lives. IMO this is what government is about, saving people. Sometimes from their stupidity and ignorance.
There's also plenty of evidence of cases where regulation and legislation has harmed, or had no effect. Arguments that regulation & legislation intrinsically help or harm are, at best, specious. Regulation & legislation are tools that obviously can be helpful; the debate should always be about whether a particular regulatory/legislative approach is helpful.
"Carry it or tie it to your bike" ... wouldn't it be possibly stolen if you left it on your bike that you chained up on the street? And carrying it doesn't sound comfortable at all -- where do you put it?
The amount of discomfort (psychological fear of theft or physical nuisance of carrying it) is very likely going to discourage its use. But then you're liable for a fine for not having a helmet, so you choose to not ride the bike.
Just don't require helmets for bike riders over some age.
I tie it to my bag. I've seen ones that fold to a size of a banana. If someone breaks the chain then they take my bike, the helmet is the least of my concerns.
The idea that use would be discouraged because of that is ridiculous when you consider the alternative: cars or public transport. Both are terrible options. Parking, traffic, etc.
I'm 47 and had a crash recently. How does my age have to do anything if someone suddenly jumps in my lane or a car runs into me?
I think they're arguing that children should be made to wear helmets because won't somebody think of the children.
The same argument applies to children of course - where do you put your helmet after you've cycled to school? Attach it to the bike loosely and someone will steal it, it's too big to carry in your rucksack all day, and you don't want to have to go back and forth to your locker potentially on the other side of school if you have one at all.
Also if it's locked to the bike you would break the lock and steal the bike. The helmet is the cheaper part. Helmets are often designed so locks can go through them.
> If someone breaks the chain then they take my bike, the helmet is the least of my concerns.
Why not? A good bike helmet is several hundred dollars. That's not life-altering money of course, but it adds a decent percentage to the cost of replacing the stolen bike.
In cities with bike shares, a significant number of short distance bike trips are on the bike share (like, 50% plus range). Requiring a bike helmet eliminates those people that are walking around and decide to use a bike share to go 2 miles.
Tying a helmet to a bike can result in theft and weathering (rain).
The article goes to describe that it is the secondary effects that are important. Ie, it's better to have 100 cyclists on a road with 50% helmet usage, than it is to have 3 with 100% usage.
I've seen campaigns and memorial stickers asking drivers to watch for motorcycles. So it is not dissimilar for pedal bikes, except the safety effect for driver awareness is even more important for non-motorized bikes. Which is essentially the non-intuitice conclusion of the article.
Yes, but that additional cost does discourage people to use a bike. And many countries want to encourage rather than discourage bike use, for several reasons:
* bikes don't endanger other road users the way cars do
* bikes pollute less
* bikes take up less space
* bikes put less strain on the road
* bikers get more exercise and are therefore healthier
All of these are important positive effects, so a lot of countries would prefer to stimulate bike use rather than discourage it. They don't have the same reason to encourage car or motorbike use, so having the extra cost there is fine. The alternative for a car is likely to be better for society, so it's fine to discourage their use. The alternative for a bike is likely to be worse.
> you have to carry the helmet, have it with you at all times, before and after riding.
You need it when you're on your bike, riding it. I commuted by bicycle for 19 years and biked (or walked) almost everywhere (Arlington, VA - Washington, DC). When I rode to the store or to meet someone or to get something to eat, the helmet usually stayed with the bike. I never thought someone would steal just my helmet. I didn't bother to lock it up, although you can get a wire to pass through the helmet and lock it up with the bike.
It seems my post was unclear and sounds like I'm against helmets. If so, sorry about that. It's quite the opposite. I ride a bike every day and use a helmet at all times, and would recommend everybody should do the same.
But I agree that making it mandatory will do more harm than good, for the reasons stated in the article.
These same arguments apply to motorcycles. I find them ridiculous. But, it's your head man and as an adult you should be able to go helmetless if you so choose.
Except if they wreck and are on medicare you and I are footing that bill. Or if you bump them with a car and then they die because they're not wearing a helmet it's going to really fuck up your life too.
Or if they just don't have insurance, the hospital passes on the cost to recoup their care in the form of high rates for everyone.
Isn't that argument easily extendible to anything optional that is also dangerous..? Also this is an argument from a US perspective. As someone who lives in Canada, where healthcare is in large part paid by taxes, I have no interest in restricting what people do because "it'll cost me more". Leads down a road I don't like
You know that if something is paid by taxes, and you pay taxes, you are footing the bill for it? Yes you aren't going to get an itemized bill with a line item for Jim's cracked skull, but that's still money that could have gone to things like schools or infrastructure or cancer treatments or what have you.
We do put restrictions on drinking and smoking, such as limiting consumption to certain times, places and age groups, and many places have things like taxes on soda and other such tactics to reduce obesity. We have even heavier restrictions on other activities that don't pose much threat to anyone but the person doing it, such as hard drugs. We don't want to stop people from having fun, we're all willing to bear some cost for our fellow man, but minor inconveniences which lead to big cost savings make sense. Helmets are incredibly beneficial and the burden is pretty light - even when not required by law most people voluntarily wear helmets. Mandatory helmet laws allow cyclists to keep doing what they love while dramatically reducing the number of severe injuries that society at large needs to deal with, it's a happy medium.
That is what I meant yes, I am okay with paying for stupid things that people do, else we end up with an insane system where are prevented from doing anything even mildly dangerous or disrupted, as it'll cost the taxpayers money.
I'm infinitely more concerned with the insane amount of government waste that happens where that money could go to schools or infrastructure or cancer treatments. I imagine that government waste is orders of magnitude more expensive than cyclists damaging themselves because they weren't wearing helmets, for example.
It's a very small step from there to saying that activities like above treeline winter hiking, ice climbing, motorcycle riding, playing football, etc. should be prohibited (or at least require expensive private insurance) because some number of people consider them unreasonably dangerous.
As someone who lives in a country with socialised healthcare, who has occasionally done lightly reckless things in the past, I am happy to pay for other people's recklessness.
Or, rather, I am happy that if you end up in hospital for any reason at all, the only thing on everyone's mind is treating you as best they can, and helping you to get better. No matter how you ended up there, or whether it was your fault or not, or how much money you have - if you're hurt, people will take care of you.
It's what I'd want to happen to me, it's what I'd want to happen to my family, it's what I'd want to happen to some of my friends who have somewhat more reckless hobbies than I do. And so I'm happy to have my tax money do the same thing for complete strangers, because they're somebody else's family or good friends. (And even if they're not, being alone is not a reason to deny someone healthcare.)
I trust people not to "take advantage" of this and be stupidly reckless simply because the healthcare is there, because... even with great healthcare that's available for free at the point of use, serious injuries suck. Having great healthcare doesn't make pain less painful, or physiotherapy to come back from injury less time-consuming, or less of a crimp in your whole goddamn life.
While I totally agree with you on the payments side, I still like to see the message being sent out that reckless has consequences outside my own little head. Even those family members can suffer from my reckless behaviour. Right now, in case of a self caused accident without precaution measures (like, no helmet) the insurance will shorten the payments yes, but the system also won't let me default on the treatments - social support will kick in. So I have both the support and the threat and I think it works fine like that.
In a world without health insurance, fine. Otherwise the system will try to minimize the costs - by forcing the people contribute at minimizing the risks. This is how it works now (in Germany, maybe also other places?) if you have a bike or ski accident without wearing a helmet, if it was self caused you'll probably get reduced payments.
> But, it's your head man and as an adult you should be able to go helmetless if you so choose
The reasoning behind wearing an helmet on motorbikes is two fold:
- there are a lot more chances of being left disabled by the accident than dying, which is something you might not have thought about, but when you're disabled suddenly it's not your head anymore, you depend on other people to take care of your head and the rest of your body. There's a cost involved in severe head traumas and the monetary one is by far the less important.
- your head splattered on the asphalt is something other people might not want to watch. Some people might be even traumatized by that view. So please if you really want to risk it, do it when you're alone, in the middle of nowhere. Because you can still do it, you won't get arrested if you do it, simply fined.
but the real reason why I do not understand this "easy rider" alle cozze argument is: helmets are super cool! If professional bikers wear it, then why not?
A seat belt is much less of an imposition on comfort and convenience than a helmet is. And there isn't really a more convenient alternative to driving a car, so of course mandating seat belts doesn't reduce car use.
Statistically, you are much more likely to die or be injured in a car crash than on a bike, so surely we should mandate helmet use in cars, right?
The point of the article is not that helmets are unsafe, no one would argue that wearing one is less safe than not.
The simple fact is, in every place where cycling is normalized and not a deviant behavior for weird lycra-wearing dentists or people with DUIs, almost no one wears a helmet.
Mandating helmets is a failed policy if the goal is to reduce reliance on cars, and to make cities safer for everyone.
> Mandating helmets is a failed policy if the goal is to reduce reliance on cars, and to make cities safer for everyone.
That's not the goal. The goal is to reduce head injuries. Mandatory helmet laws are effective at achieving that goal. If part of that reduction is simply discouraging people who would not ride a bike safely from riding a bike, that's not necessarily out of line with the goal.
> Mandatory helmet laws are effective at achieving that goal
…in the short term.
In the long term, if they prevent cycling from ever becoming a viable alternative to driving, then they’re still worse.
If someone is interested in trying a bike from one of those sharing locations, but they don’t have a helmet, they won’t try the bike in the first place. Especially if a city law makes a bike-sharing app “validate” that you’re wearing a helmet, to enforce the law, before giving you a bike.
Fewer people try the idea of riding a bike around their town, so there’s more pushback against improved cycling infrastructure because “it would never benefit me”, so there’s less infrastructure investment.
Continued ad nausium, cycling is less safe due to the limited number of people who are willing to advocate for safer infrastructure in the first place, which makes a much larger difference to safety than helmets.
Mandatory helmet laws are not the thing preventing cycling from becoming a viable alternative to cars. Plenty of places without mandatory helmet laws still are dominated by cars, and mandatory helmet laws reduce cycling participation by small percentages - most cyclists wear helmets without being required to, and it's not a particularly heavy burden. I know if given the choice between a car payment and wearing a helmet what I would prefer.
There's resistance to improved cycling infrastructure because there's resistance to improving any infrastructure, no matter how critical, and the overwhelming majority of people don't see a massive rework of the entire transportation system to shift away from cars as a realistic possibility even in the moderate to long term.
But of the places known to have a large share of cycling, none have mandatory helmet laws (at least as far as I know). Thus, it may not be sufficient but it seems necessary.
If most cyclists wear helmets, why do you need to mandate it?
1. Because it causes disproportionate harm to other people
2. Because it causes disproportionate harm to other people
3. I’m pretty sure that law isn’t universal and probably depends on city codes.. Regardless, if studies showed that requiring smoke detectors was burdensome enough to decrease the amount of new construction, to the point that it could be detrimental to society, then we should reevaluate that law.
Well it's a lot more like a 19% reduction in head injuries for a 4% reduction in cycling, but yes, I'm quite confident that the various governments that have enacted such laws and the constituencies they represent generally would agree that it's better to not bike at all than to risk serious head injury.
[1] reports on Australian introduction of mandatory cycle helmet laws, and says:
"Pre-law surveys counted 6072 child cyclists in NSW, 3121 cyclists (all ages) in Victoria; and over 200 000 cyclist movements on two key routes in Western Australia. Equivalent counts a year after enforced helmet laws showed declines of 36% (NSW), 36% (Victoria) and 20% (Western Australia). Sunday recreational cycling in Western Australia (24 932 cyclists pre-law) dropped by 38%. Increases in numbers wearing helmets, 1019 (NSW) and 297 (Victoria) were substantially less than declines in numbers counted (2215 and 1110)."
In other words, Victoria started with 3121 cyclists, gained 297 helmets and lost 1110 cyclists.
Are you sure you didn't misread that 4% figure from a source that actually said 40%?
Needless to say, a 20% reduction in head injuries from a 40% reduction in cycling doesn't seem like a very good deal to me.
> Statistically, you are much more likely to die or be injured in a car crash than on a bike, so surely we should mandate helmet use in cars, right?
That is very faulty logic.
In a modern car with a person seat belted in, there is very little for a person to strike their head against (which is what a helmet protects against). The airbags are there to protect you from striking your head against the steering column or the side of the passenger compartment.
On a bike, there is nothing protecting you from striking your head against something.
When I was doing neurosurgery, I saw lots of head trauma. The head trauma for bad car accidents was more diffuse axonal injury caused by rotational or deceleration forces that a helmet would not protect you against (your head isn't slamming into anything). Whereas with bicycle accidents it was more impact trauma and skull fractures and resulting brain injury (which a helmet would have protected you against).
Source: Neurosurgery resident at a Level 1 trauma center.
Yet, every any time you are driving a car around at track, during an HPDE event or Track day, you are required to wear a helmet, and those events are MUCH safer than the streets.
Arguing on this line is pointless. You can use this line to justify any number of mandatory safer features. The goal should be to drive an adoption of clean, non congestive, personal transportation, and the primary drivers for this is cost and convenience. Mandatory laws requiring stuff is counter to this.
> Mandatory helmet laws do not prevent people from riding bikes. Just like mandatory seat belt laws did not prevent anyone from driving cars!
> As far as killing bike share systems, look no further than Seattle, Washington. After they implemented similar policies, their bike share system floundered. The same has been seen in cities across Australia.
> "Lastly, we know these “quality of life” laws are disproportionately enforced in communities of color and in lower income communities." - what the hell?! Yes, helmet and safety laws are the reason why police officers disproportionately enforce various laws against communities of color. /s Let's blame this and not deal with the real problem: reform of police enforcement.
This is the same argument as "Guns don't kill people; people kill people" and it is the same level of technically-true-but-if-you-need-to-say-it-you-are-probably-wrong-in-practice"
When you have a weak argument, you throw whatever you can to try to immunize it against attack[1], including things that are at most peripheral to the issue, like race, which is not an issue in many countries on earth (Thailand, China, Korea, Japan, most African countries, middle east, most parts of Europe, etc.
[1]It the modern "think of the children", but instead, "think of the minorities" but worse because there are adult voices in minorities who can speak for themselves and most also want safety. That said in many places there are racist policies against one group or another, but I don't think the above is that.
> /Some/ protection is better than nothing at all.
As a regular bike rider of 20 years, a helmet has protected me on exactly 2 occasions: once when I was training for racing and once actually in a race. So technical/fast conditions that most riders don't encounter.
The biggest danger to a leisure or commuter rider are car drivers running them over. Helmets do nothing to stop a multiple ton steel object hitting your body at 30+mph and don't protect the parts that get hit.
> In the meantime, we need to implement better traffic calming and separation of automobile and cycling/pedestrian traffic. Kids die every year because in many areas, they have no choice but to bike on the side of a road that has cars whizzing past 60+ mph with less than 12 inches of separation in between.
100% this is the answer. The only thing helmet laws and discussions do is let people feel good about themselves while doing literally nothing to prevent vulnerable users.
> As a regular bike rider of 20 years, a helmet has protected me on exactly 2 occasions: once when I was training for racing and once actually in a race
That's their purpose, protect you when you need it, which is on average a couple of times in a lifetime.
If the helmet had protected you hundreds of times, probably you should have stopped riding a bike (or your friends and family should have stopped you).
If you heard someone say "the seat belt saved my life at least 30 times" would you or would you not think that that person is dangerous and should not drive?
> Helmets protected me in bike racing where they're already mandatory.
> They do not protect most riders at all.
This is a textbook example of non sequitur.
I would also add that it's so obvious that it hurts, because, simply, most bikers have never raced and never will, so to them what is cruise speed for a professional biker is where the risks are.
I too have been a professional car driver in (very) minor leagues, that doesn't mean that what protected me while racing cannot protect my dad that never like driving and has always been very bad at it.
> Mandatory helmet laws do not prevent people from riding bikes. Just like mandatory seat belt laws did not prevent anyone from driving cars!
I don't see how adding friction does not lead to a reduction in cycling?
Unlike helmets, seat belts are one size fits all and they're built into the car. I'm not putting on someone else's sweaty and gross helmet.
But you've hit on the right issue: helmets would be far less necessary if car drivers could stop hitting people. There aren't a whole lot of people just falling over all alone in a bike lane and outside Tour De France recaps, bike-on-bike crashes are also uncommon and uneventful. Remove the 3 tons of metal whizzing by and helmets would probably be reserved for winter conditions, rain, or sport activities.
The solution isn't in changing biking. It's in changing driving.
You also have to carry it around, it increases the surface area of your head, it's harder to do shoulder checks, they are uncomfortable when it's hot out, and for some hair types it messes up your hair for the day.
> Mandatory helmet laws do not prevent people from riding bikes. Just like mandatory seat belt laws did not prevent anyone from driving cars!
That's a straw man. Nowhere in the article does it use the word "prevent". What the article cites are studies indicating that the behavioural effect of the laws was a reduction in bike riding.
> "Lastly, we know these “quality of life” laws are disproportionately enforced in communities of color and in lower income communities." - what the hell?! Yes, helmet and safety laws are the reason why police officers disproportionately enforce various laws against communities of color.
Again, that's a straw man argument. The laws aren't the reason why police officers disproportionately enforce said laws against communities of colour, but an observable effect of said laws is that they are disproportionately enforced on communities of colour. Sure, you can work on police enforcement reform, but until you get that problem fixed, the disproportionate enforcement is an observable effect.
> To deal with bike safety, we need to make everyone wear bike helmets until we reach critical mass in cycling adoption. /Some/ protection is better than nothing at all.
That contains the kind of poor logic you're critical of. There's a presumption that to reach critical mass in cycling adoption we need to "make everyone wear bike helmets", despite evidence cited in the article that the blunt instrument of legal mandates appears to reduce cycling adoption.
