> If you don't wear a helmet, don't worry about it, it doesn't mitigate that much risk. The exercise benefits of biking do way more to increase your life expectancy than skipping a helmet does to reduce it.
This is very, very stupid advice.
This is very, very stupid advice.
Now do you see how you sound? Bike helmets marginally help, but the same marginal difference is found going from bicycle helmets to full face motorcycle ones.
I’ve broken my face in 4 places in a bike accident where the only thing that would have helped would have been a motorcycle helmet, but I don’t go around town wearing one or telling other people to. I like the air in my hair and I’m ok with the additional risk that not wearing any helmet carries. I’m careful in otherways but I’m an adult making an informed choice about the relative risk.
Yeah it's still probably a net increase on your life expectancy to ride without a helmet compared to driving, but most people wear seat belts even though almost every mile driven doesn't result in a crash.
But it doesn't change the truth of the sentence: "The exercise benefits of biking do way more to increase your life expectancy than skipping a helmet does to reduce it."
But we do, and it's because they have a share bike that didn't come with a helmet, or they were worried about messing up their hair, or they lost their helmet, or they left it at the destination, or they're a rebellious teenager who just doesn't care, or no-one educated them about the risks, or they just forgot to put it on.
A better comparison would be to flossing your teeth, or wearing sunscreen: everyone should do it, but not everyone will do it.
None of these are good enough reasons to not wear a helmet while you're riding a bike, but any one of them would be a good enough reason to not ride your bike at all. That's the point OP is trying to make by saying you can skip your helmet if you want.
If that's true, then you are not wearing a properly fitted one.
Presumably, you're willing to accept that risk. Biking without a helmet is no doubt riskier than walking without one, but both activities are well within reasonable risk-taking range.
You don't need me to tell you why I don't like wearing a helmet when I bike; you already use all those same reasons to avoid wearing one when you walk.
Not even close to the same thing. By being that absurd, you clearly are not wanting to engage in good faith.
I (honestly and in good faith) place walking and biking in the same "helmet not required" risk category. The point isn't whether or not you adjust the risk slider further in one direction than me. The point is to respond to the assertion that there is zero reason to avoid wearing a helmet. We all know that isn't true, or we'd all wear helmets all the way down the risk scale.
Where you place "time to put on a helmet" on the scale isn't really the point. The point is that the scale obviously exists and it's obviously the case that there are places on the scale where not wearing a helmet makes sense, because if it were literally the case that there were no tradeoffs, then there'd literally be no reason not to wear one at all times.
That's the reductio proof I'm trying to illustrate.
The risk of death from 1 hour of cycling reduces life expectancy by about 24 minutes. Wearing a helmet probably changes this by a couple of minutes.
- http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/06/13/bicycling-the-safe...
- https://nwurban.wordpress.com/2010/12/20/cyclings-impact-on-...
1 additional hour of sitting and watching TV in the evening, in an already sedentary life, probably has a similar effect on life expectancy.
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/17/get-up-get-out-dont...
The exercise you get from that same session of cycling for 1 hour INCREASES life expectancy from 3-9 hours.
- http://commonhealth.wbur.org/2013/03/minutes-exercise-longer...
- WHO study, http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/exercise-l...
you could theoretically look at the injury rate for non-helmeted people, but, again, you don't know how representative that rate is of the population. You are assuming that the non-helmeted accident statistics sample is representative of the cycling population. I am not sure that is true.
>The risk of death from 1 hour of cycling reduces life expectancy by about 24 minutes. Wearing a helmet probably changes this by a couple of minutes.
This data does not take road conditions into account. Most cyclists prefer to bike on roads with very few cars on them. For example the road outside my apartment, a two-lane road outside of town by a lake with no services, is always packed with cyclists. The boulevard connecting my road to the train station, however, is heavily car-trafficked and has almost no cyclists. It is wrong to apply data from cyclists on the first road to those biking on the second.
>1 additional hour of sitting and watching TV in the evening, in an already sedentary life, probably has a similar effect on life expectancy. http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/17/get-up-get-out-dont....
This is double-counting. If you count sitting as a detriment, you can't turn around and count biking as an increment. There has to be a default from which to decrement or increment.
>[first link]>Every Minute Of Exercise Could Lengthen Your Life Seven Minutes
>[second link]>In fact, exercise was a bigger factor than body weight in many cases. People who were normal weight but were inactive actually lived an average of 3.1 fewer years than obese people who kept up high levels of activity.
