Hacker News Reader

Comment by troncjb | Hacker News Reader

> Helmet proponents are right about one thing: If you're in a serious accident, then wearing a helmet makes the odds of a head injury significantly lower — by somewhere between 15 and 40 percent. (This is why ER doctors and brain surgeons are so pro-helmet — they've seen firsthand what happens in helmet-less accidents.)

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.

View on HN

For this reason, I wear a helmet. But the health benefits of cycling vastly swamp the risk of death, so the helmet gain is only a small marginal difference.

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.

> so the helmet gain is only a small marginal difference

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.

If I were not wearing a helmet routinely I'd be so paranoid about getting hit/falling/some injury that there would be no health benefits at all. Wearing a helmet is comfortable, relatively in expensive and life saving. There is really no argument to be made to not have one on your head. I can't believe you are needing to even make a pro-helmet case at all here.

Arguments:

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?

The classic bike/head injury is riding into a crack (or grating) that grabs the front tire and stops the bike, hurling the rider over the handlebars and hammering them headfirst into the ground.

Been there, done that. Catch yourself on your hands/elbows. If you can’t, then perhaps you should go slower over such terrain. We dutchies coast on average around 20 km/h (12.5 mph). Anyone going above 30 is deemed “racing bicyclist” and they usually do wear helmets. They are a class on their own and are often hated by car drivers, since they think they have the road for themselves.

So that's the difference. Anybody commuting in America is going as fast as practicable, and owns a road bike. Cruising is more like 32km/h(20mph). Since the average distance from home to work can be many miles, speed is paramount.

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.

Bit of a late reply. I find this difference so difficult to grasp. We use our bikes as a utility first and recreation second. Here the bicycles are generally sturdy, heavy, robust. They can take rain, wind, sand, dust for years with minimal maintenance. We don't go fast, but we arrive at our destination without gasping for a breath. Road bikes are seen as unpractical: the chains require weekly maintenance, sitting forward is more dangerous and gives you a bad overview of the road, they don't take rain well (rust) and they wear down relatively fast. Why use them for your commute? It doesn't make sense! It's like taking a sports-car to work every single day. It's fun the first day, but it gets boring, expensive and impractical rather quickly.

Examples: https://www.batavus.nl/stadsfietsen

...because you're going 20 miles, and can't take 2 hours to get to work?

It sounds like your recommended safety practice is basically not to get hurt and if something does happen to have the strength to stop yourself form flying over the handles bars unexpectedly. This is not a good long term solution. Maybe if you're putzing around town that works ok but if you are ever riding in traffic or at speed this is a recipe for disaster.

Wearing safety gear should never be a crutch to lean on for you to practice unsafe acts. A helmet is there should anything go wrong and you should always be riding as cautiously and defensibly as possible.

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.

As a gating item to riding at all, its arguably a negative influence on public health. Since otherwise exercise-leaning people might not do it if they couldn't work the helmet into their schedule (have it at all; carry it with them all day)

If you are a cyclist getting hit by a car, a helmet is not designed to help you.

> If you are a cyclist getting hit by a car, the averages and statistics don't matter at all.

But helmet design standards do. A helmet meeting the CPSC standards isn't designed to protect you in impact with a motor vehicle.

Think about what you're saying. You'd rather it be your skull to get hit directly. Why?

If car seat belts were designed and tested in frontal impacts at up to 20 mph, then would you believe that they would make a difference when traveling at 60 mph?

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.

Yes, absolutely I'd rather be wearing a seat belt designed to to a 20 mph spec in a 60 mph crash than no seat belt at all. I'd take anything at all to slow down my body/brain from coming to a complete stop.

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.

> I'd take anything at all to slow down my body/brain from coming to a complete stop.

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.

Let's say you're on the 10th story of a burning building and the fire department is below telling you to jump. They have one of those cartoon sheets to catch you but it's only rated to catch people falling from the 5th story. If you jump you'll hit the sheet at 40 mph but break through it and hit the ground at 10 mph. Do you shout at them to take the sheet away because you want to hit the ground at the full 40 mph because the sheet won't do enough good?

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.

> The person who is truly taking a risk is the person who doesn't ride a bike

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.

Lots of ordinary activities present a similar or greater risk of head injury than cycling. Do you wear a helmet to get into the bathtub? Do you wear a helmet to climb the stairs?

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.

> 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."

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.

> (This is why ER doctors and brain surgeons are so pro-helmet — they've seen firsthand what happens in helmet-less accidents.)

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com