The article agrees with you (as does most everyone else) that "some protection is better than nothing at all". It's not a question of whether wearing a bicycle helmet is a good idea or not. Just because something is a good idea doesn't mean that a legal mandate for it is also a good idea.
> In the meantime, we need to implement better traffic calming and separation of automobile and cycling/pedestrian traffic. Kids die every year because in many areas, they have no choice but to bike on the side of a road that has cars whizzing past 60+ mph with less than 12 inches of separation in between.
Again, the article agrees with you on this point: "Right now, with nearly 40,000 people killed on American roads every year, that means we need to keep our leaders’ attention focused on structural reforms like complete street redesigns, which are proven to make our public spaces safe for everybody, whether they are walking, biking, taking transit, and yes, driving too."
> Mandatory helmet laws do not prevent people from riding bikes.
Mandatory helmet laws say to people "Look Out! Bicycles are DANGEROUS! No matter how careful or experienced you are or where you're cycling, you could get your head smashed like a bowl of eggs at any time"
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> Mandatory helmet laws do not prevent people from riding bikes.
Non-recreational biking (e.g. using a bike to get around) with a helmet is a giant pain in the ass. I have to find a place to store my helmet securely or carry it around all day. It messes up my hair, so I have to perform extra effort to be presentable at my destination.
Within my city, I travel by bike a decent percentage of the time; with a helmet law, I would basically never do so.
>Mandatory helmet laws do not prevent people from riding bikes. Just like mandatory seat belt laws did not prevent anyone from driving cars!
This is an absurd comparison.
Mandatory helmet wearing makes bike-sharing programs almost completely unworkable. In my city, I see more people riding bikes from bike sharing programs than I do riding privately owned bikes.
It's interesting to me how different countries approach helmets. In Germany some people wear them, but many don't. In the Netherlands wearing a helmet is practically unheard of.
In the Netherlands you're either a tourist or 60 year or older if you wear a helmet. But it is also not that fair to compare the Netherlands to other countries. We grew up with bicycles and our infrastructure is much better for cycling.
It's more that the Netherlands is a substantial outlier in terms of how they accommodate cyclists, so applying their attitudes towards helmets without also being as cyclist-friendly (infrastructurally and socially) as they are is asking for trouble.
Obviously infrastructure helps a lot, but there is still the danger inherent in the fact that it's quite far from your head to the ground. I don't wear a helmet though personally, since the bike infrastructure is good in my city in Germany, at least on the routes I take
Pretty much exactly the same as driving: those who put on special clothes for their vehicle use activity routinely make the helmet part of that special attire, those who operate their vehicle in plain clothes don't.
I wear a helmet every single time here in Germany and I don’t when I visit the Netherlands.
Not that surprising when you consider Dutch cities have (by German standards) excellent and safe biking infrastructure and, even more important, huge numbers of cyclists. You‘ll never be overlooked between cars when you’re part of a large group on the bike lane.
if you're doing a standard 20kmh / 12mph which is a casual pace to do on a flat elevation, have segregated, dedicated space to cycle and have a culture where everyone cycles so everyone has a "cycling mindset" then yes, you'll probably see different outcomes than one with the opposite culture.
I cycle in the UK, i wear a helmet because our cycling infra is not good, cyclists are not really protected by the police, and it's common to complain about cyclists. The attitude here is different. You're the enemy, a parasite, you're in the way of my car!
If you're MTB or going fast, sure wear a helmet. If you just bike to get to work or school and stay well below 25km/h, and have good cycling infra, you don't a helmet.
I don't wear a helmet skiing but always when biking. It's too easy to lose your front tire grip on gravel or wet pavement and that often puts your face in direct contact with the earth. It happens almost instantly.
The effects of Safety In Numbers cannot be overstated. I’d go as far and say it’s even more important than cycling infrastructure like physically separate bike lanes. You do not want to be the only cyclist at a busy intersection between cars making a turn crossing your lane.
Might be counterintuitive, but if a helmet mandate reduces the number of riders even slightly it is a bad idea.
And of course: Wear a helmet. Especially if your city is still designed for cars.
> You do not want to be the only cyclist at a busy intersection between cars making a turn crossing your lane.
With well designed infrastructure this won't happen. Give cyclists separate lights with priority. The situation you're describing is extremely rare in somewhere like the Netherlands.
But that is just a trivially true point. Let’s think of things we can do until our city becomes interested in redoing its streets in 100 years, if ever.
Why? Our cities aren't magical beasts whose whims we must yield to. They're shaped by people. Demand better. Look at the transformations taking place in Paris, how cities like Utrecht have been saved from car-centric design and given back to humans.
I just don't understand this defeatist attitude. Most people on this site live in healthy democracies. Why do we call for reforms in every political sphere but maintain an adamant denial of our power over city planning?
Ironically, municipal politics probably serves the largest impact and easiest entry point for leveraging political will.
Not everything has to be harangued like many federal-level politics are. You can just go to your city council and demand better. The worst that can happen is they say no - and you can just organize to vote them out with the rest of your community.
Mandatory Helmet Laws may make cyclists less safe by macroscopic effects but for the love of God wear a helmet. I would not have a father right now if he had not been wearing a helmet when he hit a pothole.
It's not just cars / other road users that are potentially dangerous to cyclists, poor road surface or debris can just as likely cause a life-changing injury, even if you're not travelling at high speed. Wear a helmet.
This is kind of what the article says. It’s not anti-helmet.
For cities, bikeshare can be amazing—I live in DC and our CaBi system is very popular. It is a cheap and easy way for everyone to have access to a bike, and it complements the District’s investment in a bike lane network. A helmet law would kneecap the system.
Wearing a helmet is good, but getting people out of cars and onto bikes with good bike lanes will lead to overall health benefits for a community.
Just an anecdote. Bike share in Vancouver, BC where helmets are mandatory comes with helmets attached to the bikes. And there are "hair nets" IIRC for hygiene purposes.
The only real argument for making it less safe is the "increased interactions with the police" argument. This seems to be very US-centric as in most other places an interaction with the police will not get you shot/teased/maced/neck-kneeled as likely.
The article doesn't seem to make any claims about reduced safety. It claims there is a reduction in cycling, worse business for bike-sharing and more harassment of minorities.
But what are the concrete numbers on injuries (either absolute or per distance traveled) that would back up the safety claim? Or is the "less safe" not actually refering to physical safety while riding?
The Netherlands did a study on bike helmets and found that cars tend to be more dangerous with cyclists if the cyclists are wearing a helmet, which is why there are no mandatory bicycle helmet laws in the Netherlands. However, it's worth noting that the cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands also for the most part separates bikes and cars with more than just a line of paint, so their experience may not translate well to other countries with poor cycling infrastructure.
I would assume there is quite a lot of evidence for the efficacy of helmets in the event of a crash, no? I think in general it makes more sense to give credence to studies that give intuitive results that are explainable by sound first principles modeling, rather than one study that gives an unintuitive result based on human behavior.
Not really? There may be slight reductions in some injuries as a result of helmet use, but for most cyclists this isn't really what you'd call definitive data. At the end of the day, a few inches of foam isn't going to protect you from a few tonnes of steel.
That said, it's notoriously under-studied. If you look into "best helmet" in terms of safety you'll see a lot of marketing speak and not a lot of science. The way that helmets are tested tend to 1) not be reflective of actual use of the helmet in a conflict scenario and 2) tend to make pretty broad assumptions about the largest danger factor on the roads.
The thing is that you would /think/ that there's a lot of evidence out there for helmet use. The most compelling evidence for helmet use is for drivers in cars / automobiles, and we wouldn't dare mandate that into existence.
Helmet laws always seem to get people ruffled up but at the end of the day the number of bike fatalities is already low, and skewing that in terms of helmet use somewhat misses the point - dedicated and separated bicycle infrastructure will have a vastly larger impact compared to any mandate on using a helmet. It seems like arguing about adding a mandate on helmets is just an easy way for the system to wash its hands of responsibility for not regulating vehicle and street design more thoroughly.
There was a significantly higher crude 30-day mortality in un-helmeted cyclists 5.6% (4.8%–6.6%) versus helmeted cyclists 1.8% (1.4%–2.2%) (p<0.001). Cycle helmet use was also associated with a reduction in severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) 19.1% (780, 18.0%–20.4%) versus 47.6% (1211, 45.6%–49.5%) (p<0.001), intensive care unit requirement 19.6% (797, 18.4%–20.8%) versus 27.1% (691, 25.4%–28.9%) (p<0.001) and neurosurgical intervention 2.5% (103, 2.1%–3.1%) versus 8.5% (217, 7.5%–9.7%) (p<0.001).
“The evidence is clear: helmets save lives and significantly reduce the risks of severe injury,” said Lois K. Lee, MD, MPH, FAAP, lead author of the statement, written by the AAP Council on Injury, Violence, and Poison Prevention. “And yet sports-related injuries make up a substantial proportion of all traumatic brain injuries. As a pediatric emergency medicine physician, I advise all my patients – and their parents-- to wear helmets.”
I don't think I'm necessarily disagreeing that in the worst-case scenario that helmets do the job of reducing brain and skull trauma. Doing something is the alternative to doing nothing, you'd expect some difference here.
My problem is that helmet use isn't exactly "well-studied." All these studies look at existing reports from medical centres on injuries & deaths. This doesn't actually account for the broader behavioural changes in the system, or look at causes outside of "injured while wearing a helmet vs. not."
In any other industry this kind of reporting (while factual) is absolutely ignoring everything else. A short list of what isn't being considered:
- Which road and behaviour led to incident?
- Which kinds of road conflicts can be addressed by helmets?
- How did road design lead to the incident?
- Were environmental factors a concern (winter, ice, rain, etc.)?
- How does behaviour for the cyclist change as a result of not wearing a helmet?
- How does behaviour for other road users change as a result of a cyclist not wearing a helmet?
- What kinds of helmets are more viable for protection in the case of the most extreme (and most common) conflict scenarios? How do we then test these helmets to ensure compliance in manufacturing?
These are all questions you'd expect to be answered here, and then you'd do the cost-benefit analysis on whether a mandate is necessary or not. A "well-studied" field would have discussed these effects in broader detail, not just short-cut to "fewer people who already had huge injuries while cycling died when using a helmet." That is not the entire problem, because it leaves out a huge sampling of people who do not wear helmets and do not make it to the hospital in the first place.
The kicker is rate of head injuries during a bicycle crash. A fraction of crashes involve a person's head (though when it does, for those one in ten falls, you really want it)
The numbers are under reported. Every cyclist I know that uses a bike for transport has been hit by a car. Myself thrice, never reported. Crashes involving myself, never reported. Hence, there is a bias in the data for the really traumatic injuries
I got to witness an accident where a helmet would have made a huge difference for the cyclist. A lady was cycling at fairly low speed on a street that had old rails, then her front wheel apparently got stuck in a rail and she fell over and got a pretty serious looking head injury. Several of us in cars pulled over, called 911, and waited till the ambulance arrived and told them what happened. I have no idea what happened to her in the end, but she was unconscious and bleeding profusely from her her. She was not wearing a helmet, as you might surmise.
Bicycle helmets are designed to protect riders from collisions with terrain at normal cycling speeds (in fact, less than that; helmet tests are done with a speed of about 14 miles per hour [0]).
Cyclists who are hit by traffic are likely to be hit much, much harder than that. Therefore the effect of the helmet is more or less entirely untested, and manufacturers have no incentive to design helmets for that scenario.
> which is why there are no mandatory bicycle helmet laws in the Netherlands
We (the Netherlands) don't have helmet laws because we hate helmets, not because we did research and concluded they'd have significant adverse effects.
> and found that cars tend to be more dangerous with cyclists if the cyclists are wearing a helmet
I know that when I'm driving a car, I specifically behave differently when I see a bicyclist with a helmet vs without. /s
This just sounds so preposterous. First off, I doubt the average driver notices bicyclists at all. Of those that do, I'd seriously doubt if they even consider that they are wearing a helmet or not and just express frustration at the bicycle being there in the first place. The suggestion that a driver notices a helmet and acts more aggressively towards the rider or that they give a wider berth to the rider when not wearing a helmet is just "trying too hard" for lack of better words to describe my incredulity.
If you are riding a bicycle in an area (like mine) where biking is just not at all that common in the majority of areas, then the drivers of motor vehicles are just out of practice of noticing bicycles. It is not in their muscle memory of needing to look out for them. Other cars, sure. Pedestrians, maybe (but that's probably pretty low as well).
I do behave differently with some bicyclists than others and it might be correlated with helmet use.
If I see a bicyclist that looks like a bicyclist I tend to drive closer to them because I expect they are going to stay in their lane. Conversely, people who look like they aren't regular bike riders or teenagers just screwing around -- I will give a much wider berth... in some cases even going a completely different route to avoid them.
> If I see a bicyclist that looks like a bicyclist
I recall a coworker explaining the duality of cycling in full kit vs. cycling in "street" clothes with his children. In the former case, he appears as a pro or semi-pro cyclist and in the latter, as a dad spending time with his children.
It's not hard to guess which get-up gets him honked at, coal rolled[0], etc. It's also not hard speculate that a driver is more likely to give the dad spending time with his children more room on the road. (Of course, in either case the cyclists should all be wearing helmets, but we're only even having this discussion because not all are so responsible.)
Yeah, I know someone who has no issue seeing people biking who look like they are going somewhere, but he absolutely hates people who look like they are biking for exercise. His logic is that roads are built for transportation, and people shouldn’t be blocking parts of the road to get a workout in.
because we hate helmets, not because we did research
Actually, we did. From [0] (the link to the study itself is on that page too):
> A recent Dutch study (2021) concludes that many people expect to make fewer bike rides when mandatory helmet laws are introduced. These findings suggest that such a law would have a negative effect both on bike usage and on public health in general.
In addition to the standard arguments already posted here about safety in numbers, efficacy of a helmet, and infrastructure design, they also mention a few practical problems with helmets:
- What to do with the helmet when you're not wearing it? A good helmet is too big to just store in a coat pocket or a handbag.
- What to do if you lose your helmet or it gets stolen? How will you make it home then?
I experience the same delema's when I ride a motorcycle and have to lug around an even bigger/heavier/more expensive helmet. I sometimes will opt for a car over motorcycle simply because of the PPE element. However, my solution to that problem is not to skip wearing my PPE. I am not sure it should be the same for cycling either. In places like the Netherlands I guess it can make more sense for PPE to not have as much importance as you're going to have far less risk of an head injury compared to a rider in many North American cities.
The "re-analysis" just does a bunch of ad-hoc adjustments to make the study underpowered. You could make literally any scientific paper show no effect by doing the same thing.
Because, you know, politicians would do anything to keep people voting for them, including putting people lives at risk to please them (COVID just proved it, if there was some doubt left), but doctors opinions are a bit more of a reliable source to understand what could potentially kill you and what could save your life.
I don't agree. A surgeon is not going to see the vast majority of people who don't suffer head trauma, so they are not any more reliable than anyone else. If anything, they are likely to be more biased than the average person.
> A surgeon is not going to see the vast majority of people who don't suffer head trauma
Which is a very silly argument.
A surgeon is one among the few that can see a spike in brain traumas cases and can investigate the causes, it's totally more reliable than you or me, because he has the data and the knowledge, we don't.
I don't know about you, but I would ask a veteran about the horrors of war, not to 4 years kids, who, having seen none of it, are, by your reasoning, less biased.
> A surgeon is not going to see the vast majority of people who don't suffer head trauma
Because surgeons are notoriously not people too and live in a closet in the hospital.
> Now, get me a statistician and we can talk.
first of all, medical professionals typically study statistics, epidemiology doesn't really figure out itself on its own.
Secondly, I work with statisticians to assess the risks for insurance companies (not in the US).
I work with that kind of data everyday and, guess what, MDs reports are highly predictive of risks, the average Joe with a laptop opinions, are discarded because, after examination, have been found "completely non-predictive".
> medical professionals typically study statistics, epidemiology doesn't really figure out itself on its own.
Having tutored medical professionals trying to pass their epidemiology classes, I would not make that claim. From my observations, epidemiology and statistical literacy is treated as a "check this box" effort, the least important of their courses.
Ban cycling. Even less trauma. And why stop there, make it illegal to walk outside as well. No more pedestrians getting hit by cars!
This sounds absurd ofcourse, and it is. But from the point of the surgeons it is not absurd, as it reduces trauma significantly. So any decisions should be taken by taking into account socio-economic effects as well. Cycling is a part of Dutch culture and compared to other countries we are doing very well. Mandatory helmets are a big deal (where do you keep the helmets?) and will definitely move people from bikes to cars.
My cousin had a cycling accident where his helmet cracked in half (pretty much) but the head was safe. He just slipped on some leafs or ice or something so there wasn't even anyone else involved. Ever since I saw that picture I'm religious about wearing a helmet. Skulls crack folks, not rocket science. I mean I don't need a law for that. I kind of like my life.
>A reduction in the number of cyclists on streets;
Really a goal of the move. For sure there's a reduction, article suggests 15-40% which jives for me. So long as a bikes are allowed on the road, you will have movements to punish cyclists. Soon as a city has bike pathes all over enabling you to get to your destination and banning cyclists off the road and sidewalks. Then this problem will be solved.
Bike sharing systems basically cant function where bike helmets are mandatory. Which is super interesting because how many people really just ignore the bike helmet rule anyway?
>More exposure among vulnerable populations to unnecessary interactions with police.
Police brutality is a huge problem for the USA. Not anyone else.
There is some serious reaching going on here, chicago has mandatory helmet laws, most people don't wear helmets anyways its one of those selective enforcement laws that will get you in trouble you're already doing something the cops care about. Our bike share program is fine and bike infra is increasing.