This is an unjustified assumption of linear behavior. It's possible (likely IMO) that the first couple hours of exercise make a big difference coming from inactivity, but additional exercise on top of this likely has a smaller impact. The data only strongly indicate that cycling will have such a large impact on life expectancy if you already get very little exercise -- less than 2.5 hours/week of brisk walking. It is hard to believe, for example, that biking for 4 hours per day would increase life expectancy by 13 years -- there are practically no interventions known to have such a large effect!
Wearing a helmet doesn't increase the number of minutes of your life like you're winding a clock or something. It decreases the probability that you're dead by 40 from a preventable tragedy, leaving your parents without a child and your family without a parent.
After five minutes of googling, I sadly did not find any relevant statistics.
Nope. The correct interpretation is 'cyclists without helmets who get into a serious crash triple their chance of death by head injury'. The study doesn't look at cyclists who don't crash. This is important, because you can't assume that all cyclists have an equally likely chance of having a serious crash. I'm going to be riding with a helmet on regardless of the law, but by making helmets mandatory, you kill off so much transport and utility cycling which was at low risk levels.
> The study also cites Victoria, Australia, as an example of successful legislation. Helmet use in the city increased from 31 per cent to 75 per cent after the introduction of mandatory helmet legislation, and cycling fatalities decreased by 48 per cent.
Yes, but a major reason for those reductions are because people stopped cycling after the introduction of those laws. See http://www.cyclehelmets.org/1194.html - "In 1985-6, 3.4 per cent of trips in Melbourne were by bicycle. In 2004 this was only 2.0 per cent, suggesting that cycling was still much reduced compared with before the helmet law". Trauma surgeons are happy, public health experts are not.
I've been cycling to work for years, which which has varied from 10 miles one way, to 1 mile. I always wear my helmet, and in all these years an many thousands of bike miles, it only been "useful" once. A drainage grate was covered over with leaves, I didn't see it, my front wheel fell in, fork snapped off, and I flew over the handlebars, headfirst into the curb. My helmet split in two and I had a massive head bruise, but had I not been wearing it, I'd be dead.
Helmet paranoia DOES reduce the odds of exercise. On a group level, at the level of public health, that's PRECISELY what it does. I encourage you to read about it, that's why they call it the helmet paradox. This piece is a nice summary.
http://www.howiechong.com/journal/2014/2/bike-helmets
Bike helmets protect our heads, but they also do the following:
1. increase your chances of getting in an accident
2. discourage cycling
Here's what to do:
1. If you want to be healthy, ride a bike instead of driving.
2. If you want to be even healthier, consider maybe putting on a helmet, but be mindful it doesn't increase your risk-taking behavior.
I choose option 2, but option 1 is also great.
https://www.vox.com/2014/5/16/5720762/stop-forcing-people-to...
So this is why most of us wear a helmet. The logic is not "so few people get in accidents that if I wear a helmet it is likely to be overkill!". The logic is "if I get in an accident I will be very glad I am wearing this."
Generally, you prepare for the worst, not hope that you are on (typo) the right side of statistics.
The person who is truly taking a risk is the person who doesn't ride a bike because of the perception that it's dangerous, and continues to be sedentary and drive a car to work. This person is literally reducing their life expectancy by years. (See links I posted elsewhere in the thread.)
You need to be able to think about conditional probability.
This is such, such flawed logic. If you are a cyclist getting hit by a car, the averages and statistics don't matter at all. If you are the cyclist getting hit by a car, the helmet is not a "marginal difference". Your protective gear matters. You need to consider the individual cyclist when you are making sweeping statements about the usage of protective gear.
1. Wearing makes you less cautious
2. Car drivers think ‘you’re protected’ thus make larger risks
3. Helmets are inconvenient to carry around at your destination
4. It hampers the development of saver bicycle road situations, since ‘the cyclists are already protected’
I’m dutch, driving without a helmet since forever (started at 2 years old). Most serious accidents on the road that I know of are broken colar bones, broken hips and broken wrists. You really need a strange fall the land on your head. I guess with a head-on collision perhaps?
Also, any terrain in the US is 'such terrain'. There's little or no accommodation for bikes, and the roads (for cars) consider cracks of 1 inch or so as negligible. Also gratings by curbs (where bikes are expected to ride) often have slots of that size. There's a public-education effort to get gratings turned at right angles to traffic, but most traffic departments are disdainful of bikes.
