Hacker News Reader

Comment by tempestn | Hacker News Reader

What's the cost? Helmets aren't that expensive. Having to carry it around? Could always lock it to the bike. Helmet hair?

View on HN

Wouldn't work if you're using a bike share.

It's actually the reason why I don't use the bike share program, even though I have a station right next to my apartment building. I could ride it to/from the train station or the grocery store, but I'm paranoid about not wearing a helmet, and hauling the bulky thing around all day is a massive inconvenience.

Would you be ok with a mandatory helmet law for car drivers and passengers? The risk of a head injury that a helmet would prevent is much higher in a car, and carrying a helmet around in your car is more convenient than on your bike (e.g. it's much less likely to get stolen). Nevertheless, we don't have mandatory helmet laws for people in cars; why is that?

> The risk of a head injury that a helmet would prevent is much higher in a car

What is this based on? My own intuition is that the risk is many times higher on a bike.

I don't remember the source, take that as you will. Cars go faster which means a higher risk of collisions (less time to react etc.), and also a higher risk of head injury per collision.

Maybe I'm just a shitty cyclist but I've wiped out way, way more times on a bike than in a car. You can crash without it being a "collision".

Did you hit your head though? Even "low" speed for a car can be 20mph; you can hit a stationary object and be thrown around pretty severely.

That said yeah if you're "wiping out" more than like once every few years you're doing something seriously wrong (or at least taking an unnecessary risk). I've only once had any kind of incident on my cycling commute.

The hardest I've wiped out on a bike was where a bike trail intersected a road. Everything was super wet and slick from rain. Despite bikes having right of way and my bright bike light being on, a truck with no headlights barreled across it without stopping.

Once I saw it, I had to slam on the brakes so hard my rear brake cable popped out of the handlebar, disabling the rear brake completely and I was putting full pressure on the front brake. I didn't have time to react and avoid going over the handlebars, and I hit my helmet on the pavement. (Thankfully, I did stop in time to avoid the truck hitting me).

Was I doing something seriously wrong? Yes -- I was riding a bike without a properly adjusted rear brake cable. However, this sort of mechanical issue (and any number of others) could happen to any riders who aren't much more hyper-diligent about maintenance than average.

Who knows if we'd even be having this conversation had I not been wearing a helmet that night.

From a public health perspective, evidence suggests making helmets mandatory is counter-productive, and so I don't support those laws. However, I still maintain that anyone who cycles without a helmet is fucking stupid.

Cycling in the rain is a risk. Cycling in the dark is a risk. Cycling across badly-designed intersections (and if it put you as a cyclist in the kind of danger it wouldn't have put a car in, it's a badly-designed intersection) is a risk. Being on the road without a helmet - indeed doing anything in your life without a helmet - is a risk. In all of these cases one weighs up the risk of doing it against the inconvenience of not doing it.

Maybe we're all "fucking stupid", but by the stats someone cycling without a helmet is less stupid than someone driving, at all. There's this weird, disproportionate cultural obsession with helmets for cyclists and cyclists only.

There are were 42000 brain injury-related hospitalizations for motor vehicle occupants per year, though this data is from before 2001.

https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/13379/cdc_13379_DS1.pdf (Table 10)

Sure but you have to normalize it somehow. Americans drive way more than they bike. I imagine if you calculated this per-time or per-distance, driving would still come out much safer for the brain than cycling without a helmet.

Again just from memory, driving is a lot worse per-time and per-commute, though a small factor better per-distance.

Locking it to the bike isn't a good solution if you live in a place where it rains or snows a lot. So you end up having to carry it with you on errands. If you bike a lot, those small inconveniences add up.

I can't imagine fashion sense is much of a reason, that seems like a strawman argument commonly conjured up by helmet laws advocates.

People being afraid their bike helmets make them look like goobers, maybe?

Well, they do. Better to be a goober with an unfractured skull, though.

I always thought the statistic that mandatory helmets reduced cycling was a bit pathetic myself. It really isn't that hard. Yes, I have come off my bike and hit my head, while wearing a helmet. Unfortunately, I landed on a tooth rather than my helmet, which wasn't a lot of fun.

Regarding helmet hair, I had a colleague who had the most amazing hair spikes (think coffee cup sized), who would very carefully put a cycle helmet on every day before cycling home.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com