Selective enforcement is even worse. It leaves the decision to the cops and who are they going to go after? The ones that are weak and have little power to defend themselves.
I know one observation is just an anecdote, but my experience is totally different.
1) I had one fall from a bicycle in my 30s from a front axle failure. My fault on not setting the quick release on the wheel correctly. I had the good fortune to roll forward. My head touched the ground, and I had no injury or concussion. My foam (no outer shell) helmet had cracked. I think the impact "doing work" on the helmet prevented a serious injury.
2) I have never been injured by the helmet (dropped on my foot, or not been able to see due to it).
A helmet protects you by being crushed - it dissipates the kinetic energy of your head in the process. They’re not very strong in tension at all - a cracked helmet is a helmet that failed to do its job properly.
If it crushed first & then cracked then that’s different of course.
Quick release systems in bicycles are really the worst. They should be outlawed for non-professionals for obvious safety issues since people who just casually ride bikes never educate themselves on these boring things. And it takes like a few minutes maximum for a complete noob to take off and install another wheel in traditional "slow release" system so it's entirely pointless for casualists yet dangerous.
> When the Australian cities of Melbourne and Brisbane mandated helmet use, it actually made streets less safe for cyclists. The number of people riding bikes dropped precipitously, which reduced the “Safety in Numbers” effect.
This links to [1], but this paper doesn't seem to support the assertion at all.
> These results help explain why two of the four companies operating in Sydney decided to leave the city in July 2018: the low rate of trips-per-day per bike, a high level of vandalism, and the threat of heavy fines from councils made the system one without potential for financial profit. While dockless bikesharing appears to be successful in many cities globally, the factors leading to its success have not been replicated in Sydney to date.
There's no mention of helmets, and the paper is specifically about bike sharing programs, not biking in general.
I'll cite SWOV.nl (Dutch institute for road safety research):
> The effect of (mandatory) bicycle helmets on bicycle use is not clear. Several international studies show that bicycle use decreases after the introduction of helmet laws, even though most studies do not find such an effect or only find a temporary effect [9] [42] [49]. [...]
> There are two international review studies of the effect of mandatory helmet use on the use of bicycles, both dating from 2018 [9] [42]. The first study [42] shows that the available research results are not unequivocal. It states that mandatory helmet use could indeed result in a decrease of the number of cyclists, but that this need not always be the case and that, if the number of cyclists initially decreases, that need not be of long duration. The second study is a mostly qualitative analysis of the available literature [9]. Based on their findings, the researchers conclude that there is little to no evidence of a substantial decrease of bicycle use due to the introduction of mandatory helmets. They have examined 23 studies/data sets and conclude that 2 of these studies support the hypothesis that mandatory helmets lead to a decrease of cycling, whereas 13 studies do not, and 8 studies show mixed results.
> The abovementioned review studies only concern research done abroad, in particular in Australia and North America.
Presumably the first link was intended to link [1] which says Australia's mandatory helmet laws reduced cycling by "30-40% overall, and up to 80% in some demographic groups"
It also claims that "MHLs are the main reason for the failure of Australia’s two public bike hire schemes. Brisbane and Melbourne are the only two cities in the world with helmet laws to have attempted public bike hire. While schemes in places like Paris, London, Montreal, Dublin and Washington DC have flourished, Brisbane and Melbourne have amongst the lowest usage rates in the world."
Presumably in editing, the article's two mentions of cycle hire schemes got confused.
I wear a helmet, laws or not. But when I occasionally don't, I notice that I am way more careful, e.g. more mindful of a curb with a metal post that I ride by.
I wonder if this effect is permanent, if I would stop wearing a helmet forever.
Being more mindful won't protect your brain if you do get in an accident without a helmet. If the effect as permanent, why wear helmets at all?
This is all galaxy freakonomics brain shit.
Of course, mandatory helmet laws do NOT make cyclists less safe. They may make people who choose not to cycle because of the law less safe. But there is no discussion of the balance of safety -- more for helmet wearers, perhaps less for people who choose not to cycle.
They make those who still cycle less safe because less people will cycle overall.
So basically a single person wearing a helmet is safer than not wearing. But a person wearing a helmet is a crowd is less safe than that person biking "alone" not wearing a helmet.
When I started biking around 4 years ago, I rode my bike for at least two years without a helmet. That would be around 10.000 km without one. I never had an issue. When I started wearing a helmet I started breaking my bones, because I started to do riskier stuff (which was the reason for starting to wear a helmet).
Then I got used to it and bought myself a better one last year, instead of the 20€ one wich I initially had.
But I don't ride my bike in traffic on a street, so those first two years were never really a high-risk scenario.
Mandatory helmet laws make the number of injuries associated with biking go down. That is their purpose, and they are effective. Yes, some of that is people who would rather not bike at all than bike safely, and there are some non-linear effects from that, but it's still a net reduction in injuries.
There is a real need for society to discuss whether the value of reduced injuries outweighs the cost in terms of less cycling - for example more car emmisions, more traffic congestion, less easy cardio, etc. But to say people are less safe is just not true for the common definition of safe.
Citation needed. If they are now traveling via automobile, I doubt there is a net reduction when taking into account: vehicle injuries and fatalities, air pollution, and of course, in the long term, anthropogenic climate change.
This is a classic example of a system with perverse incentives. Everyone feels safer in their big SUV. In reality it's just an arms race, and we're all losing.
> Everyone feels safer in their big SUV. In reality it's just an arms race, and we're all losing.
I'm not sure, absent secondary effects, wearing a helmet makes cycling more dangerous for other cyclists the way that driving a big SUV, absent secondary effects makes it more dangerous for other drivers. It's not like the extra mass from helmets means you'll do more damage when you smash in to other cyclists.
Sure, but that's not the argument. It's that if you require people to carry a helmet with them to use your for-hire bike system, less people will use it, but they'll still need to get places, so they're more likely to hire a car or drive themselves.
The hypothesis is that requiring helmets may make individual bikers safer in isolation, but if it causes less people to bike and to drive instead, the increase in people driving cars may make it less safe to ride a bike, even adjusted for the fact that they're safer via the helmet.
I'd imagine this is especially true given that the helmet mostly only helps prevent the more dramatic injuries to the head. Getting hit by a car is still likely to seriously injure you in plenty of places the helmet doesn't help with.
Agreed. I just thought the metaphor was not helpful.
> The hypothesis is that requiring helmets may make individual bikers safer in isolation
...though there's a (somewhat) credible argument that even this isn't true. There are arguments against this too. Some argue automobiles see someone without a helmet as more "at risk" and therefore are more mindful of them, thereby net increasing their safety. Others argue that mandates tend to discourage innovation in safety equipment design, effectively encouraging the deployment of limited safety equipment at the expense of more effective alternatives.
> I'd imagine this is especially true given that the helmet mostly only helps prevent the more dramatic injuries to the head. Getting hit by a car is still likely to seriously injure you in plenty of places the helmet doesn't help with.
Which also brings up the ol' "is it better to be more likely to live, but also more likely to have broken arms and legs?" question.
> If they are now traveling via automobile, I doubt there is a net reduction when taking into account: vehicle injuries and fatalities, air pollution, and of course, in the long term, anthropogenic climate change.
You're not thinking like a Zero-sum American.
If you accidentally hit & injure a pedestrian, cyclist, or another driver in your Hummer - better them than you.
Secondly: if they are now traveling via automobile, the risk of injuries is less than going by bike without an helmet.
If you believe that by driving cars the risk of brain trauma goes up 63 to 80%, you should provide some evidence,
You're also blindly assuming that no bike means car, in my opinion it would mirror the usage pattern of someone not keen to use a car: public transportation, walking, other means of transportation such as skateboard, scooters etc.
Doubtful if "cars" means motor vehicles, as most of the US has poor public transit thus cycling would be the closest best substitute readily available. The number of cyclists would explode.
There would likely also be lots of deaths due to weakness in the supply chain.
Agree but that said cyclists can still injure themselves without help from cars. We'd expect the absolute number of cycling injuries to rise with the number of cyclists. However, they will be much less serious injuries.
About 30% of cycling deaths are not traffic related, hardly negligible. If cars magically disappeared there would be a lot more than 3 times the current number of cyclists on the road.
Citation? If car traffic is pushing someone into the shoulder, and they hit a grate, was that counted as car related? If it is a hit and run (super common), and someone comes up to a person that was left for dead, is that counted? How exactly is that 30% computed?
If you suffer an impact in a helmet, that is now an ex-helmet. That is, you can't repair them, and the only way to check they're still sound is destructive testing. (not trying to rebut your anecdata)
Your reply made me check for the UK, so in 2016 we have
"For teenage and adult cyclists, accidents are more likely to involve collisions with motor vehicles, but about 16% of fatal or serious cyclist accidents reported to the police do not involve a collision with another vehicle, but are caused by the rider losing control of their bicycle." [1]
Not quite 30% but much more than I expected and obviously not negligible. Thanks for the rebuttal.
I think he was saying that if suddenly cars were not allowed, there would be a class of people unable to get food or services and would die. Aka, you can't replace a fedex truck delivering food to a handicapped person with 500 fedex bikers delivering one box each. (and what about couch deliveries).
> The number of cyclists would explode. There would likely also be lots of deaths due to weakness in the supply chain.
In the short term, yes.
In the medium and long term, if you Americans would put all that money you spend on cars & car infrastructure into equivalent walking and cycling infrastructure and public transport, you'd probably leave even the Dutch behind...
Not here; I live in Oxford, UK - one of this country's "cycling cities". The great majority of cyclists are not motorized. Cycle theft is barely policed, and an electric bike worth £2,000 is worth pinching (the cops don't treat electric bikes differently from cheap rusty crap bikes). Most people here ride throwaway bikes costing under £300 new.
Can, needs or should, I would add. My perspective doesn't seem to be very popular, however I could never understand how laws that are intended to protect us only from ourselves are compatible with the philosophy of law that we're supposingly embracing in the west.
The only rational argument for these laws would be the burden on the national-health system for injuries sustained on the head during riding a bike. This could be solved by allowing people to opt-out of the free national health system coverage explicitly in these instances of injuries, if indeed statistics show that there is a significant burden imposed on it. And still there is the counter-argument that this would be biased -what about people who are engaging into leisure activities with higher-risk, "extreme-sports" and such. I wouldn't be surprised if even the cost of treating normal sports-related injuries is higher than the cost of head-related injuries of bikers riding with no helmet. Why not enforce wearing full protective gear when engaging in every sport?
If we start with this mentality, it's only a slippery slope that would lead us in a place we don't want to be.
Same as with smoking taxes. It started with the justification that it's fair to counteract the increased cost that smokers have on the national health system. A perfectly fair reasoning. But by now these taxes have increased so much that this justification is no longer convincing -instead they are widely accepted as a sort of "luxury tax" that smokers pay, no longer to cover the cost of the medical treatment they are more likely to receive on average, but just "because that's how it is". This income is not even earmarked for the health system in many cases. They also started covering things that evidence don't support they pose any or as much of a risk as cigarette smoking (Vaping), and in some cases -Italy, IIRC-, even with official lawmaker justification that these products deprive the state from tax income that they would receive through the smoking tax. A completely illogical argument that I was surprised to see it made nobody blink twice.
So I think such laws are really a demonstration of government acting as a for-profit entity, squeezing money from whatever they think they can get away with.
Oh, there are scores of risky activities that can result in medical costs that some people (libertarians?) would prefer that we didn't socialize.
Incorrect use of OTC drugs; crossing the road while diddling a mobile phone; drinking alcohol; hell, pushing your toddler on a swing in a playground. Perhaps socialized medicine should refuse to treat people who have declined vaccination, or declined a bowel cancer screening. Maybe climbing a ladder should close you off from socialized medical care. Perhaps you shut yourself out if you ever hang out with sick people.
Obviously, I'm not serious.
For me, the big thing about socialized medicine is that it's universal. It's a massive benefit to everyone, if people with people with infectious diseases like TB, diphtheria and cholera can get treatment for free, without producing ID or proof of entitlement. And that's true whether or not they have legal status, as immigrants or whatever.
I agree, I was trying to follow the only line of reasoning I can think of that would rationalize the existence of such laws in a way that doesn't break the concept that we should be able to choose for ourselves the amount of risk we want to be exposed in (which is generally accepted in other cases of everyday life).
> doesn't break the concept that we should be able to choose for ourselves the amount of risk we want to be exposed in
I'm not sure that this right to regulate one's own personal risk environment is actually a thing. It sounds rather vague; you could use it to justify almost any act. "I think you're a threat; I choose not to expose myself to the risk you pose, so I eliminate you".
Perhaps I didn't phrase it properly. I meant, "the concept that we should be able to choose the amount of risk we want to expose ourselves in". Which is generally accepted as a personal right, based on the premise that we, and nobody else, owns our body. But every now and then we see some laws that seem to break that (such as in this case). If we didn't accept this principle, then would have to agree to also punish suicide attempts, or a number of other things that would sound absurd.
You might as well go all the way. Quite sure most of the bikes where I live don't even qualify as road safe because only road/city bikes are sold with the mandatory safety equipment (lights, bell, reflectors, ...) out of the box and the attachable variants of those are often not road legal either.
So if you want to protect cyclists from themselves lock them in a cell and throw away the key, it is the only way to be sure.
Interestingly, mandatory helmet laws for car drivers and passengers would get us more QALYs than MHLs for bikes. By our reasoning chain of proximate injury reduction, we must prescribe them.
I'm a little wary of relying on this, because it seems like the kind of effect that would go away if no-helmet was more normalized. In other words, if we have a (local) culture that says "bicycling is sufficiently dangerous as to require a helmet", then drivers (even the ones who don't themselves cycle) are going to have that in their heads, and it's going to influence their behavior: "if I accidentally strike this person not wearing a helmet they're going to get really hurt, I'd better be extra careful". If the consensus is that lacking a helmet is not particularly problematic, I suspect we'll find drivers not acting specially too.
There is an incredibly large number of studies that have all shown massive reductions in the rates of head injuries and deaths with the introduction and enforcement of mandatory helmet laws.
Apparently whatever negative effect drivers passing closer to helmeted cyclists has is insignificant against the massive improvement of protecting an extremely important and extremely vulnerable part of your body.
Which just by itself would help reduce the total number of injuries, as the unfortunate reality is almost every other form of transport is less likely to result in hits to the head. So you then have to balance that against the downsides of people choosing "safer" forms of transport, which are not inconsiderable.
If you are implying cars. What about deaths from pollution? Reduced years of life from pollution? Reduced years of life from being overweight due to lack of exercise? Miserable years of life caught in traffic?
Absolutely, I certainly don't wish to see more people driving cars! But for any individual, if safety is your primary concern and you're deciding between a car and a bicycle, you'd choose the former.
It might be conceivable that more people hurt their heads on a per-km basis walking than cycling, but I'd be extremely surprised that for the same individual, walking (or driving) a given distance would be more likely to result in a serious head injury than cycling it.
Okay but we care for amount of helmeted individuals injury rate vs ones without helmets.
Less incidents can be just less cyclists, or something mildly related as "on average, helmets are colorful and increase visibility vs average cyclist that before helmet had nothing well visible on them"
Back when mandatory seatbelt laws were debated, people used to concoct scenarios where a rider/driver is saved because they're not wearing a seatbelt (they were "thrown clear").
This reminds me of that. Your "safety in numbers" and "cars pass closer to helmeted cyclists" is a desperate attempt to avoid a simple fact:
if a head hits the pavement without a helmet, it gets injured.
Of course you can invent other scenarios, but only by ignoring that one.
There are many many thousands of Dutch who bike daily without a helmet, so this is a false dichotomy.
I bike a lot as in for transportation and running errands, and the speeds are generally quite low, and after many years I'm good at not falling off my bike. The biggest thing that concerns me is drivers and their associated cars. In many cases a helmet will do nearly nothing when you get crushed by an overpuffed SUV or truck.
> There is a real need for society to discuss whether the value of reduced injuries outweighs the cost
You could make an equal argument about driving and car/vehicle use. For example the city I live in has had more deaths by vehicle than deaths by homicide this year.
Portland, I cant find the slide with that stat that I saw from a PBOT meeting, and it looks like the results are contradictory to my statement for last year (2021)
> I'm good at not falling off my bike. The biggest thing that concerns me is drivers...
I think this is a good way to frame it for those who ~~are anxious about riding~~ don't regularly ride bikes. It's really easy to ride safely on your own once you learn the intricacies of riding on two wheels. Bikes are hard to tip over if you know what you're doing. It's the introduction of large machines with the means of generating immense amounts of kinetic energy with very little human input that things start getting complicated. In fact this applies for the introduction of electric bikes and scooters, too. So many times I have seen new riders on shiny new e-bikes accidentally shock themselves four meters forward because they aren't used to the throttle. Imagine if they're waiting behind a cyclist, or at a stoplight, and they push either themselves or a cyclist in front of them into the flow of traffic.
I would be interested to see hard data but I suspect "one-person" bike injuries are much less prevalent and dangerous on average than those involving at least one cyclist and at least one motor vehicle (including e-bikes).
I was driving to work one day and there was a bicyclist far ahead of me, alone.
I have no idea what happened but the gentleman flipped the bike and took a tumble right over the handlebars. No visible road debris, road wasn't wet, bicyclist wasn't doing anything silly.
I stopped and luckily he was fine (he was wearing a helmet) but seemingly for no reason, a bicyclist ate pavement.
Wheel could have gotten stuck in a recessed light rail line, pothole, or gouge in the road. A stick or shoelace could have become tangled in the front wheel and arrested its movement.
