Comment by owenversteeg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by owenversteeg | Hacker News Reader

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Ah, found the American.

Firstly, it's certainly not 80-90 of those 200, that's preposterous if you look at more detailed analyses of the results. About 70 of those 200 deaths are from irresponsible use of ebikes by old people!

Furthermore, bikes are the primary mode of transportation for most people I know here - elderly, young, weak, strong, you name it. The USA's main mode of transportation is cars (unnecessarily large ones!), which (aside from killing over 40,000 people a year directly) also kill the environment, the bodies of those inside, and a truly horrifying number of other people by proxy of countless wars waged over oil. If you count the 40,000 direct deaths alone, you get 129 deaths per 1M Americans per year and 11 deaths per 1M Dutch people per year. Take into account the other issues involved in driving and I'm sure that number will increase by (at absolute minimum) a factor of 10.

Helmets may make sense in America, where biking is a sport dominated by 30-55 year old men on $1000+ bikes wearing criminally tight pants, sunglasses, and aerodynamic helmets. But in the Netherlands they are a preposterous idea. Wearing helmets decreases bike use, which kills in far greater numbers.

> Ah, found the American [...] it’s certainly not 80-90 of those 200, that’s preposterous

Right, yes, I’m on the only American here, and only Americans believe that bike helmets make you safe.

I didn’t make the claim, it was made by SWOV of The Hague in the Netherlands, and republished by DutchNews. Since you’re there, maybe take this up with them? They did look at the detailed analysis, and they said helmets would save 85 Netherlanders per year, not me.

> The USA’s main mode of transportation is cars [...] killing over 40,000 people a year directly

Why did you turn this into a death competition? What does this have to do with cars? The discussion was over whether bike helmets make you safer or not.

I’m fully aware of how bad cars are. Your nationalistic slight aside, not all Americans want cars and the deaths that come with them. I can’t control that. But I can wear a helmet.

> Wearing helmets decreases bike use, which kills in far greater numbers.

That’s a strong claim. Please put a magnitude on it and some evidence and sources behind it.

(Not the person you replied to.)

> Please put a magnitude on it and some evidence and sources behind it.

Alberta's helmet law – children's cycling halved, injuries increased per cyclist

https://www.cyclehelmets.org/1250.html

HEAT analysis: United Kingdom

https://www.cyclehelmets.org/1231.html

Frequently asked Questions For Policy Makers

https://www.cyclehelmets.org/1137.html

I don’t trust that site.

While I appreciate the response and attempt to address my question, all three of those links are from cyclehelmets.org, and the site is helmet skeptic. That’s not my opinion, it says right on the site that most of their material is anti-helmets. I find it incredibly biased, it tends to use emotional arguments and tries to magnify every scrap of anti-helmet evidence. I dislike how cyclehelmets.org attempts to draw causal lines from correlations at practically every opportunity. Just read your link and see how often they use words like “seem” and “suggest”, then try to imagine some of the many other possible explanations.

BTW, did you notice what the 10-year Canada study concluded? “In general the rate of head injuries is declining, but this is not consistent across the country, nor is it attributable to legislation as some provinces with legislation experienced a decline while others did not.” So there is evidence that helmet laws did not cause the supposed changes in ridership.

Do you believe that having to use seat belts prevents people from driving cars? If not, why not? Do you think seat belts make drivers more aggressive? Do you believe that helmets prevent people from participating in other sports? I live near a lot of ski resorts, and nearly 100% of skiers here are voluntarily wearing helmets, and the number of skiers is rising every year. Same goes for bikes, there are no helmet laws where I live and yet most people wear them, and more people are riding than ever. I don’t buy for a second that helmets are so offputting it drives away half of all people, there are a million possible explanations for whatever data points they found in Alberta. For example, the injury rates presented are absolute numbers, not per-capita like they should be. More injuries is expected when there are more people, and between 2000 and 2006, Alberta got more people.

Do your children use helmets?

Look, I'm not going to start the entire helmet debate here on HN, especially since you clearly have not done your research. But to specifically address your points:

1) SWOV has published multiple analyses of this issue. They explicitly noted that the analysis you're referring to was unusual in that it said up to 85 people would be saved per year by wearing helmets. Their other analyses, which use different modes of calculation, arrived at far lower numbers.

2) It's not "a death competition" (but don't worry, America is #1 regardless.) However, every mode of transportation has a cost in lives in many forms. Aside from direct deaths, there are also many indirect deaths from various modes of transportation. If you're going to criticize a possible safety problem in a mode of transportation, keep in mind the broader context. In the Netherlands, where trains are a critical part of the transportation infrastructure, there are more suicides by train than bike deaths (although both are around 200/yr.) You could argue for, perhaps, airport-train-style doors in front of platforms. But that too has an associated cost, and a benefit.

3) You need to consider the consequences of every action, no matter how obscure or strange they may possibly be. Anti-child labor laws sound like a good thing, right? Well, read up on the Child Labor Deterrence Act. Harkin simply introducing the act in Congress was enough to scare manufacturers around the world into action, firing their enormous sweatshops of children. Good, huh? Well, the children were at the sweatshops for a reason. Turns out that without the sweatshops, enormous numbers of children went into prostitution, theft, and rock crushing (which might not sound bad, but it guarantees the destruction of your lungs if you're not killed in a number of other ways.) Every action can have first order, second order, third order consequences...

Finally: 200 deaths a year is an extremely, extremely small number for a system with nearly 20 million users, operating carbon-free, smog-free, at extremely low cost (~20 eur/year.) And it manages to provide fresh air and exercise to all participants! There's basically nothing like it; it's a wonder of the modern world. Risking damaging this system by adding helmets... The payoff is tiny, the risk is enormous.

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