Examples: https://www.batavus.nl/stadsfietsen
If a helmet is inconvenient to carry around then certainly the bag full of clothes, shoes, gloves is also inconvenient but none of that should prevent you from biking.
> It hampers the development of saver bicycle road situations, since ‘the cyclists are already protected’
This honestly sounds like very faulty logic. It's like saying there's no need for stop lights because drivers are wearing seatbelts. They'll be ok.
I've fallen sideways on ice several times. Once hitting my head. I would never want to hit my skull on concrete from a ~5 ft fall because not wearing a helmet is slightly more convenient.
But helmet design standards do. A helmet meeting the CPSC standards isn't designed to protect you in impact with a motor vehicle.
Because you're basically saying that bike helmets would make a difference in a collision scenario where the impact force would far exceed their design and impact testing standards.
The sudden stopping is what kills. If the only thing slowing down my brain is my skull then that is worst case scenario, unless of course, my skull shatters, then I guess my brain slows down at a more acceptable rate as it spills onto the road.
I'll take anything at all between my brain and a hard object trying to rapidly impart some force unto it. A helmet does this very well.
Except that in this case, the belt just comes off its anchor points and doesn't slow you down at all. Just like a bridge rated for a 10,000 lbs load will collapse when a fully loaded 80,000 lbs tractor trailer drives over it.
If something is going to work, then it had to be designed and tested for it. You can't simply believe it's going to work in situations that it wasn't designed and/or tested for.
Edit: and just to address this specifically
> Except that in this case, the belt just comes off its anchor points and doesn't slow you down at all.
This is not true because the energy that went into breaking that anchor point is energy your body is no longer carrying. The belt did slow you down and even in breaking could still have saved your life.
No, that is not what "risk" means. Sedentary people can still be fairly certain that they will die when they are over 60, even if it's a few years earlier than they would if they were active.
A cyclist without a helmet has a much greater chance of dying an an unpredictable time. That is what "risk" means.
The problem with the helmet debate isn't that it's wrong, but that it's irrelevant. Every minute spent arguing about helmets is a minute that isn't spent making the most important point - cyclists live longer than non-cyclists, regardless of whether they wear a helmet. Wear a helmet, don't wear a helmet, it doesn't really matter. TO AVOID A PREMATURE DEATH, MOVE YOUR BODY.
You could use the same logic to justify extreme defenses against all kinds of rare-but-deadly events. You should be wearing a helmet in your car to protect against accidents in which your head hits the side window. You should be carrying a rifle to fight off wildlife every time you go for a hike. You definitely shouldn't be crossing any streets in auto-heavy cities. (And we could go on and on and on like this. There's no reason to even leave your house! Better to get everything delivered and not risk contact with the world at all!)
Everything is a tradeoff. There are no absolutes. Just tradeoffs.
Except for the fact that the CPSC (Consumer Products Safety Commission) impact testing standards for bicycle helmets only test for impacts for a guided free fall drop from a height of 6.5 feet. That's the equivalent of someone falling over while doing a track-stand on the bicycle.
If you're going 25 mph and hit the ground, the helmet won't protect from an impact it wasn't designed or tested for.
The second problem is that helmets won't protect you from forces that lead to concussive type injuries.
If you really want adequate head protection, then you need to wear a motorcycle helmet.
Personal anecdote: I bought a helmet a few years ago. While it was still in delivery I came into a situation where I was not sure what a car was doing and I caught myself thinking: "with a helmet I'd not braked" - but rather taken the risk.
Thus I have never worn it and it is sitting there collecting dust.
Another abstract example: no country is more obsessed with "low carb" and "low fat" than the US. Yet no other country produces more plus sized people than the US.
Yet another example is Michael Schumacher. Without the helmet he may not have taken the risk to go into unknown terrain.
I feel vulnerable without a helmet and that keeps me alive.
(FWIW, I always use a helmet except when I use shared bikes, which is rare, only a few times a year. I get on one of my own bikes, helmeted, hundreds of times a year.)
You might actually be right here. I do not know. Either way, don't expect "I really don't need to cite anything" to convince anybody serious.
Strangely, in Denmark most cyclists do wear a helmet. To me it's very inconvenient. E.g. where to store the damn thing when going anywhere?