For what it's worth, I did the same thing once without a helmet on (it was a rail line and my front tire got perfectly stuck) and made it through with only a scraped knee. So we're 1-1 on anecdata.
"Less prevalent" seems unlikely, from the large number of accidents I'm aware of among myself and peers, maybe 25% have involved motor vehicles? Sure, they tend to be the more serious ones, but certainly if you do any sort of regular off-road recreational riding (esp. MTB) you're almost certainly going to come off quite a few times with no other vehicles involved. But I don't know how well my own observations extrapolate to the population as a whole - I suspect a large percentage of bicycle falls never get reported/recorded anywhere anyway.
Helmets are required around construction sites for health and safety. That's not an argument to require helmets for pedestrians. Any particular activity can be particularly dangerous, and you can mandate safety gear for that activity, but that has absolutely no bearing on stuff outside of that activity.
And I agree that MHL laws should be more flexible, and not just a blanket "you must wear a helmet at all times while on a bicycle" statement, which is what it is in Australia.
> There are many many thousands of Dutch who bike daily without a helmet, so this is a false dichotomy.
That is not a false dichotomy. The meaning of "safety" here is referencing local standards that have been socially defined. Specifically, this is about the US.
> The biggest thing that concerns me is drivers and their associated cars. In many cases a helmet will do nearly nothing when you get crushed by an overpuffed SUV or truck.
Or getting knocked to the ground, where you will not have the angle or too much momentum to protect your head (even after your wrist/arm snaps).
> There is a real need for society to discuss whether the value of reduced injuries outweighs the cost
This is the value in helmets, which has been validated immediately in every locale where it was enacted, to my own chagrin. The article immediately tries to conflate reduced usage with reduced injuries, as if more usage would reduce injuries. I'm sure there's a small multivector "Safety In Numbers" variable that has a reduced injury rate with an increase in usages...if nothing else, from normalizing bikes in some areas, but it's small enough that the injury numbers still go up from increased usage and no helmets.
The safety in numbers should not be resigned as a small effect. When drivers see zero cyclists, they stop looking for them.
There is a very notable difference in streets that get high non motorized usage vs a lot. Compare a playground or park with a lot of pedestrians compared to say a national forest.
What's more, a helmet only helps if you hit your head. A small fraction (afaik, less than 10%) of falls will have a helmet helping you at all (but when it would, you tend to really want the helmet)
Very few cyclists get crushed, the overwhelming majority of people who die in cycling accidents suffer the head trauma that helmets are specifically meant to prevent.
Plenty of people do bike daily without a helmet, likewise plenty of people don't wear their seatbelts daily - and 99.9% of the time they suffer no ill effect. The Netherlands is one of the few countries where more people die per year cycling than driving, and per capita they have a much higher cycling fatality rate than neighboring countries. Well designed infrastructure is a good thing, but accidents still happen.
Head injuries are also the most common thing that kills drivers. Your argument provides an equally strong case that drivers should be required to wear helmets.
The hierarchy of helmet need is #1 motorcyclists, #2 drivers, #3 pedestrians–pedestrian head injuries are incredibly common–, and #4 cyclists.
Well, that is interesting, but head injuries are often from just falling over from any height, not really from being hit by cars. Most traumatic brain injuries in older adults are from falling from standing height or less.
>
The hierarchy of helmet need is #1 motorcyclists, #2 drivers, #3 pedestrians–pedestrian head injuries are incredibly common–, and #4 cyclists.
Interesting. I would have assumed cyclists are second given how fast road bikes go and the fact that they normally ride on major roads where cars speeds are well above 60 km/hr.
How did you arrive at your ordering? Was it from an unlinked source?
I'm just going from national injury stats you can find in CDC WONDER and derived reports. Head injuries among American cyclists are a non-issue, far behind practically all other causes of head injuries, and using government powers to force cyclists to wear helmets is a complete waste of everyone's time.
I appreciate the link, but I can't tell if those number are per capita or just raw numbers.
It would make sense that bike numbers are smaller if they are just the raw numbers given that there are probably 100x more cyclists and 1000x more pedestrians than bikers.
If those numbers aren't adjusted for usage then it makes bikes look even more dangerous when you adjust for how often each form of travel is used.
I am both a motorcycle rider and a bicycle rider for decades. While I never-ever got on the motorcycle without a helmet, half of my bicycle rides on the road are without a helmet and the only reason I wear one ever is because it has better venting than a regular cotton cap. I always wear a helmet offroad on the bicycle.
The day the helmet will be mandatory on a bicycle I will sell by bikes, it means cycling is too dangerous to be on a street and the government is incapable of protecting cyclists but by mandating helmets. It's like mandating bulletproof vests in Philadelphia or Baltimore instead of solving the gun violence problem in the cities.
> While I never-ever got on the motorcycle without a helmet, half of my bicycle rides on the road are without a helmet and the only reason I wear one ever is because it has better venting than a regular cotton cap. I always wear a helmet offroad on the bicycle.
Interesting, why don't you wear a helmet on the road?
I assume the reason you always wear a helmet off road is because of all the falls on trails?
I think that cycling on road (not road racing) should be safe enough not to need a helmet; if it does, I don't go on that trip. If I cannot safely use a bicycle around town without a helmet it means a child cannot ever use a bike safely.
Offroad I voluntarily take moderate risks, so I always wear a helmet and gloves (gloves are more for comfort) and sometimes an enduro "light armor" to protect me from tree branches on a single trail. But the equipment I wear is 100% my decision and I want to stay that way.
I appreciate that response. The only thing I have issues with is this statement.
> I think that cycling on road (not road racing) should be safe enough not to need a helmet; if it does, I don't go on that trip.
Would you say the same thing about seatbelts in a car? I just can't figure out how to wrap my mind around not taking a trip if you need safety gear with one mode of transportation and not another.
Fully agree about it should be each person's individual decision.
And nice to run into another cyclist on this site!!
Well, the seatbelt is a complicated situation; I ride motorbikes at 100 mph (160km/h) with no seatbelt (in places where that speed is legal) and I don't feel the need for one, but I wear a seatbelt in the car at 50 km/h. Why? The seatbelt is just there and it has almost zero inconvenience for me to put it on, so I do. Not because I feel safer with a seatbelt at 50 km/h - I do appreciate airbags at that speed.
Bicycle helmets, on the other side, can be inconvenient; also you don't have one with you at any time, like any car has a seatbelt. Bikes are relatively slow, so having a helmet "just in case" mandatory at all times does not make sense for me, maybe for small children to some extent. Just ask yourself: what is next, helmets, balistic armor and knee protectors mandatory by law for pedestrians just because they may be hit by a car, bicycle or fall on the ice? There should be a limit and for me the limit is the mandatory helmet on a bicycle. Yes, I encourage beginners to wear helmets on bicycles on the street, but I would not mandate it, that gives the wrong message that the streets are not safe.
The classic argument is that people should be wearing bike helmets when climbing ladders, using stairs and having a shower (a lot of people slip in the shower). However, when examined logically in terms of head protection, people think that it's only appropriate for cyclists.
If you are basing on totally detached statistics, maybe..
But what's obviously missing is context. Safety is all about context. Walking shouldn't require protection until excessive risk is added to it, like walking on ice or across a busy intersection.
The moment that risk is added, it needs to be balanced with safety. Helmets might be an effective safety measure, but they are situationally inconvenient for pedestrians; and rely on too much behavioral discipline.
> Head injuries are also the most common thing that kills drivers
I wonder what the correlation is with seatbelt usage.
My guess is that most people who die of head injuries due so because they're not wearing a seatbelt, and the head doesn't take kindly to being turned into the tip of a meat missile.
Well, per capita is pretty meaningless, as the Dutch ride so much more per person.
Anyway there should be more discussion about what kind of bicycle.
Racing bikes go fast, your feet are in toeclips, you're in a bent down position - those things are dangerous. And everybody in the Netherlands wears a helmet riding them.
E-bikes can go very fast, cars underestimate their speed, people wear helmets.
But city or transport bikes, they go very slow (like 15km/h), you sit upright and can easily evade trouble or put a foot to the ground. Falls happen and old people break legs or hips sometimes, but to hit the ground with your head would be very very unusual. Those are the bikes we don't use helmets on.
The kids these days are using clipless pedals (stupid name to distinguish them from toe-clips) which connect to a cleat on the bottom of your cycling shoes. Once practised, a twist of your ankle is all that's required to get your foot free. When not practised, you see a cyclist falling over slowly to the side when they forget to unclip at a traffic light.
Yes it is. I've only come off a handful of times, but I never noticed my feet being trapped - after a while it becomes almost a subconscious action.
Toeclips are considered more dangerous as you often need to loosen the straps first to free your foot. I know one person that broke bones in his foot when riding up a curb at the wrong angle (i.e. wheel slips) when using toeclips. (I also hurt my wrist when using modified toeclips on a unicycle and didn't get my foot free in time).
They're still in use, but probably more likely on a fixie than a road/racing bike.
It only takes an extra split second to twist your foot out of a toe clip, but in the event of a sudden and unexpected wipeout that split second can make all the difference.
Clipless should be easier to disengage from than toeclips. With toeclips you should be tightening up the straps to keep your foot firmly attached for pedalling, but for city/commuting you'd likely have them looser so you can free your foot without touching the straps.Toeclips usually involve more of a pulling action to free your foot than a twist - I'd consider them slower than clipless.
Clipless clips are still a type of toe clip. You literally clip your toes into the pedals. Worst term ever.
Many years ago, when I was still using clipless I lost control on a patch of gravel. Momentum had my body rotating away from my bike such that one foot unclipped easily, but the other was rotating the wrong way to unclip, and I ended up twisting my knee pretty good.
It's a stupid name, but you do not clip your toes into the pedals at all. The clip attaches to a cleat at the bottom of your shoe which will be typically positioned at the ball of your foot or mid-sole - not your toes.
I use SPD (i.e. MTB two-bolt cleats) on my road bike and the worst problem I had with clipless was when one bolt had loosened and then fallen out during a ride. I thought that my right foot had a lot of float and when I stopped to examine it, I couldn't get my shoe released at all as it was attached with just one bolt and thus could rotate. I ended up undoing the shoe to get my foot free and after looking to see what the problem was, I decided to ride the rest of the way home (10 miles or so away) and fix it there.
Luckily, I unclip with my left foot (UK, so we're on the left side of the road) so I was fine until I got home and had to take my shoe off again to fully dismount. It's worth checking SPDs for a loose bolt from time to time.
I ride a bike daily in Amsterdam, and almost everyone on an E-Bike is cruising at 20-25 km/h.
It's common to see people up that to 32 km/h (20 mph), which you can do by setting the limits to US ones instead of EU ones, and trivial on some bikes.
None of these people are wearing helmets, or close enough to nobody.
I only see people on E-Bikes that can legally reach speeds of 40-50 km/h or so wear helmets.
Those look like bicycles, but are legally classified as light motorcycles. They require license plates, helmets etc.
I think mandatory helmet laws are dumb, but let's not misrepresent Dutch cycling.
Your speed doesn't matter, it's the speed at which your head hits the ground that matters and that can be quite high even if you're standing still before falling
The speed you travel on your bike directly contributes to the speed your head potentially hits something. Also the slower you travel the more time you have to react to or avoid or mitigate a crash.
We could require everyone to wear helmets all the time (for their own safety since someone could just fall over or trip at any time), but that's clearly not going to happen.
I think the more general point to consider here is that helmet laws are a distraction from larger issues surrounding traffic deaths and the way we design our cities and transportation systems.
I’d note that being hit by a car doesn’t crush you typically, it merely transfers a lot of force and you hit the ground very hard. One of my best friends in high school was an unparalleled genius in everything he attempted - piano, chess, sports, math, everything. But he was hit by a car driving and hit his head on the curb. He has lived there rest of his life in the care of his parents with the mental capacity of a 5 year old.
I’ve never been in a car accident that required a seat belt either. We should remove them all by your logic.
Cars have tons of safety regulations built into them and seat belt laws are pervasive. I don’t expect them to relax over time either, cars are much safer than they ever have been and I expect their safety will continue to improve year over year.
Can you say the same thing about the bicycle? What safety features do they have? The helmet is the only one I can think of.
> I’ve never been in a car accident that required a seat belt either. We should remove them all by your logic.
Having a seat belt in a car is far less of an inconvenience than carrying around a helmet. If mandatory helmet laws cause people to take a car to the supermarket instead of biking then *more* people will die. Not to mention the immense congestion and destruction of the planet this will cause.
> Cars have tons of safety regulations built into them and seat belt laws are pervasive. I don’t expect them to relax over time either, cars are much safer than they ever have been and I expect their safety will continue to improve year over year.
Cars have safety features for their passengers - meanwhile they are by far the most lethal mode of transportation worldwide. Should we only care about people inside a car, or should we perhaps start caring about *all people*?
> Can you say the same thing about the bicycle? What safety features do they have? The helmet is the only one I can think of.
How about not going at very fast speeds? What safety features does "walking" have? Should we now start wearing a helmet while walking?
We could just do what the Netherlands does and make streets/paths safe for biking rather than armoring up bikers to deal with a more dangerous environment.
so basically for most urban areas you're advocating a huge usage of eminent domain, since doing such retrofits would likely involve chopping off the livingrooms of many homes to make space necessary for the change. so that we can have bikes without helmets, destroy a million homes.
Sure, and lets make the speed limit 5mph and avoid 1.3 million vehicle deaths every year. It'll take people longer to get places but we know what's best for them
> Yes, some of that is people who would rather not bike at all than bike safely, and there are some non-linear effects from that, but it's still a net reduction in injuries.
Doubtful, since it raises the number of miles driven in cars, which would increase the number of injuries there.
This topic has come up several times now on HN and the conversation is always very frustrating.
The debate tends to run towards "no one will tell me to wear a helmet". The same studies are cited as supporting one side or the other when all the studies are clearly insufficient.
It's good that HN doesn't take things are face value, and the discussions here seek to understand unintended consequences. But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and anecdata does in fact equal data.
Unfortunately cycling is dangerous because - in most countries - cyclists share the road with cars and trucks. There's only one winner in a cyclist vs car showdown.
If you cycle somewhere that doesn't have nice cycling infrastructure a helmet is a great idea. A helmet will not automatically turn you into a target for indifference or road rage from motorists - that's the default posture of most motorists towards cyclists, helmet or not.
> Mandatory helmet laws make the number of injuries associated with biking go down. That is their purpose, and they are effective.
There's significant problems with most of the studies showing the effectiveness of bike helmets (especially the Thompson and Rivara study) and there's also the issue that they can conceivably cause greater brain damage die to rotational forces (by increasing the diameter of the head). Some issues are discussed here https://crag.asn.au/5-ways-wearing-a-bicycle-helmet-can-resu...
Also, there's the Dr Ian Walker study (although very small) that shows a greater number of close passes from drivers when the cyclist wears a helmet. Risk compensation may also be at play, so that cyclists take more chances when wearing a helmet (I recall a study showing that effect was particularly pronounced in kids).
Unfortunately, most helmet studies use hospital admissions which is going to bias the results unless hospital admissions are a close match with the cyclist population.
It's of note that cycle helmets are safety tested by typically a 2m drop onto a flat surface - this equates to providing a level of protection at slow speeds up to approx 12mph, but they are most certainly not tested to withstand the forces involved when there's a RTC. The question then is why are they being prescribed for situations far beyond their designs?
The point here is that the "mandatory helmet" part is less significant than the "law enforcement" part.
People who would happily be riding with a helmet are disincentivized to go riding at all, because they don't want to be the subject of police patrol. That's the effect we clearly don't want.
Does not matter if it is more safe or not. It is typical goverment overreach. Me wearing a helmet is no ones business but my own. It has no effect whatsoever on anyone else in society.
Is your child specifically sensitive to brains? If she sees me lying at the end of a long red smear in a pool of blood with my head intact, but with my leg ripped off and my other limbs contorted into absurd positions, is she likely to have no lasting effects.
This is a logic failure; I didn't say specifically or exclusively brains, I provided an example of one of the many gruesome ways your dead body would cause harm to others based on your poor decision making skills.
A possible steel man for the opposite position could be that a person hospitalized because of a preventable injury to the head will be of a greater cost to society, and that the sacrifice of personal liberty is outweighed by every dollar going towards something more beneficial.
I'm not saying I totally agree with that, but I think it's an argument that's rarely articulated, whereas the more reductive argument of keeping everyone "safe" is almost always the default.
You're emphatically wrong. If we have an accident and you die as a result of not wearing a helmet then your estate can file a wrongful death lawsuit against me. If there was a helmet law in place and you weren't wearing a helmet at the time of the accident then your estate is going to have a much more difficult time winning a wrongful death lawsuit. Your actions have consequences for others and frankly it's rather childish to try to pretend they don't.
It seems like they're really reaching to find ways to oppose helmet laws on "safety" grounds. I discern that their opposition to helmet laws has nothing to do with safety.
You'll note the criticism in this article goes beyond safety grounds. The reason for the headline is patently obvious though: if the sole intended positive effect of the laws doesn't actually play out, then it's no longer a case of weighing the positives vs. the negatives.
Yes. I point is that even if your motives have nothing to do with safety, assuming you can make a credible argument, it makes perfect sense that you'd attack the laws on "safety" grounds, since the presumed positive safety effect is really the only supporting argument for the laws.
tl;dr: if there was an oracle that could tell us definitively that mandatory helmet laws don't improve safety, I think we'd see mandatory helmet laws repealed pretty much everywhere.
I don't think they've made a credible argument here. This is true regardless of whether the arguments they raise have merit otherwise (e.g. police interactions.)
People are well justified in looking at them askance for their choice of framing device. It's manipulative and dishonest, or at the very least comes off that way.
> I don't think they've made a credible argument here.
