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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 ?!?
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Australia is an oft-cited example. Many Australian territories passed mandatory helmet laws for cycling. Off the top of my head, cycling fell by about 40% in the aftermath, and the injury rate went *up*. (Of course the injury rate may have gone up because the people who were helmet wearers in the first place, and didn't stop cycling, were higher risk takers - and removing the other 40% who were not risk takers from the cycling pool made the accident rate go up - note rate, not absolute value).
Another experiment someone did in Britain was to fit an ultrasonic measuring system to a bicycle to measure how close cars were passing. They tried riding in various different manners, for example further from the kerb (tr.US: curb), with helmet, without helmet, dressed as a woman etc. He found that as a hemetless woman, cars gave him the greatest amount of room, and as a helmeted man, the least amount of room. http://www.drianwalker.com/overtaking/overtakingprobrief.pdf
There's also the theory that the more cyclists on the road, the lower the accident *rate* (absolute numbers may go up) because car drivers are just more used to seeing them. Holland has probably the highest rate of regular cycling, probably the lowest rate of helmet wearing, and probably the lowest cycle accident rate.
In summary, I don't think helmets ever should be made mandatory, and may actually have the unintended consequence of making the remaining cyclists less safe.
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Creating bicycle lanes is a much better way to safety for bicylers, than helmet laws. The Netherlands where I live, one of the most bicycle-intense countries in the world, started to create bicycle lanes in the early '70-ies in order to reduce the number of bicycle casualties. And it worked. And we don't wear helmets here (if you see bicyclers with helmets in the Netherlands, it are either racing bicyclers, or foreigners, seldom average cyclers).
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem delendam esse
"car's part of the road" ???
This is a mistake. Where does it say the road belongs to cars?
I am sitting right now in the Surgical ICU of a level 1 trauma center. 3 of our 34 patients have serious intracranial hemorrhages from bicycle crashes.
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.
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!
people who've never lived in anything other than a wonderland of privilege
Oh, how I wish academia was like that. It's 8 pm and I'm still at work. When I go home in half an hour, I will keep on working until I can't work anymore. If I'm lucky, I might get to see my family on the weekend. If I don't work this hard, I won't get tenure and I won't have a job. Academia is no wonderland of privilage and it hasn't been since the 18th century, when the only people who had time to think about things were the idle nobility. Anybody in academia today has worked hard to get there and continues to work hard to stay there. Why do we want to stay there? Because it's the only way we can study things we're really passionate about, rather than what people force us to. But at 8 pm after a long day of teaching, I wonder if I really do want to be here afterall...
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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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.
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.
If the risk was obvious, I would agree. However I'm not sure that one's vulnerability when cycling is really appreciated - just as people didn't used to feel vulnerable when driving without seatbelts. Even a minor fall onto hard pavement can easily break bones, and if the broken bone happens to be the skull then you can be in real trouble.
A little while ago I took a tumble when a startled animal ran into my bike. I landed on my helmet, which cracked, and was dazed enough to earn a day in hospital. Later, when a road safety group visited my workplace, I got a chance to find out roughly what kind of impact I had taken. They took the remains of my helmet and hit it with a hammer on an undamaged area until it showed damage similar to the original fall. It required quite a serious blow with a heavy hammer. They then delivered a similar blow to a force-measuring stand, which indicated that the force delivered was far more than that needed to break a skull.
In short, even on an empty country lane an unlucky fall can kill you. Until recently I didn't know that, and I suspect lots of other people don't know it either.
I'm just glad someone is finally remarking how silly this is. I've been saying for years that ladder helmets are necessary. My kids, before doing any dangerous activity, go to the closet and get their helmet out. Whether that be their ladder-climbing helmet, their swing set helmet, or their swimming pool slide helmet, they know that being safe is better than being dead. Anything that requires being more than standing height from the ground requires a helmet. The kids are excited about it, too - for their birthdays this year, they know they'll be getting new "going down the stairs" helmets.
Take it to the limit, everybody to the limit, come on, everybody fhqwhgads.
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