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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.
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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And a motorcycle helmet actually illustrates your point really well. To make "being hit by a car" OK on a pedal bicycle you would need a motorcyle style helmet, but obviously no-one is going to wear one of those to ride a bike, they're heavy and awkward and expensive. So they have these smaller, lighter helmets. And they're certified, they have logos on and everything. But wait, what are they certified for?
Well they're certified for falling off the bike and hitting your head on the ground. Low speed impact simulated by a device that thumps the helmet. No crash dummies, no tonne of steel crashing into the cyclist, just a small metal piston and a guy with a clipboard. And those sort of impacts do happen... if you're five and still learning to ride, or if you're a BMX stunt cyclist, or maybe if you're mountain biking. But does it happen on the roads? Not really. No, on the roads what happens is that cyclists get mown down by inatttentive drivers turning across their path, or they ride into a suddenly opened car door, that sort of thing and the helmet doesn't do shit. So why bother with it?
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).
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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.
Yes, he has invented a machine that allows him to travel alternate timelines in parallel universes. He uses this machine solely for arguing on the internet.
Either that or the damage done to the helmets indicates a level of force best not applied to a naked head.
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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.
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"?