That seems irrelevant to whether that's a fair way to frame the article.
> People are well justified in looking at them askance for their choice of framing device.
Yes, but I think, if you ask that question, you also have to ask, "what would be the best way to frame this article?" I don't think there's such an obviously better answer.
> It's manipulative and dishonest, or at the very least comes off that way.
A key argument of the article is that mandatory helmet laws don't improve cyclist safety. I don't see how it is dishonest to frame the article that way.
If you're looking to persuade someone to make a decision you want them to make, it's usually best to speak to their concerns, not your own. You can call that manipulative if you want, but I think a lot of people would just call it persuasive.
One risk for cyclists from helmet-wearing is torque.
If you fall off and bang your head, the helmet will give you some protection against a head injury (how much protection? Nobody knows, because unlike motorcyle helmets, there are no standards).
But the helmet increases the width of your head, which means that torque from the impact is more likely to injure your neck.
The neck torque thing constantly has been trotted out by anti-helmet motoryclists and has never been shown to be real.
And there are many bicycle helmet standards, some of which are very strict. CPSC, the European equivalents, SNELL bicycle certifications, etc.. There are separate certifications for bicycling disciplines with higher risk like BMX, Downhil/Enduro mountain biking, etc.. as well.
The SNELL standards for bicycles don't require the same levels of protection as motorcycle or car motorsports helmets but are very strict in that they will go and buy helmets in the field to hold the manufacturers honest. CPSC famously lets the companies self-certify.
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[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 385 ms ] threadIt protects you from brain damage.
Their cars are custom built (e.g. F1) and don't have air bags or crumple zones and are open top.
Their cars are modified to be lighter weight, so air bags and other safety equipment is removed. Instead they are fitted with roll cages and wear a helmet.
They're also racing around at high speeds where rolling a car is a real possibility.
Yes, let's equate that to a road car with a proven safety record (NCAP) tests.
Let's see how many tests of a cyclist smashing their head into the ground shows that it's harmless...
I'm sure that you can provide evidence of helmet-wearers doing the same to show that it's harmless one you put on a foam hat?
On a related note, thousands of drivers dying from head trauma each year demonstrate that NCAP is no immortality cheat either.
Helmets should be optional. Taking risks should be legal.
> Just wear a helmet.
You do you. Next up we gonna enforce pedestrians to wear air-bag suits "for their own safety", forbid roller skating, etc.
Disclaimer: living in the Netherlands.
What's the difference from a seat belt law? As long as I'm paying for everyone elses' healthcare (which is the norm in developed countries), their personal risk taking is my concern. Even in places without publically funded healthcare, everyone pays for others' risks through premiums so the difference isn't as big as it would seem.
Cars literally don't do any of those things. They're convenient (at least when your city isn't subject to awful traffic) and that's it.
You found a risk reducing law that probably does make sense. Very small investment (Volvo relinquished the patent, thanks Volvo) and very large benefit.
But this "their personal risk taking is my concern" argument of yours makes me shiver. I'd never want someone else's risk taking to be my concern: I've got more important stuff to attend to, thank God.
Your personal risk preferences impact me in a variety of ways:
* my cost of living goes up, because damage control is much more expensive than prevention; someone has to pay for it, and dead people can't.
* my personal risk goes up, because resources I might need such as emergency doctors' time are occupied dealing with the consequences of your decisions instead.
* my quality of life goes down, e.g. I have to spend more time waiting in traffic jams while the bodies are scraped off the roads.
If you take your risks in a space I am forced to share with you, whether physical, societal or economical, your choices affect me.
Sports will be gone, only the gym survives as it has the lowest risk factor. No more alcohol and drugs. And there will be condom police checking up on you when you cozy up with anyone except your wife.
Sure, go and try to make it happen. But I will also try to subvert it :)
"Put a sharp pin in the steering wheel and forbid belts and airbags." he jokingly argued.
There's quite some truth to it.
You also shouldn't be paying for everyone elses' healthcare
No, I'm not saying we should just leave them there to die.
A priori, you don't know if someone won't be able to pay for treatment, so there's no reason someone should be left to die
The important part is that things should be voluntary and not forced
Hitting concrete with your body at speed is not going to be great for you regardless of the exact cause or exact body part. Just wear the helmet, pity's sake. Why be a meat crayon?
I'm fine without, thank you for being considerate.
The article makes a point, I agree with: don't put barriers on cycling.
I agree wholeheartedly. And I have trouble with most safety laws: they can be recommendations, but not laws (yes seat belt was mentioned, I know, I know).
But I agree with your general point, if the marginal safety gain during cycling was enough to make them mandatory, few activities would remain without mandatory protective headwear (my last bike-related head injury happened while walking through the kitchen during maintenance).
The closest I came to a concussion was when I slipped while walking on ice.
It is quite likely, I spend at least 10,000 of biking so far without a helmet. I had some small accident, but non where I got any brain damage. In most cases the accidents was the result of my own stupidity: being too hurried, not watching the traffic, or doing putting on a rain coat while biking.
Here in the Netherlands, I guess that my risk for getting involved in an accident, is not any higher than walking and other forms of transportation. I am not using an e-bike and I usually bike at a speed of about 15km/h. I do not use a racing bike, but a bike where you sit in an upright position allowing you to look around easily. I also take care of using routes that are safe. Here in the Netherlands, where are more bikes than cars, and biking is an important means of transportation for daily commutes and doing shoppings. We have good infrastructures for bikes.
They’re not GOOD reasons but let’s not pretend there aren’t any at all.
Because I like my head not freezing when it's ten degrees below freezing? When I bring this up, sometimes people tell me about thin membrane caps that fit under the hat, but they don't work when it's actually really cold out. Helmets absolutely do not fit over warm-weather hats (or any hats, really). (Other people have said "why would you be biking if it's below freezing", which shows that they don't understand the entire conversation.)
The helmet itself gives some wind protection which helps as well I think.
I whip my head back and forth over my right shoulder constantly to check the state of traffic behind me.
Before I maneuvre, I check, check and check again. Always checking. Always fully aware of what's behind me.
Having something attached to my head makes it harder and less comfortable to do these rapid checks. I think this makes me less safe overall.
I live less than a mile from my former cubicle, and my old commute was mostly through a park with two road crossings. There was no reason to wear a helmet.
If I'm on a longer road ride, or riding off-road, I religiously wear a helmet. If I'm riding lift-assisted downhill, I wear a full-face helmet.
As already mentioned it can interfere with constant checking habit for extra safety, as well as cold weather appropriate headgear. Personally I gave up cycling once compulsory helmet laws were introduced in Australia since for sun protection I had an already heavy enough wide brim weather proof hat. It's probably not that common, but I have a weakened neck from a poorly treated bad whiplash (forced over the edge of road on a bicycle with a wooden road marker being right at the spot my head / neck area would land.) Additionally trying a helmet (not all helmets are the same and possibly there are brands out that have addressed certain problems) I found the straps sitting proud interfered with other distant road noises, not an issue in town traffic, but it would certainly drown out vehicles approaching from behind driving on non urban roads, with many drivers not looking for cyclists sharing that road.
I've also seen helmets from friends who have crashed where the helmet is completely destroyed. It just isn't worth it.
Your argument is the same as that against seatbelts. I've driven hundreds of thousands of miles but never had an accident. I still put my seatbelt on.
Here in the Netherlands, biking (without support) at speeds around 15km/h if you are in good health and of sound mind, is not more dangerous than walking or traveling by some other means. Recently, the number of traffic causalities has gone up, that those are mostly related to the use of e-bikes by elderly people and younger people. I feel that if you need support for biking when you do not have the strength (due to old age), you probably are not fit for biking at all. Many young people using e-bikes remove the speed restriction allowing them to bike at speed up to 30 km/h. At those speeds, the chance of accidents go up very quickly.
But if someone will wear one of these things who wouldn't otherwise wear anything at all...
Cycle routes in the Netherlands are awesome! Things are slowly improving here, but we're still a long way from that level of care placed into the design.
this is not news. wearing helmets has been associated with a range of negative issues for years now. (https://road.cc/content/news/268605-wearing-cycle-helmet-may..., https://www.bicycling.com/culture/a29802208/helmet-laws-safe..., https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/09/060911102200.h...)
Edit: Yep. https://web.archive.org/web/20220000000000*/https://www.bicy...
>cursory updates to the body of the text
Still pretty straightforward to algorithmically determine if this has happened.
Then at some point it was <i>last year</i> - and they've just left it like that for new next couple of years.
Only other real change is that the author used to work for "Transportation Alternatives and Families for Safe Streets" - and now doesn't.
On its topic, I was expecting to mostly disagree. That said, the case is compelling. To condense, it is basically saying don't turn it into a partisan conflict between riders and police. That plays out in predictably bad ways for communities.
Mandatory helmet laws do not prevent people from riding bikes. Just like mandatory seat belt laws did not prevent anyone from driving cars!
"Lastly, we know these “quality of life” laws are disproportionately enforced in communities of color and in lower income communities." - what the hell?! Yes, helmet and safety laws are the reason why police officers disproportionately enforce various laws against communities of color. /s Let's blame this and not deal with the real problem: reform of police enforcement.
To deal with bike safety, we need to make everyone wear bike helmets until we reach critical mass in cycling adoption. /Some/ protection is better than nothing at all.
In the meantime, we need to implement better traffic calming and separation of automobile and cycling/pedestrian traffic. Kids die every year because in many areas, they have no choice but to bike on the side of a road that has cars whizzing past 60+ mph with less than 12 inches of separation in between.
NSW police were chasing people down and fining them for not wearing a helmet. My college room mate got done twice in a month.
The laws are successful in that they get people to wear helmets, but they are an abject failure in terms of participation in cycling.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Percent-cycling-to-work-...
Even with a helmet, biking in US looks fucking scary.
I've got hundreds of thousands of miles in my legs and I won't get on a bike without a helmet on even going around the block.
On the infrastructure yes, agree. I'd be happy with simple stuff like ubiquitous bikes lanes and 10 foot wide shoulders...
Manufacturers however do warn that they aren't designed to mitigate dangers it vehicular collisions, and studies show that vehicle drivers are kinder to cyclists without helmets. Sources here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2020/07/10/bicycle-...
If you can't give the cyclist that much space, slow down and wait until you do.
As with many other things, the way forward here is to copy the Scandinavian countries and separate cyclists from motorists entirely. Sadly, though, there are too many groups fighting this kind of change.
If I had a penny for every time someone's squeezed through between my wing mirror and the kerb in start/stop traffic with just an inch or two to spare...
This really gets pulled out every single time someone points out the proper distance required for passing a cyclist and it’s wrong.
First, passing a cyclist with a car and passing a car with a cycle are asymmetric things. The cyclist needs space to actually go a straight line, the path of a bicycle is never straight - and it sways more at slower speeds.
The cyclist also needs space in both directions to make a turn, for example to avoid an obstacle. If you take that space to one side, they cannot even safely turn the other direction.
Cars have a significantly higher draft than cyclists. They’re bigger, heavier and scarier. If the cyclist twitches as you pass them, you were too close.
Cars just don’t fall over. Cyclists do. Slippery patch on the road, whatever. And when they fall, they need space.
The car driver passing the cyclist has no idea how skilled the cyclist is. And unskilled cyclists need more space to maneuver - or make mistakes when scared and fall. See above. The cyclist passing the car knows their skill. And even unskilled cars do not randomly fall over.
The danger is asymmetric. A car even slightly touching a cyclist is likely to end up with a major injury or death. A cyclist slightly touching a car is a dent and a scratch.
This is why in many places, there’s a mandatory minimum distance when for a car passing a cyclist, but none for cyclist passing a car.
I'm saying the cyclist still needs that space even when they are moving faster than the cars around them, because they are still in danger even when they are the fastest moving thing in the vicinity.
Cars have blind spots, and cyclists that overtake with insufficient clearance fit precisely into them. Cyclists can still wobble, fall or slip even when they are the ones doing the overtaking, and they still get hurt. Danger is present even when the motorised vehicle is only moving at low speed, because parts of the cyclist and/or bike can still get snagged on parts of the motor vehicle if the cyclist wobbles or falls into it.
I firmly believe insufficient clearance between cyclists and cars is a situation that we can and should avoid with sensible design of cycle paths, roads and junctions. In the sad absence of such, enough clearance has to be maintained to avoid collision if either party stops suddenly or the cyclist wobbles or falls.
In slow or start/stop traffic, the car is generally trapped between other cars and has nowhere to move to; the cyclist is the only party with any control over the situation.
Squeezing by cars in start/stop traffic is one of the more debatable ones. There's also rampant red light running. Driving without lights at night, wearing dark clothes, is the one where I see absolutely no upside for their behavior.
There are a lot of psychos out there with a straight up violent hatred for cyclists and a way too many people justifying it because a cyclist was a danger to themselves at some point.
In any case, the car behind you honking and flashing their headlights was likely not putting your life in danger.
Thank you for doing the right thing and being patient with the cyclist though. Rest assured your behaviour is appreciated.
Where I live, this is called "filtering", and it's encouraged by both cycling organisations and motoring organisations. If the ICE traffic has stopped, then the worst that can happen is that you misadjust some motorist's wing mirror, and they have to wind their window down to fix it.
> Driving without lights at night, wearing dark clothes, is the one where I see absolutely no upside for their behavior.
Agreed! If you dress up as a piece of tarmac and proceed down a tarmac road made for cars, without lights, you should expect cars to treat you like a piece of road, because that's what you look like.
I had no idea it had a name.
> and it's encouraged by both cycling organisations and motoring organisations.
This shouldn't really come as a surprise. It's much safer for the cyclist to get ahead of traffic.
It's a very nervy situation to have traffic slowly start moving again and you being on your bike squeezes near this accelerating train of cars.
Even worse is to be between 2 cars. If the one in front of you suddenly breaks and you can't break on time, you hit them. If you do break on time, you run the risk of getting rammed by the car behind you and squashed into the car in front of you.
If I feel the breeze as you pass me, you were too close. Actually I think that's quite a good metric, because it ties together your speed and closeness.
If the cyclist changes bikes, then even the cyclist doesn't know. And cyclists change bikes quite a lot, because cycle thieves. You have to get used to a new bike; each machine has different steering geometry and balance.
If the hammer is on the table, and I put my hand next to it, there is really no reason for anyone to be angry. I didn't hurt the hammer. And I'm not a hypocrite, as in this case the chance of hurting myself was zero.
Your post is compelling, in comparing it to seatbelt laws. That said, you probably don't know those as well as you think you do. For an easy example, public transit that is often targeting lower income areas often does not require seat belts. Indeed, I've never been in a bus that required them. Even car seat laws often have carve outs for cabs.
Worse, though, your post is ultimately a false dichotomy. There is no need to pick one. We should reform police to be less "us versus them," we should make better traffic calming choices. All the while we should encourage helmets. This article even does that. The claim is not to make it criminal and not to weaponize enforcement. Because they have strong evidence that that doesn't work.
There's a big difference between a helmet and a seat belt; the seat belt is part of the car; you have to carry the helmet, have it with you at all times, before and after riding. The net result is a drop in the number of riders, which has an impact on overall safety.
I came to this article thinking it would be BS but it turns out to be quite reasonable. Yes, helmets protect rider and all riders should wear one; but making helmets mandatory have unintended consequences which result, as a whole, in making bikes less safe for everyone.
I had a motorcycle for well over a decade. We have helmet laws here and I carried that heavier helmet or placed it on my bike. It was fine. Part of the cost of having a bike.
Unfortunately you can't glance at a cyclist and decide affirmatively that they're an idiot for riding without wipeout skills.
We went through this same nonsense with motorcycles. Stop acting like it's the end of the world to put a piece of foam and plastic on your head for a little bit.
If someone asked me to wear a helmet while running, I would find that ridiculous. Same thing when riding my (non-road) bike.
Bike speeds > 20km/h are normal and easily achievable for the untrained on flat ground. Downhill, you'll quickly go past 30km/h. This isn't something that you're doing while running for longer periods of time while you're still half-asleep.
Helmets annoy me too, but "the fastest runners can peak at speeds higher than what I reach every other day on my bike and they don't wear helmets" is a weird argument.
For rides where I go faster, I will take my road bike and wear a helmet.
For rides where I go slower, I would prefer not to wear a helmet, but mandatory helmet laws don’t make that distinction.
As you alluded, even between bike trips, I weigh the risks differently when I think about a casual spin down a protected lane or a recreational trail as compared to an aggressive commute inches apart from vehicle traffic.
My local bike share program has started blurring things even more for me lately as they introduce progressively zippier e-bikes. Any more, it’s trivial for me to move with traffic on these huge heavy clunkers of bikes, while to my impulses it still feels like the low-effort casual kind of ride I’d instinctively rate as not warranting a helmet.
Still, I’m glad to be judging for myself how to mitigate the specific risks of a specific ride.
You don't need that helmet until you do.
Let me assure you, if you've decided cycling safety is a binary contingent on whether or not you're wearing a helmet, you're doing it wrong. It's no better than superstition. There are so many other variables.
* Avoiding the crash in the first place
* Knowing how to fall if you crash
* Helmet, and potentially other protection, when unable to execute crashing properly.
(Edit: Changed ’security’ to ’safety’)
I got three stiches in my chin. I lost two teeth; one was driven through my lip, and I had 13 stiches in that lip (there are three layers in a lip: outer skin, muscle, inner skin). I needed two root-canals. I fractured my mandible, which is now joined to the maxilla on only one side. I was concussed, and wound up sleeping about 15 hours a day for the next 3 months. I couldn't chew for ages.
A motorbike helmet might have helped; but not a bicycle helmet.
Of course, the helmet is only 10% of cycling safety. But it's for that important 10% when your head crashes into the ground. Suggesting that it would never come in handy is naive.
