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To Encourage Biking, Lose the Helmets
Hugh Pickens writes in about the detrimental effects of mandatory helmet laws (at least as applied to adults): "Elisabeth Rosenthal writes that in the United States the notion that bike helmets promote health and safety by preventing head injuries is taken as pretty near God's truth but many European health experts have taken a very different view. 'Yes, there are studies that show that if you fall off a bicycle at a certain speed and hit your head, a helmet can reduce your risk of serious head injury,' writes Rosenthal. 'But such falls off bikes are rare — exceedingly so in mature urban cycling systems.' On the other hand, many researchers say, if you force people to wear helmets, you discourage them from riding bicycles causing more health problems like obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. Bicycling advocates say that the problem with pushing helmets isn't practicality but that helmets make a basically safe activity seem really dangerous, which makes it harder to develop a safe bicycling network like the one in New York City, where a bike-sharing program is to open next year. The safest biking cities are places like Amsterdam and Copenhagen, where middle-aged commuters are mainstay riders and the fraction of adults in helmets is minuscule. 'Pushing helmets really kills cycling and bike-sharing in particular because it promotes a sense of danger that just isn't justified — in fact, cycling has many health benefits,' says Piet de Jong. 'Statistically, if we wear helmets for cycling, maybe we should wear helmets when we climb ladders or get into a bath, because there are lots more injuries during those activities.'"
The real problem is that I'm an adult and I can decide for myself whether or not I will wear a helmet. The government doesn't need to make this decision for me.
The US is absurd: you don't have to wear a helmet on a motorbike, but you need one on a pedal bike ?!?
Non-Linux Penguins ?
This is why so many "common people" look down on academia. The blind grabbing of statistics by people who've never lived in anything other than a wonderland of privilege in their major cities. You know why people feel it's unsafe to bike? It's because it's fucking unsafe to bike in areas without bike lanes. Which is pretty much most of the US except for major urban areas or the occasional statistical fluke. Rich people in the suburbs who are terrified of their own shadow are the exception. The norm are people who actually are at high risk of being run off the road if they tried to bike to work at 7am.
Everything will be taken away from you.
"car's part of the road" ???
This is a mistake. Where does it say the road belongs to cars?
In The Netherlands, part of the success is in the fact that sharing the road with bicycles is considered an important part of driver education (and has been for a long time). In cities with (almost) all bicycle lanes separate from the main road, no driving exams are done (example: Almere, the 6th city of the Netherlands has no possibility to do driving exams). Any mistake where a bicyclist is not given the space and care (s)he deserves results in failing the exam, so this part is taken very seriously. In additions, drivers are always held responsible in accidents invoolving bicycles.
As a result, car drivers are very careful around bicyclists and they need not wear helmets. Cycling is considered safe. These factors make more people want to use the bicycle.
And if you go to rehab you'll notice the vast majority of people there have substance abuse problems...
Here's two reasons:
1. Helmets give the cyclist a false sense of security.
2. Helmets give drivers a false sense of security.
You may think [1] does not apply to you, and possibly it doesn't but people are incredibly bad at judging that kind of thing. It's very likely that you take more risks when wearing a helment.
The second point is far more important and it's not something you as a cyclist can do anything about. Studies have shown that cars pass closer and faster to bikes when the cyclist is wearing a helmet. On some subconscious level they see the cyclist as being less vulnerable and hence they drive more dangerously around them.
For these reasons I discourage my three daughters from riding helmets when they cycle and I don't wear them myself.
However, even if one discounted both these reasons, mandatory helmets are horrible on principle. Its my own life I may be putting in danger, so if you want to wear a helmet, go ahead, if you want to tell other people to wear a helmet, go fuck yourself.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
I ride a bike in London, don't own a car and am in my 60s, to declare interest. I don't wear a helmet and am unwilling to do so.
The arguments that I citing in the heading are summarised here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_of_Social_Cost that is, neither car nor bike is particularly 'wrong' about any of this. The best thing [that we don't really have in London] is safe bike lanes.
However there's also more economics that probably shows that safety features make activities more unsafe by making the operators more reckless: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Peltzman the younger bikers who run lights seem to prove this.
Finally I like to appear as a soft, helmetless pink squishy thing with white hair, I suspect these signals make motorists more careful around me. But, for certain, the debate tends to be emotion rather than reason and statistics.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
I find the dents and gouges in my helmet to be pretty compelling evidence of injuries and pain that didn't occur.
YMMV, Science Guy.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
I never understood people who don't wear helmets when cycling.
Because, with literally thousand of hours biking as a (helmetless) kid growing up in the pre-nanny era, even riding about two miles to and from school every day (no, not an exaggerated memory, thanks to the magic of Google maps I can actually trace the route) - I took plenty of falls off my bike.
And a helmet wouldn't have done a hell of a lot to protect the one part of me that got injured over and over in those falls, my knees.
If I can reduce the chance of damage to literally the most valuable thing in my life by wearing a $25 helmet OF COURSE I'M GOING TO WEAR A HELMET DO YOU THINK I'M STUPID?
Yep, I kinda do - Because falls not related to a car hitting you won't affect your head, and if you do get hit by a car on a bike, that little eggshell won't do much to help you when the rest of your body gets smeared across the pavement like so much squirrel.
Free tip for all the Lance-wannabes out there - Quit "clipping in". When you can actually move your limbs to catch yourself falling, nothing short of getting run over should give you much worse than a bit of road-rash. Maybe a broken wrist if you go down hard.
The keyword here is "mature urban cycling systems". I'm pretty sure no US cities can even remotely compare to Amsterdam or Copenhagen (I've biked in both and you really notice that the bike is considered the equal of the car, not an afterthought as is so common), neither can my city (Stockholm). When bikes interact with cars to such a large extent and the bike network tends to suddenly disappear, leaving cyclists to biking on roads with motorists who tend not to notice cyclists. This is a big problem in Stockholm and I recently biked in San Francisco where it seems to be an even bigger problem, a motorist completely cut me off in order to park when I was coming fast in the bike lane, I was barely able to brake in time, this is even worse than I've ever experienced in Stockholm where motorists like to use bike lanes as "temporary" parking spots, but at least look around first when driving into a bike lane. In an environment like this, I would never leave the helmet unless I knew I was not going to interact with cars at all during my trip.
These box stores sell what customers want. The problem with cycling for most of us is that RACERS KILLED IT:
1. We don't want toe clips. 2. We don't want handlebars that force you to hunch over. 3. We don't want tires that will go out of true after 200 miles on potholed roads. 4. We don't want to spend any more than $500. 5. Steel is fine. Really. Sturdiness is hella more important than saving a few blasted kg. Yes. I said kg. Not grams. 6. We want a seat you can actually sit on..
Anyway, you see a lot of steel cruisers here with fat tires (but they are slick usually), wide handlebars, steel frames, and AFAIK most have on gear but they have handle brakes. People don't want overpricd finicky racing machines that cost as much as a car. We're not Lance Armstrong.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Do you even know any drivers who attempt to not exceed posted speed limits on roads by 5-10mph? This may be anecdotal, but almost all people I've met who bitch about cyclists have a history of rear ending other drivers and causing accidents, meaning they are terrible drivers.
You want cyclists to respect cars? Start by respecting the traffic laws. This works both ways.
Further, roads were originally built for cyclists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Roads_Movement