Comment by plamenv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by plamenv | Hacker News Reader

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I'm one of the cool-looking europeans :) I've started to bike recently and decided not to wear a helmet after reading few articles that suggested there is practically no evidence at all that bike helmets help you in any way. But most convincing was data from Australia - before they started forcing everyone to wear helmets, there were on average 7 deaths/year caused by incidents involving bikers. After the helmets were made mandatory, the mortality rate was reduced to 6/year, yet the number of regular bikers was reduced by 30%!! If anything, this suggests that helmets may worsen your chances to stay alive.

And if you think about it, if you're flying with 20-30km/h towards a tree, no helmet is going to save you. Even if the head is protected, your neck will break. With lower speeds I guess you still have time to try to fall in such a way so the head is somewhat protected. Btw, I'm not avoiding helmets so I can look cool. It's just one more gear to carry and worry about. And I may still get a helmet if start riding more cross-country. Right now I'm riding on road and unpredictable falls look more unlikely.

I was knocked off my bike by a car about 4 months ago whilst not wearing a helmet, I had forgotten it that day and had just had an earful from my girlfriend about it.

Both me and the car were doing about 20mph, fortunately it wasn't head on and they just swiped across into me. I went flying and landed square on my chin, at that speed there is nothing you can do to "fall in a better way". I ended up in hospital with a suspected broken jaw although it could have been far worse, if I had landed on the top of my head rather than my face I could have ended up with brain damage - or worse...

With the way I fell a helmet would have stopped me from having a huge graze from my chin up to my forehead.

Helmets do work, it is true that they aren't going to save you in a head on collision with a speeding car but they will help prevent sever head injury in the type of accident that happens commuting to work.

Frankly I think its stupid not to wear a helmet, I was stupid, and it should be law in the UK to wear one. Your head is the most important part of your body and you should do what ever it takes to prevent damage to it!

Do you wear a helmet when you walk? When you're in a car?

I ride a bike every day and I have never hit a car. Heck, I've never seen a biker hit a car, even though I see a hundred bikers or so each day. Nobody wears helmets in the Netherlands. If you see somebody with a helmet you can be sure that it's a foreigner, somebody under the age of four, or somebody on a racing bike.

Now suppose you do get hit and lets even suppose that you get hit on the head. What's the probability that you get hit on the helmet? Small: only the top of your head is protected. For racing bikers it can help. Due to the way you sit on those bikes it's much more likely you'll land on the top of your head.

It makes more sense to wear gloves than to wear a helmet. Nine out of ten times your hands will get injured. And in my experience you do think about how you fall in the split second you're in the air. When you're not wearing gloves you'll be less inclined to grind your hands over the asphalt.

> After the helmets were made mandatory, the mortality rate was reduced to 6/year, yet the number of regular bikers was reduced by 30%!! If anything, this suggests that helmets may worsen your chances to stay alive.

What if the majority of the bikers who stopped biking were less experienced and thus more dangerous on average? This seems likely because the more committed people are likely to be more experienced, and those who don't have a helmet handy on some particular ride and so don't ride are also likely to be less experienced.

Well, that makes the anti-helmet case even stronger. If the most dangerous riders from the pool were in the 30% that stopped biking and if the helmets were actually helpful, wouldn't it make sense for the reduction in mortality rate to be bigger than 30% as opposed to the actual 17%?

The mortality rate went down in absolute terms, but up in per cyclist terms so your theory is the wrong way round. To explain more cyclist injuries you'd have to give a reason why the more committed cyclists that continued to cycle regularly were more likely to hurt themselves.

You could blame the helmets themselves for causing injury and that may be partly true but a more likely reason is 30% less cyclists meaning that car drivers were less used to sharing the road with cyclists. A common bike accident term is "SMIDSY", meaning "Sorry mate, I didn't see you" since they simply didn't expect a cyclist to be there.

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