Since you seem to believe in the power of personal anecdote, I am an experienced cyclist and have crashed directly on to my head before. It was just once, but it prevented a serious head injury.
It's another thing to make a law forcing everyone to agree with you, or else.
The paradoxical result shown in this article, which has been seen repeatedly, is that forcing people to wear helmets does more harm, by discouraging people from riding bicycles, than the benefit it creates by pushing some small number of the bicyclists who remain to take safety precautions they would otherwise have neglected.
The reasons for requiring this for the "greater good" are:
* Younger people are easily influenced and without such a law wouldn't use a helmet, seatbelt, etc.
* Costs of healthcare after a bad crash can be serious. Yes, my country like pretty much everyone outside the US, has single payer. We would foot the bill, regardless.
* It's proven that regulation and legislation can help. Regulation for seat-belts, airbags, crash testing, etc. has saved many lives. IMO this is what government is about, saving people. Sometimes from their stupidity and ignorance.
It may be proven that regulation can help, in general, but it has also been proven that this specific type of regulation does more harm than good.
The key sentence in the article is: " Financial struggle for popular bike sharing systems"...
That's where the money is and that's who made up that nonsense. Lots of people die because of those terrible motorized bikes and scooters. They're trying to get cyclists to fight their regulatory requirements by making up fake science.
For me, however, this idea is old news. People have been investigating this issue for years and the results seem to be generally consistent. I have been reading reports about the link between helmet laws, reduced cycling rates, and reduced overall safety for at least five years now.
I live in Seattle, where the surrounding county passed a mandatory helmet law back in 1993. After decades of experience, this law was seen to do more harm than good, and the Board of Health decided earlier this year to repeal it.
I think it's entirely plausible that the article was written by a PR company, and that is one possible reason (though not the only) they were paid to do it.
I'll quibble with you on a few points though:
Much research only find correlation. Just because it's not conclusive about causation doesn't mean it's not research.
As much "those terrible motorized bikes and scooters" might have lead to people dying (I've heard the anecdotal horror stories, I've just not looked at the data, so I'm ignorant to the overall effect), there have been plenty of attempts (some successful) at non-motorized bike sharing systems. One could reasonably imagine that when those systems are successful, it is likely there's a net increase in cycling within the community, thereby increasing overall safety of cycling via the "safety In Numbers" effect cited in the article, not to mention a possible reduction in the amount of driving. It therefore follows that one could make an argument that improving the success rate of such systems helps improve bike riding safety (though I'd like to see THAT data). It might even be true (and again, I have not seen any data on this) that for all the terrible deaths from motorized bikes & scooters, that adoption of them still increases the safety for cyclists, because if the alternative is the same person being in a car/truck/SUV, then a cyclist being hit by a motorized bike or scooter, even if they get hit more often, might be far less dangerous.
I think we shouldn't presume any particular PR motive for the article necessarily means it is not in line with the interests of cyclists. Ad hominems aren't don't really undermine the arguments presented in the article.
So why not do that too?
We do also do that too.
Every car is built with a fancy headrests and seatbelts and airbags -- the entire car is literally a helmet, and we require this on every new vehicle sold for decades. (And we require the seatbelt be worn too, legally enforceable by law in most areas)
We even check every single car sold to make sure the Helmet-worthiness of it is safe for the general public (see https://www.nhtsa.gov/vehicle/2019/CHEVROLET/VOLT/5%252520HB... as an example of a vehicle results)
When an occupant of the car is small enough such that the built-in helmet-worthiness of the car might be rendered insufficient, we also require they get extra helmet-like protections wrapped around their head/neck/body - see https://www.dmv.com/car-seats for specifics -- and even these are also legally enforceable by law in most areas
Of course all of this is simply to say, that there is a line, where the marginal safety gain is outweighed by the cost, both economic and otherwise. Different people and organizations are going to have differing opinions on where this line should be, but arguing purely on the side of harm reduction misses a great deal. This is aside from personal responsibility, liberty, etc.
I did feel this aspect of the effect of regulation was not well addressed in the article at least. I think there's an implication that the effect of regulation has been to reduce cycling, and therefore the effect on youth has been more to discourage cycling altogether than to encourage cycling with helmets, but I don't think that's well established. IIRC, the positive effects of seat belt laws are generally much more pronounced after a generation or two.
> It's proven that regulation and legislation can help. Regulation for seat-belts, airbags, crash testing, etc. has saved many lives. IMO this is what government is about, saving people. Sometimes from their stupidity and ignorance.
There's also plenty of evidence of cases where regulation and legislation has harmed, or had no effect. Arguments that regulation & legislation intrinsically help or harm are, at best, specious. Regulation & legislation are tools that obviously can be helpful; the debate should always be about whether a particular regulatory/legislative approach is helpful.
The amount of discomfort (psychological fear of theft or physical nuisance of carrying it) is very likely going to discourage its use. But then you're liable for a fine for not having a helmet, so you choose to not ride the bike.
Just don't require helmets for bike riders over some age.
The idea that use would be discouraged because of that is ridiculous when you consider the alternative: cars or public transport. Both are terrible options. Parking, traffic, etc.
I'm 47 and had a crash recently. How does my age have to do anything if someone suddenly jumps in my lane or a car runs into me?
If anything my healthcare bill will be higher.
The same argument applies to children of course - where do you put your helmet after you've cycled to school? Attach it to the bike loosely and someone will steal it, it's too big to carry in your rucksack all day, and you don't want to have to go back and forth to your locker potentially on the other side of school if you have one at all.
Also if it's locked to the bike you would break the lock and steal the bike. The helmet is the cheaper part. Helmets are often designed so locks can go through them.
Why not? A good bike helmet is several hundred dollars. That's not life-altering money of course, but it adds a decent percentage to the cost of replacing the stolen bike.
Or do what happened in Australia and just don't bother riding a bike and drive your car instead.
I sound flippant but I'm just reflecting _what actually happened_, which is where conversations need to be grounded.
Tying a helmet to a bike can result in theft and weathering (rain).
The article goes to describe that it is the secondary effects that are important. Ie, it's better to have 100 cyclists on a road with 50% helmet usage, than it is to have 3 with 100% usage.
I've seen campaigns and memorial stickers asking drivers to watch for motorcycles. So it is not dissimilar for pedal bikes, except the safety effect for driver awareness is even more important for non-motorized bikes. Which is essentially the non-intuitice conclusion of the article.
Yes, but that additional cost does discourage people to use a bike. And many countries want to encourage rather than discourage bike use, for several reasons:
* bikes don't endanger other road users the way cars do
* bikes pollute less
* bikes take up less space
* bikes put less strain on the road
* bikers get more exercise and are therefore healthier
All of these are important positive effects, so a lot of countries would prefer to stimulate bike use rather than discourage it. They don't have the same reason to encourage car or motorbike use, so having the extra cost there is fine. The alternative for a car is likely to be better for society, so it's fine to discourage their use. The alternative for a bike is likely to be worse.
You need it when you're on your bike, riding it. I commuted by bicycle for 19 years and biked (or walked) almost everywhere (Arlington, VA - Washington, DC). When I rode to the store or to meet someone or to get something to eat, the helmet usually stayed with the bike. I never thought someone would steal just my helmet. I didn't bother to lock it up, although you can get a wire to pass through the helmet and lock it up with the bike.
But I agree that making it mandatory will do more harm than good, for the reasons stated in the article.
Or if they just don't have insurance, the hospital passes on the cost to recoup their care in the form of high rates for everyone.
You don't ride a bicycle in a vacuum.
I'm infinitely more concerned with the insane amount of government waste that happens where that money could go to schools or infrastructure or cancer treatments. I imagine that government waste is orders of magnitude more expensive than cyclists damaging themselves because they weren't wearing helmets, for example.
Or, rather, I am happy that if you end up in hospital for any reason at all, the only thing on everyone's mind is treating you as best they can, and helping you to get better. No matter how you ended up there, or whether it was your fault or not, or how much money you have - if you're hurt, people will take care of you.
It's what I'd want to happen to me, it's what I'd want to happen to my family, it's what I'd want to happen to some of my friends who have somewhat more reckless hobbies than I do. And so I'm happy to have my tax money do the same thing for complete strangers, because they're somebody else's family or good friends. (And even if they're not, being alone is not a reason to deny someone healthcare.)
I trust people not to "take advantage" of this and be stupidly reckless simply because the healthcare is there, because... even with great healthcare that's available for free at the point of use, serious injuries suck. Having great healthcare doesn't make pain less painful, or physiotherapy to come back from injury less time-consuming, or less of a crimp in your whole goddamn life.
Do you get reduced payments for orthopedic rehab if you play sports and get injured?
Do you get reduced payments for diabetes treatments if you're overweight?
The reasoning behind wearing an helmet on motorbikes is two fold:
- there are a lot more chances of being left disabled by the accident than dying, which is something you might not have thought about, but when you're disabled suddenly it's not your head anymore, you depend on other people to take care of your head and the rest of your body. There's a cost involved in severe head traumas and the monetary one is by far the less important.
- your head splattered on the asphalt is something other people might not want to watch. Some people might be even traumatized by that view. So please if you really want to risk it, do it when you're alone, in the middle of nowhere. Because you can still do it, you won't get arrested if you do it, simply fined.
but the real reason why I do not understand this "easy rider" alle cozze argument is: helmets are super cool! If professional bikers wear it, then why not?
Statistically, you are much more likely to die or be injured in a car crash than on a bike, so surely we should mandate helmet use in cars, right?
The simple fact is, in every place where cycling is normalized and not a deviant behavior for weird lycra-wearing dentists or people with DUIs, almost no one wears a helmet.
Mandating helmets is a failed policy if the goal is to reduce reliance on cars, and to make cities safer for everyone.
That's not the goal. The goal is to reduce head injuries. Mandatory helmet laws are effective at achieving that goal. If part of that reduction is simply discouraging people who would not ride a bike safely from riding a bike, that's not necessarily out of line with the goal.
…in the short term.
In the long term, if they prevent cycling from ever becoming a viable alternative to driving, then they’re still worse.
If someone is interested in trying a bike from one of those sharing locations, but they don’t have a helmet, they won’t try the bike in the first place. Especially if a city law makes a bike-sharing app “validate” that you’re wearing a helmet, to enforce the law, before giving you a bike.
Fewer people try the idea of riding a bike around their town, so there’s more pushback against improved cycling infrastructure because “it would never benefit me”, so there’s less infrastructure investment.
Continued ad nausium, cycling is less safe due to the limited number of people who are willing to advocate for safer infrastructure in the first place, which makes a much larger difference to safety than helmets.
That’s the idea.
There's resistance to improved cycling infrastructure because there's resistance to improving any infrastructure, no matter how critical, and the overwhelming majority of people don't see a massive rework of the entire transportation system to shift away from cars as a realistic possibility even in the moderate to long term.
If most cyclists wear helmets, why do you need to mandate it?
If most people refrain from stealing, why do we make theft illegal?
If most houses never burn down, why do we require smoke detectors?
2. Because it causes disproportionate harm to other people
3. I’m pretty sure that law isn’t universal and probably depends on city codes.. Regardless, if studies showed that requiring smoke detectors was burdensome enough to decrease the amount of new construction, to the point that it could be detrimental to society, then we should reevaluate that law.
"Pre-law surveys counted 6072 child cyclists in NSW, 3121 cyclists (all ages) in Victoria; and over 200 000 cyclist movements on two key routes in Western Australia. Equivalent counts a year after enforced helmet laws showed declines of 36% (NSW), 36% (Victoria) and 20% (Western Australia). Sunday recreational cycling in Western Australia (24 932 cyclists pre-law) dropped by 38%. Increases in numbers wearing helmets, 1019 (NSW) and 297 (Victoria) were substantially less than declines in numbers counted (2215 and 1110)."
In other words, Victoria started with 3121 cyclists, gained 297 helmets and lost 1110 cyclists.
Are you sure you didn't misread that 4% figure from a source that actually said 40%?
Needless to say, a 20% reduction in head injuries from a 40% reduction in cycling doesn't seem like a very good deal to me.
[1] https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/9/4/380
Nope, 4%
That is very faulty logic.
In a modern car with a person seat belted in, there is very little for a person to strike their head against (which is what a helmet protects against). The airbags are there to protect you from striking your head against the steering column or the side of the passenger compartment.
On a bike, there is nothing protecting you from striking your head against something.
When I was doing neurosurgery, I saw lots of head trauma. The head trauma for bad car accidents was more diffuse axonal injury caused by rotational or deceleration forces that a helmet would not protect you against (your head isn't slamming into anything). Whereas with bicycle accidents it was more impact trauma and skull fractures and resulting brain injury (which a helmet would have protected you against).
Source: Neurosurgery resident at a Level 1 trauma center.
Arguing on this line is pointless. You can use this line to justify any number of mandatory safer features. The goal should be to drive an adoption of clean, non congestive, personal transportation, and the primary drivers for this is cost and convenience. Mandatory laws requiring stuff is counter to this.
> As far as killing bike share systems, look no further than Seattle, Washington. After they implemented similar policies, their bike share system floundered. The same has been seen in cities across Australia.
The hills don't help, either.
Helmets are way down the list of reasons not to bike there.
This is the same argument as "Guns don't kill people; people kill people" and it is the same level of technically-true-but-if-you-need-to-say-it-you-are-probably-wrong-in-practice"
[1]It the modern "think of the children", but instead, "think of the minorities" but worse because there are adult voices in minorities who can speak for themselves and most also want safety. That said in many places there are racist policies against one group or another, but I don't think the above is that.
As a regular bike rider of 20 years, a helmet has protected me on exactly 2 occasions: once when I was training for racing and once actually in a race. So technical/fast conditions that most riders don't encounter.
The biggest danger to a leisure or commuter rider are car drivers running them over. Helmets do nothing to stop a multiple ton steel object hitting your body at 30+mph and don't protect the parts that get hit.
> In the meantime, we need to implement better traffic calming and separation of automobile and cycling/pedestrian traffic. Kids die every year because in many areas, they have no choice but to bike on the side of a road that has cars whizzing past 60+ mph with less than 12 inches of separation in between.
100% this is the answer. The only thing helmet laws and discussions do is let people feel good about themselves while doing literally nothing to prevent vulnerable users.
That's their purpose, protect you when you need it, which is on average a couple of times in a lifetime.
If the helmet had protected you hundreds of times, probably you should have stopped riding a bike (or your friends and family should have stopped you).
If you heard someone say "the seat belt saved my life at least 30 times" would you or would you not think that that person is dangerous and should not drive?
Helmets protected me in bike racing where they're already mandatory.
They do not protect most riders at all.
> They do not protect most riders at all.
This is a textbook example of non sequitur.
I would also add that it's so obvious that it hurts, because, simply, most bikers have never raced and never will, so to them what is cruise speed for a professional biker is where the risks are.
I too have been a professional car driver in (very) minor leagues, that doesn't mean that what protected me while racing cannot protect my dad that never like driving and has always been very bad at it.
I don't see how adding friction does not lead to a reduction in cycling?
Unlike helmets, seat belts are one size fits all and they're built into the car. I'm not putting on someone else's sweaty and gross helmet.
But you've hit on the right issue: helmets would be far less necessary if car drivers could stop hitting people. There aren't a whole lot of people just falling over all alone in a bike lane and outside Tour De France recaps, bike-on-bike crashes are also uncommon and uneventful. Remove the 3 tons of metal whizzing by and helmets would probably be reserved for winter conditions, rain, or sport activities.
The solution isn't in changing biking. It's in changing driving.
That's a straw man. Nowhere in the article does it use the word "prevent". What the article cites are studies indicating that the behavioural effect of the laws was a reduction in bike riding.
> "Lastly, we know these “quality of life” laws are disproportionately enforced in communities of color and in lower income communities." - what the hell?! Yes, helmet and safety laws are the reason why police officers disproportionately enforce various laws against communities of color.
Again, that's a straw man argument. The laws aren't the reason why police officers disproportionately enforce said laws against communities of colour, but an observable effect of said laws is that they are disproportionately enforced on communities of colour. Sure, you can work on police enforcement reform, but until you get that problem fixed, the disproportionate enforcement is an observable effect.
> To deal with bike safety, we need to make everyone wear bike helmets until we reach critical mass in cycling adoption. /Some/ protection is better than nothing at all.
That contains the kind of poor logic you're critical of. There's a presumption that to reach critical mass in cycling adoption we need to "make everyone wear bike helmets", despite evidence cited in the article that the blunt instrument of legal mandates appears to reduce cycling adoption.
The article agrees with you (as does most everyone else) that "some protection is better than nothing at all". It's not a question of whether wearing a bicycle helmet is a good idea or not. Just because something is a good idea doesn't mean that a legal mandate for it is also a good idea.
> In the meantime, we need to implement better traffic calming and separation of automobile and cycling/pedestrian traffic. Kids die every year because in many areas, they have no choice but to bike on the side of a road that has cars whizzing past 60+ mph with less than 12 inches of separation in between.
Again, the article agrees with you on this point: "Right now, with nearly 40,000 people killed on American roads every year, that means we need to keep our leaders’ attention focused on structural reforms like complete street redesigns, which are proven to make our public spaces safe for everybody, whether they are walking, biking, taking transit, and yes, driving too."
Mandatory helmet laws say to people "Look Out! Bicycles are DANGEROUS! No matter how careful or experienced you are or where you're cycling, you could get your head smashed like a bowl of eggs at any time"
If that's not an anti-cycling message, what is?
Everything needs a DEI angle, these days.
Non-recreational biking (e.g. using a bike to get around) with a helmet is a giant pain in the ass. I have to find a place to store my helmet securely or carry it around all day. It messes up my hair, so I have to perform extra effort to be presentable at my destination.
Within my city, I travel by bike a decent percentage of the time; with a helmet law, I would basically never do so.
This is an absurd comparison.
Mandatory helmet wearing makes bike-sharing programs almost completely unworkable. In my city, I see more people riding bikes from bike sharing programs than I do riding privately owned bikes.
I cycle in the UK, i wear a helmet because our cycling infra is not good, cyclists are not really protected by the police, and it's common to complain about cyclists. The attitude here is different. You're the enemy, a parasite, you're in the way of my car!
If you're MTB or going fast, sure wear a helmet. If you just bike to get to work or school and stay well below 25km/h, and have good cycling infra, you don't a helmet.
It's like US don't want people to bike.
Might be counterintuitive, but if a helmet mandate reduces the number of riders even slightly it is a bad idea.
And of course: Wear a helmet. Especially if your city is still designed for cars.
With well designed infrastructure this won't happen. Give cyclists separate lights with priority. The situation you're describing is extremely rare in somewhere like the Netherlands.
I just don't understand this defeatist attitude. Most people on this site live in healthy democracies. Why do we call for reforms in every political sphere but maintain an adamant denial of our power over city planning?
Not everything has to be harangued like many federal-level politics are. You can just go to your city council and demand better. The worst that can happen is they say no - and you can just organize to vote them out with the rest of your community.
It's not just cars / other road users that are potentially dangerous to cyclists, poor road surface or debris can just as likely cause a life-changing injury, even if you're not travelling at high speed. Wear a helmet.
For cities, bikeshare can be amazing—I live in DC and our CaBi system is very popular. It is a cheap and easy way for everyone to have access to a bike, and it complements the District’s investment in a bike lane network. A helmet law would kneecap the system.
Wearing a helmet is good, but getting people out of cars and onto bikes with good bike lanes will lead to overall health benefits for a community.
Just an anecdote. Bike share in Vancouver, BC where helmets are mandatory comes with helmets attached to the bikes. And there are "hair nets" IIRC for hygiene purposes.
But what are the concrete numbers on injuries (either absolute or per distance traveled) that would back up the safety claim? Or is the "less safe" not actually refering to physical safety while riding?
That said, it's notoriously under-studied. If you look into "best helmet" in terms of safety you'll see a lot of marketing speak and not a lot of science. The way that helmets are tested tend to 1) not be reflective of actual use of the helmet in a conflict scenario and 2) tend to make pretty broad assumptions about the largest danger factor on the roads.
The thing is that you would /think/ that there's a lot of evidence out there for helmet use. The most compelling evidence for helmet use is for drivers in cars / automobiles, and we wouldn't dare mandate that into existence.
Helmet laws always seem to get people ruffled up but at the end of the day the number of bike fatalities is already low, and skewing that in terms of helmet use somewhat misses the point - dedicated and separated bicycle infrastructure will have a vastly larger impact compared to any mandate on using a helmet. It seems like arguing about adding a mandate on helmets is just an easy way for the system to wash its hands of responsibility for not regulating vehicle and street design more thoroughly.
Yes, actually, really!
Helmets provide a 63 to 88% reduction in the risk of head, brain and severe brain injury for all ages of bicyclists
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7025438/
There was a significantly higher crude 30-day mortality in un-helmeted cyclists 5.6% (4.8%–6.6%) versus helmeted cyclists 1.8% (1.4%–2.2%) (p<0.001). Cycle helmet use was also associated with a reduction in severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) 19.1% (780, 18.0%–20.4%) versus 47.6% (1211, 45.6%–49.5%) (p<0.001), intensive care unit requirement 19.6% (797, 18.4%–20.8%) versus 27.1% (691, 25.4%–28.9%) (p<0.001) and neurosurgical intervention 2.5% (103, 2.1%–3.1%) versus 8.5% (217, 7.5%–9.7%) (p<0.001).
https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/9/9/e027845
“The evidence is clear: helmets save lives and significantly reduce the risks of severe injury,” said Lois K. Lee, MD, MPH, FAAP, lead author of the statement, written by the AAP Council on Injury, Violence, and Poison Prevention. “And yet sports-related injuries make up a substantial proportion of all traumatic brain injuries. As a pediatric emergency medicine physician, I advise all my patients – and their parents-- to wear helmets.”
https://www.aap.org/en/news-room/news-releases/aap/2022/amer...
My problem is that helmet use isn't exactly "well-studied." All these studies look at existing reports from medical centres on injuries & deaths. This doesn't actually account for the broader behavioural changes in the system, or look at causes outside of "injured while wearing a helmet vs. not."
In any other industry this kind of reporting (while factual) is absolutely ignoring everything else. A short list of what isn't being considered:
- Which road and behaviour led to incident?
- Which kinds of road conflicts can be addressed by helmets?
- How did road design lead to the incident?
- Were environmental factors a concern (winter, ice, rain, etc.)?
- How does behaviour for the cyclist change as a result of not wearing a helmet?
- How does behaviour for other road users change as a result of a cyclist not wearing a helmet?
- What kinds of helmets are more viable for protection in the case of the most extreme (and most common) conflict scenarios? How do we then test these helmets to ensure compliance in manufacturing?
These are all questions you'd expect to be answered here, and then you'd do the cost-benefit analysis on whether a mandate is necessary or not. A "well-studied" field would have discussed these effects in broader detail, not just short-cut to "fewer people who already had huge injuries while cycling died when using a helmet." That is not the entire problem, because it leaves out a huge sampling of people who do not wear helmets and do not make it to the hospital in the first place.
The numbers are under reported. Every cyclist I know that uses a bike for transport has been hit by a car. Myself thrice, never reported. Crashes involving myself, never reported. Hence, there is a bias in the data for the really traumatic injuries
A very good example of what "selection bias" means.
Cyclists who are hit by traffic are likely to be hit much, much harder than that. Therefore the effect of the helmet is more or less entirely untested, and manufacturers have no incentive to design helmets for that scenario.
[0] https://helmets.org/limits.htm
This was a British study
> and found that cars tend to be more dangerous with cyclists if the cyclists are wearing a helmet
Re-analysis showed that there actually was no significant effect. Source: https://swov.nl/en/fact-sheet/bicycle-helmets (under: "Do bicycle helmets also have adverse effects?")
> which is why there are no mandatory bicycle helmet laws in the Netherlands
We (the Netherlands) don't have helmet laws because we hate helmets, not because we did research and concluded they'd have significant adverse effects.
I know that when I'm driving a car, I specifically behave differently when I see a bicyclist with a helmet vs without. /s
This just sounds so preposterous. First off, I doubt the average driver notices bicyclists at all. Of those that do, I'd seriously doubt if they even consider that they are wearing a helmet or not and just express frustration at the bicycle being there in the first place. The suggestion that a driver notices a helmet and acts more aggressively towards the rider or that they give a wider berth to the rider when not wearing a helmet is just "trying too hard" for lack of better words to describe my incredulity.
This seems like an issue. The average driver should absolutely notice the environment they're operating in.
This includes noticing those around them. This should be especially true for the more vulnerable road users.
If you are riding a bicycle in an area (like mine) where biking is just not at all that common in the majority of areas, then the drivers of motor vehicles are just out of practice of noticing bicycles. It is not in their muscle memory of needing to look out for them. Other cars, sure. Pedestrians, maybe (but that's probably pretty low as well).
If I see a bicyclist that looks like a bicyclist I tend to drive closer to them because I expect they are going to stay in their lane. Conversely, people who look like they aren't regular bike riders or teenagers just screwing around -- I will give a much wider berth... in some cases even going a completely different route to avoid them.
I recall a coworker explaining the duality of cycling in full kit vs. cycling in "street" clothes with his children. In the former case, he appears as a pro or semi-pro cyclist and in the latter, as a dad spending time with his children.
It's not hard to guess which get-up gets him honked at, coal rolled[0], etc. It's also not hard speculate that a driver is more likely to give the dad spending time with his children more room on the road. (Of course, in either case the cyclists should all be wearing helmets, but we're only even having this discussion because not all are so responsible.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal
I mean yeah helmets for commuting at a snail's pace in areas without cars are an annoyance at best.
Actually, we did. From [0] (the link to the study itself is on that page too):
> A recent Dutch study (2021) concludes that many people expect to make fewer bike rides when mandatory helmet laws are introduced. These findings suggest that such a law would have a negative effect both on bike usage and on public health in general.
In addition to the standard arguments already posted here about safety in numbers, efficacy of a helmet, and infrastructure design, they also mention a few practical problems with helmets:
- What to do with the helmet when you're not wearing it? A good helmet is too big to just store in a coat pocket or a handbag.
- What to do if you lose your helmet or it gets stolen? How will you make it home then?
[0] https://www.fietsersbond.nl/de-fiets/accessoires/fietshelmen...
They did not.
But it's true that "Dutch neurologists and surgeons call on people to wear helmets while cycling"
https://road.cc/content/news/dutch-neurologists-call-cyclist...
Because, you know, politicians would do anything to keep people voting for them, including putting people lives at risk to please them (COVID just proved it, if there was some doubt left), but doctors opinions are a bit more of a reliable source to understand what could potentially kill you and what could save your life.
Now, get me a statistician and we can talk.
Which is a very silly argument.
A surgeon is one among the few that can see a spike in brain traumas cases and can investigate the causes, it's totally more reliable than you or me, because he has the data and the knowledge, we don't.
I don't know about you, but I would ask a veteran about the horrors of war, not to 4 years kids, who, having seen none of it, are, by your reasoning, less biased.
> A surgeon is not going to see the vast majority of people who don't suffer head trauma
Because surgeons are notoriously not people too and live in a closet in the hospital.
> Now, get me a statistician and we can talk.
first of all, medical professionals typically study statistics, epidemiology doesn't really figure out itself on its own.
Secondly, I work with statisticians to assess the risks for insurance companies (not in the US). I work with that kind of data everyday and, guess what, MDs reports are highly predictive of risks, the average Joe with a laptop opinions, are discarded because, after examination, have been found "completely non-predictive".
Having tutored medical professionals trying to pass their epidemiology classes, I would not make that claim. From my observations, epidemiology and statistical literacy is treated as a "check this box" effort, the least important of their courses.
This sounds absurd ofcourse, and it is. But from the point of the surgeons it is not absurd, as it reduces trauma significantly. So any decisions should be taken by taking into account socio-economic effects as well. Cycling is a part of Dutch culture and compared to other countries we are doing very well. Mandatory helmets are a big deal (where do you keep the helmets?) and will definitely move people from bikes to cars.
Really a goal of the move. For sure there's a reduction, article suggests 15-40% which jives for me. So long as a bikes are allowed on the road, you will have movements to punish cyclists. Soon as a city has bike pathes all over enabling you to get to your destination and banning cyclists off the road and sidewalks. Then this problem will be solved.
Bike sharing systems basically cant function where bike helmets are mandatory. Which is super interesting because how many people really just ignore the bike helmet rule anyway?
>More exposure among vulnerable populations to unnecessary interactions with police.
Police brutality is a huge problem for the USA. Not anyone else.
1) I had one fall from a bicycle in my 30s from a front axle failure. My fault on not setting the quick release on the wheel correctly. I had the good fortune to roll forward. My head touched the ground, and I had no injury or concussion. My foam (no outer shell) helmet had cracked. I think the impact "doing work" on the helmet prevented a serious injury.
2) I have never been injured by the helmet (dropped on my foot, or not been able to see due to it).
If it crushed first & then cracked then that’s different of course.
> When the Australian cities of Melbourne and Brisbane mandated helmet use, it actually made streets less safe for cyclists. The number of people riding bikes dropped precipitously, which reduced the “Safety in Numbers” effect.
This links to [1], but this paper doesn't seem to support the assertion at all.
> These results help explain why two of the four companies operating in Sydney decided to leave the city in July 2018: the low rate of trips-per-day per bike, a high level of vandalism, and the threat of heavy fines from councils made the system one without potential for financial profit. While dockless bikesharing appears to be successful in many cities globally, the factors leading to its success have not been replicated in Sydney to date.
There's no mention of helmets, and the paper is specifically about bike sharing programs, not biking in general.
[1] https://findingspress.org/article/7615-stationless-in-sydney...
> The effect of (mandatory) bicycle helmets on bicycle use is not clear. Several international studies show that bicycle use decreases after the introduction of helmet laws, even though most studies do not find such an effect or only find a temporary effect [9] [42] [49]. [...]
> There are two international review studies of the effect of mandatory helmet use on the use of bicycles, both dating from 2018 [9] [42]. The first study [42] shows that the available research results are not unequivocal. It states that mandatory helmet use could indeed result in a decrease of the number of cyclists, but that this need not always be the case and that, if the number of cyclists initially decreases, that need not be of long duration. The second study is a mostly qualitative analysis of the available literature [9]. Based on their findings, the researchers conclude that there is little to no evidence of a substantial decrease of bicycle use due to the introduction of mandatory helmets. They have examined 23 studies/data sets and conclude that 2 of these studies support the hypothesis that mandatory helmets lead to a decrease of cycling, whereas 13 studies do not, and 8 studies show mixed results.
> The abovementioned review studies only concern research done abroad, in particular in Australia and North America.
https://swov.nl/en/fact-sheet/bicycle-helmets (Under "What is the effect of helmet use on the popularity of cycling?")
It also claims that "MHLs are the main reason for the failure of Australia’s two public bike hire schemes. Brisbane and Melbourne are the only two cities in the world with helmet laws to have attempted public bike hire. While schemes in places like Paris, London, Montreal, Dublin and Washington DC have flourished, Brisbane and Melbourne have amongst the lowest usage rates in the world."
Presumably in editing, the article's two mentions of cycle hire schemes got confused.
[1] https://www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=173283f8-7b1c-4...
I wonder if this effect is permanent, if I would stop wearing a helmet forever.
They make those who still cycle less safe because less people will cycle overall.
So basically a single person wearing a helmet is safer than not wearing. But a person wearing a helmet is a crowd is less safe than that person biking "alone" not wearing a helmet.
Then I got used to it and bought myself a better one last year, instead of the 20€ one wich I initially had.
But I don't ride my bike in traffic on a street, so those first two years were never really a high-risk scenario.
There is a real need for society to discuss whether the value of reduced injuries outweighs the cost in terms of less cycling - for example more car emmisions, more traffic congestion, less easy cardio, etc. But to say people are less safe is just not true for the common definition of safe.
Citation needed. If they are now traveling via automobile, I doubt there is a net reduction when taking into account: vehicle injuries and fatalities, air pollution, and of course, in the long term, anthropogenic climate change.
This is a classic example of a system with perverse incentives. Everyone feels safer in their big SUV. In reality it's just an arms race, and we're all losing.
I'm not sure, absent secondary effects, wearing a helmet makes cycling more dangerous for other cyclists the way that driving a big SUV, absent secondary effects makes it more dangerous for other drivers. It's not like the extra mass from helmets means you'll do more damage when you smash in to other cyclists.
The hypothesis is that requiring helmets may make individual bikers safer in isolation, but if it causes less people to bike and to drive instead, the increase in people driving cars may make it less safe to ride a bike, even adjusted for the fact that they're safer via the helmet.
I'd imagine this is especially true given that the helmet mostly only helps prevent the more dramatic injuries to the head. Getting hit by a car is still likely to seriously injure you in plenty of places the helmet doesn't help with.
Agreed. I just thought the metaphor was not helpful.
> The hypothesis is that requiring helmets may make individual bikers safer in isolation
...though there's a (somewhat) credible argument that even this isn't true. There are arguments against this too. Some argue automobiles see someone without a helmet as more "at risk" and therefore are more mindful of them, thereby net increasing their safety. Others argue that mandates tend to discourage innovation in safety equipment design, effectively encouraging the deployment of limited safety equipment at the expense of more effective alternatives.
> I'd imagine this is especially true given that the helmet mostly only helps prevent the more dramatic injuries to the head. Getting hit by a car is still likely to seriously injure you in plenty of places the helmet doesn't help with.
Which also brings up the ol' "is it better to be more likely to live, but also more likely to have broken arms and legs?" question.
You're not thinking like a Zero-sum American.
If you accidentally hit & injure a pedestrian, cyclist, or another driver in your Hummer - better them than you.
Best to stick to your Hummer and avoid the bike.
First, there's no need for any citation, helmets do reduce trauma from impact sensibly
See:
"Helmets provide a 63 to 88% reduction in the risk of head, brain and severe brain injury for all ages of bicyclists"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7025438/
Secondly: if they are now traveling via automobile, the risk of injuries is less than going by bike without an helmet.
If you believe that by driving cars the risk of brain trauma goes up 63 to 80%, you should provide some evidence,
You're also blindly assuming that no bike means car, in my opinion it would mirror the usage pattern of someone not keen to use a car: public transportation, walking, other means of transportation such as skateboard, scooters etc.
Then you proceed to cite a study. Thanks for doing that.
I'm no native english speaker, sometimes I make mistakes.
"there's no need to" in my language can translate to "it is superfluous because" and then you explain why it is.
I'll remind you HN guidelines, in case you forgot.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
> provides citation
Yeah, it's going great.
You can also reduce the number of cycling injuries by banning bicycles.
[Edit] /s
There would likely also be lots of deaths due to weakness in the supply chain.
It does not say what counts as non-traffic incidents
"For teenage and adult cyclists, accidents are more likely to involve collisions with motor vehicles, but about 16% of fatal or serious cyclist accidents reported to the police do not involve a collision with another vehicle, but are caused by the rider losing control of their bicycle." [1]
Not quite 30% but much more than I expected and obviously not negligible. Thanks for the rebuttal.
1. https://www.rospa.com/rospaweb/docs/advice-services/road-saf... (PDF)
In the short term, yes.
In the medium and long term, if you Americans would put all that money you spend on cars & car infrastructure into equivalent walking and cycling infrastructure and public transport, you'd probably leave even the Dutch behind...
The only rational argument for these laws would be the burden on the national-health system for injuries sustained on the head during riding a bike. This could be solved by allowing people to opt-out of the free national health system coverage explicitly in these instances of injuries, if indeed statistics show that there is a significant burden imposed on it. And still there is the counter-argument that this would be biased -what about people who are engaging into leisure activities with higher-risk, "extreme-sports" and such. I wouldn't be surprised if even the cost of treating normal sports-related injuries is higher than the cost of head-related injuries of bikers riding with no helmet. Why not enforce wearing full protective gear when engaging in every sport?
If we start with this mentality, it's only a slippery slope that would lead us in a place we don't want to be.
Same as with smoking taxes. It started with the justification that it's fair to counteract the increased cost that smokers have on the national health system. A perfectly fair reasoning. But by now these taxes have increased so much that this justification is no longer convincing -instead they are widely accepted as a sort of "luxury tax" that smokers pay, no longer to cover the cost of the medical treatment they are more likely to receive on average, but just "because that's how it is". This income is not even earmarked for the health system in many cases. They also started covering things that evidence don't support they pose any or as much of a risk as cigarette smoking (Vaping), and in some cases -Italy, IIRC-, even with official lawmaker justification that these products deprive the state from tax income that they would receive through the smoking tax. A completely illogical argument that I was surprised to see it made nobody blink twice.
So I think such laws are really a demonstration of government acting as a for-profit entity, squeezing money from whatever they think they can get away with.
Incorrect use of OTC drugs; crossing the road while diddling a mobile phone; drinking alcohol; hell, pushing your toddler on a swing in a playground. Perhaps socialized medicine should refuse to treat people who have declined vaccination, or declined a bowel cancer screening. Maybe climbing a ladder should close you off from socialized medical care. Perhaps you shut yourself out if you ever hang out with sick people.
Obviously, I'm not serious.
For me, the big thing about socialized medicine is that it's universal. It's a massive benefit to everyone, if people with people with infectious diseases like TB, diphtheria and cholera can get treatment for free, without producing ID or proof of entitlement. And that's true whether or not they have legal status, as immigrants or whatever.
I'm not sure that this right to regulate one's own personal risk environment is actually a thing. It sounds rather vague; you could use it to justify almost any act. "I think you're a threat; I choose not to expose myself to the risk you pose, so I eliminate you".
You can't eliminate risk. Living is risky.
So if you want to protect cyclists from themselves lock them in a cell and throw away the key, it is the only way to be sure.
What are the effects on the number of fatalities associated with biking?
It's well known (you didn't cite any studies, so I won't either) that cars pass closer to helmeted cyclists than to unhelmeted cyclists.
There is an incredibly large number of studies that have all shown massive reductions in the rates of head injuries and deaths with the introduction and enforcement of mandatory helmet laws.
Apparently whatever negative effect drivers passing closer to helmeted cyclists has is insignificant against the massive improvement of protecting an extremely important and extremely vulnerable part of your body.
"Air pollution, which is primarily the result of burning fossil fuels, takes 2.2 years of the global life expectancy for each person". https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
Less incidents can be just less cyclists, or something mildly related as "on average, helmets are colorful and increase visibility vs average cyclist that before helmet had nothing well visible on them"
This reminds me of that. Your "safety in numbers" and "cars pass closer to helmeted cyclists" is a desperate attempt to avoid a simple fact:
if a head hits the pavement without a helmet, it gets injured.
Of course you can invent other scenarios, but only by ignoring that one.
This doesn't make your response sound any better, just bitter.
There are many many thousands of Dutch who bike daily without a helmet, so this is a false dichotomy.
I bike a lot as in for transportation and running errands, and the speeds are generally quite low, and after many years I'm good at not falling off my bike. The biggest thing that concerns me is drivers and their associated cars. In many cases a helmet will do nearly nothing when you get crushed by an overpuffed SUV or truck.
> There is a real need for society to discuss whether the value of reduced injuries outweighs the cost
You could make an equal argument about driving and car/vehicle use. For example the city I live in has had more deaths by vehicle than deaths by homicide this year.
66 dead from traffic: https://www.portland.gov/sites/default/files/2022/traffic-cr...
93 dead from homicide (breaking the previous record of 66 from ~30 years prior): https://www.opb.org/article/2022/01/15/2021-was-a-record-yea...
I think this is a good way to frame it for those who ~~are anxious about riding~~ don't regularly ride bikes. It's really easy to ride safely on your own once you learn the intricacies of riding on two wheels. Bikes are hard to tip over if you know what you're doing. It's the introduction of large machines with the means of generating immense amounts of kinetic energy with very little human input that things start getting complicated. In fact this applies for the introduction of electric bikes and scooters, too. So many times I have seen new riders on shiny new e-bikes accidentally shock themselves four meters forward because they aren't used to the throttle. Imagine if they're waiting behind a cyclist, or at a stoplight, and they push either themselves or a cyclist in front of them into the flow of traffic.
I would be interested to see hard data but I suspect "one-person" bike injuries are much less prevalent and dangerous on average than those involving at least one cyclist and at least one motor vehicle (including e-bikes).
I have no idea what happened but the gentleman flipped the bike and took a tumble right over the handlebars. No visible road debris, road wasn't wet, bicyclist wasn't doing anything silly.
I stopped and luckily he was fine (he was wearing a helmet) but seemingly for no reason, a bicyclist ate pavement.
For what it's worth, I did the same thing once without a helmet on (it was a rail line and my front tire got perfectly stuck) and made it through with only a scraped knee. So we're 1-1 on anecdata.
That is not a false dichotomy. The meaning of "safety" here is referencing local standards that have been socially defined. Specifically, this is about the US.
> The biggest thing that concerns me is drivers and their associated cars. In many cases a helmet will do nearly nothing when you get crushed by an overpuffed SUV or truck.
Or getting knocked to the ground, where you will not have the angle or too much momentum to protect your head (even after your wrist/arm snaps).
> There is a real need for society to discuss whether the value of reduced injuries outweighs the cost
This is the value in helmets, which has been validated immediately in every locale where it was enacted, to my own chagrin. The article immediately tries to conflate reduced usage with reduced injuries, as if more usage would reduce injuries. I'm sure there's a small multivector "Safety In Numbers" variable that has a reduced injury rate with an increase in usages...if nothing else, from normalizing bikes in some areas, but it's small enough that the injury numbers still go up from increased usage and no helmets.
There is a very notable difference in streets that get high non motorized usage vs a lot. Compare a playground or park with a lot of pedestrians compared to say a national forest.
What's more, a helmet only helps if you hit your head. A small fraction (afaik, less than 10%) of falls will have a helmet helping you at all (but when it would, you tend to really want the helmet)
Plenty of people do bike daily without a helmet, likewise plenty of people don't wear their seatbelts daily - and 99.9% of the time they suffer no ill effect. The Netherlands is one of the few countries where more people die per year cycling than driving, and per capita they have a much higher cycling fatality rate than neighboring countries. Well designed infrastructure is a good thing, but accidents still happen.
The hierarchy of helmet need is #1 motorcyclists, #2 drivers, #3 pedestrians–pedestrian head injuries are incredibly common–, and #4 cyclists.
Interesting. I would have assumed cyclists are second given how fast road bikes go and the fact that they normally ride on major roads where cars speeds are well above 60 km/hr.
How did you arrive at your ordering? Was it from an unlinked source?
My go-to reference for this is https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10053381/1/Mindell_Cau... but if you want to translate it from UK to USA you have to do it yourself.
It would make sense that bike numbers are smaller if they are just the raw numbers given that there are probably 100x more cyclists and 1000x more pedestrians than bikers.
If those numbers aren't adjusted for usage then it makes bikes look even more dangerous when you adjust for how often each form of travel is used.
As someone who commutes by bike, yikes!!
The day the helmet will be mandatory on a bicycle I will sell by bikes, it means cycling is too dangerous to be on a street and the government is incapable of protecting cyclists but by mandating helmets. It's like mandating bulletproof vests in Philadelphia or Baltimore instead of solving the gun violence problem in the cities.
Interesting, why don't you wear a helmet on the road?
I assume the reason you always wear a helmet off road is because of all the falls on trails?
Offroad I voluntarily take moderate risks, so I always wear a helmet and gloves (gloves are more for comfort) and sometimes an enduro "light armor" to protect me from tree branches on a single trail. But the equipment I wear is 100% my decision and I want to stay that way.
> I think that cycling on road (not road racing) should be safe enough not to need a helmet; if it does, I don't go on that trip.
Would you say the same thing about seatbelts in a car? I just can't figure out how to wrap my mind around not taking a trip if you need safety gear with one mode of transportation and not another.
Fully agree about it should be each person's individual decision.
And nice to run into another cyclist on this site!!
Bicycle helmets, on the other side, can be inconvenient; also you don't have one with you at any time, like any car has a seatbelt. Bikes are relatively slow, so having a helmet "just in case" mandatory at all times does not make sense for me, maybe for small children to some extent. Just ask yourself: what is next, helmets, balistic armor and knee protectors mandatory by law for pedestrians just because they may be hit by a car, bicycle or fall on the ice? There should be a limit and for me the limit is the mandatory helmet on a bicycle. Yes, I encourage beginners to wear helmets on bicycles on the street, but I would not mandate it, that gives the wrong message that the streets are not safe.
But what's obviously missing is context. Safety is all about context. Walking shouldn't require protection until excessive risk is added to it, like walking on ice or across a busy intersection.
The moment that risk is added, it needs to be balanced with safety. Helmets might be an effective safety measure, but they are situationally inconvenient for pedestrians; and rely on too much behavioral discipline.
It's next to impossible in the US to walk anywhere useful (transport vs recreation) without crossing a busy intersection.
I wonder what the correlation is with seatbelt usage.
My guess is that most people who die of head injuries due so because they're not wearing a seatbelt, and the head doesn't take kindly to being turned into the tip of a meat missile.
Anyway there should be more discussion about what kind of bicycle.
Racing bikes go fast, your feet are in toeclips, you're in a bent down position - those things are dangerous. And everybody in the Netherlands wears a helmet riding them.
E-bikes can go very fast, cars underestimate their speed, people wear helmets.
But city or transport bikes, they go very slow (like 15km/h), you sit upright and can easily evade trouble or put a foot to the ground. Falls happen and old people break legs or hips sometimes, but to hit the ground with your head would be very very unusual. Those are the bikes we don't use helmets on.
I think most riders in the US ride racing bikes.
The kids these days are using clipless pedals (stupid name to distinguish them from toe-clips) which connect to a cleat on the bottom of your cycling shoes. Once practised, a twist of your ankle is all that's required to get your foot free. When not practised, you see a cyclist falling over slowly to the side when they forget to unclip at a traffic light.
Toeclips are considered more dangerous as you often need to loosen the straps first to free your foot. I know one person that broke bones in his foot when riding up a curb at the wrong angle (i.e. wheel slips) when using toeclips. (I also hurt my wrist when using modified toeclips on a unicycle and didn't get my foot free in time).
They're still in use, but probably more likely on a fixie than a road/racing bike.
Many years ago, when I was still using clipless I lost control on a patch of gravel. Momentum had my body rotating away from my bike such that one foot unclipped easily, but the other was rotating the wrong way to unclip, and I ended up twisting my knee pretty good.
I use SPD (i.e. MTB two-bolt cleats) on my road bike and the worst problem I had with clipless was when one bolt had loosened and then fallen out during a ride. I thought that my right foot had a lot of float and when I stopped to examine it, I couldn't get my shoe released at all as it was attached with just one bolt and thus could rotate. I ended up undoing the shoe to get my foot free and after looking to see what the problem was, I decided to ride the rest of the way home (10 miles or so away) and fix it there.
Luckily, I unclip with my left foot (UK, so we're on the left side of the road) so I was fine until I got home and had to take my shoe off again to fully dismount. It's worth checking SPDs for a loose bolt from time to time.
It's common to see people up that to 32 km/h (20 mph), which you can do by setting the limits to US ones instead of EU ones, and trivial on some bikes.
None of these people are wearing helmets, or close enough to nobody.
I only see people on E-Bikes that can legally reach speeds of 40-50 km/h or so wear helmets.
Those look like bicycles, but are legally classified as light motorcycles. They require license plates, helmets etc.
I think mandatory helmet laws are dumb, but let's not misrepresent Dutch cycling.
Your speed doesn't matter, it's the speed at which your head hits the ground that matters and that can be quite high even if you're standing still before falling
We could require everyone to wear helmets all the time (for their own safety since someone could just fall over or trip at any time), but that's clearly not going to happen.
I think the more general point to consider here is that helmet laws are a distraction from larger issues surrounding traffic deaths and the way we design our cities and transportation systems.
Cars have tons of safety regulations built into them and seat belt laws are pervasive. I don’t expect them to relax over time either, cars are much safer than they ever have been and I expect their safety will continue to improve year over year.
Can you say the same thing about the bicycle? What safety features do they have? The helmet is the only one I can think of.
Having a seat belt in a car is far less of an inconvenience than carrying around a helmet. If mandatory helmet laws cause people to take a car to the supermarket instead of biking then *more* people will die. Not to mention the immense congestion and destruction of the planet this will cause.
> Cars have tons of safety regulations built into them and seat belt laws are pervasive. I don’t expect them to relax over time either, cars are much safer than they ever have been and I expect their safety will continue to improve year over year.
Cars have safety features for their passengers - meanwhile they are by far the most lethal mode of transportation worldwide. Should we only care about people inside a car, or should we perhaps start caring about *all people*?
> Can you say the same thing about the bicycle? What safety features do they have? The helmet is the only one I can think of.
How about not going at very fast speeds? What safety features does "walking" have? Should we now start wearing a helmet while walking?
Just make the streets smaller, with fewer, narrower lanes. It slows down the cars and makes bicycles look better in comparison too.
Doubtful, since it raises the number of miles driven in cars, which would increase the number of injuries there.
It's good that HN doesn't take things are face value, and the discussions here seek to understand unintended consequences. But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and anecdata does in fact equal data.
Unfortunately cycling is dangerous because - in most countries - cyclists share the road with cars and trucks. There's only one winner in a cyclist vs car showdown. If you cycle somewhere that doesn't have nice cycling infrastructure a helmet is a great idea. A helmet will not automatically turn you into a target for indifference or road rage from motorists - that's the default posture of most motorists towards cyclists, helmet or not.
There's significant problems with most of the studies showing the effectiveness of bike helmets (especially the Thompson and Rivara study) and there's also the issue that they can conceivably cause greater brain damage die to rotational forces (by increasing the diameter of the head). Some issues are discussed here https://crag.asn.au/5-ways-wearing-a-bicycle-helmet-can-resu...
Also, there's the Dr Ian Walker study (although very small) that shows a greater number of close passes from drivers when the cyclist wears a helmet. Risk compensation may also be at play, so that cyclists take more chances when wearing a helmet (I recall a study showing that effect was particularly pronounced in kids).
Unfortunately, most helmet studies use hospital admissions which is going to bias the results unless hospital admissions are a close match with the cyclist population.
It's of note that cycle helmets are safety tested by typically a 2m drop onto a flat surface - this equates to providing a level of protection at slow speeds up to approx 12mph, but they are most certainly not tested to withstand the forces involved when there's a RTC. The question then is why are they being prescribed for situations far beyond their designs?
People who would happily be riding with a helmet are disincentivized to go riding at all, because they don't want to be the subject of police patrol. That's the effect we clearly don't want.
If you die or not in an accident makes an enormous difference in society, especially for the other people involved in the accident.
Fascinating child.
I'm not saying I totally agree with that, but I think it's an argument that's rarely articulated, whereas the more reductive argument of keeping everyone "safe" is almost always the default.
tl;dr: if there was an oracle that could tell us definitively that mandatory helmet laws don't improve safety, I think we'd see mandatory helmet laws repealed pretty much everywhere.
People are well justified in looking at them askance for their choice of framing device. It's manipulative and dishonest, or at the very least comes off that way.
That seems irrelevant to whether that's a fair way to frame the article.
> People are well justified in looking at them askance for their choice of framing device.
Yes, but I think, if you ask that question, you also have to ask, "what would be the best way to frame this article?" I don't think there's such an obviously better answer.
> It's manipulative and dishonest, or at the very least comes off that way.
A key argument of the article is that mandatory helmet laws don't improve cyclist safety. I don't see how it is dishonest to frame the article that way.
If you're looking to persuade someone to make a decision you want them to make, it's usually best to speak to their concerns, not your own. You can call that manipulative if you want, but I think a lot of people would just call it persuasive.
If you fall off and bang your head, the helmet will give you some protection against a head injury (how much protection? Nobody knows, because unlike motorcyle helmets, there are no standards).
But the helmet increases the width of your head, which means that torque from the impact is more likely to injure your neck.
The neck torque thing constantly has been trotted out by anti-helmet motoryclists and has never been shown to be real.
And there are many bicycle helmet standards, some of which are very strict. CPSC, the European equivalents, SNELL bicycle certifications, etc.. There are separate certifications for bicycling disciplines with higher risk like BMX, Downhil/Enduro mountain biking, etc.. as well.
The SNELL standards for bicycles don't require the same levels of protection as motorcycle or car motorsports helmets but are very strict in that they will go and buy helmets in the field to hold the manufacturers honest. CPSC famously lets the companies self-certify.
CPSC Standard: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/16/part-1203
SNELL Standards: https://smf.org/stds
EU Stanard (EN 1078): https://www.helmetfacts.com/standards/en-1078/