The danger comes mostly from bad infra design and other heavier traffic (cars). Those can be addressed separately, and it turns out pretty well. Leading causes of bike-accidents are now cyclists being distracted by their phones and skipping red lights (common especially in large cities). Public awareness campaigns are addressing the former, law enforcement the latter.
You're right, strictly speaking wearing helmets is safer, and you are free to do so. But then again, 4 point safety belts in cars too (but we don't), driving slower (but we don't), not calling while driving/cycling (but we do) and so on. There's a balance between safety, practicality and getting people to their destinations, it seems helmets are simply far less impactful than other measures.
Source (in Dutch): https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/fietsers-voor-h...
I don't think it's about looking cooler, it's about barrier to entry.
It's like adding a 15 character requirement to passwords on your application and rotating them weekly. Most people will give up on your application before they even give it a try.
OPs point is that cities should make it a goal for biking to be safe regardless of if you have a helmet. I daresay biking without a helmet in Copenhagen is vastly safer than biking with a helmet in any city in the states.
The sense of safety a helmet gives you when you cycle is mostly a false one. Lack of cycling infrastructure is a far greater danger anyway. In countries with the best cyclist safety records, no one wears or owns bike helmets, like not figuratively 'no one', but literally, no one. Can't be a very significant standalone determinant of bike safety then, can it?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_helmet#Effectiveness
"Do bicycle helmets reduce the risk of injury to the head, face or neck? With respect to head injury, the answer is clearly yes, and the re-analysis of the meta-analysis reported by Attewell et al.(2001) in this paper has not changed this answer."
https://doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.aap.2012.12.003
If it's behavior that's being targeted by policies around helmets, then why would a more care-free attitude towards biking make it safer?
Fewer people are driving cars which are much more lethal to non-drivers, so fewer people get killed. People are more active and live longer because of increased physical activity.
Making bikes more appealing/ easier to access by not requiring helmets makes people collectively safer and healthier.
Could you explain why you think that? That’s a pretty general statement. Are you imagining city biking here, or something more like racing in the country-side?
Some data about how this is dangerous could be convincing: https://youtu.be/Boi0XEm9-4E count the helmets.
Just to be clear, I’m not against helmets (I wear one, as is custom in my country).
Only if you are riding a bicycle completely unsuitable for commuting or general urban use; like a mountain bike or racing bicycle.
Commonly used bicycles in Denmark and the Netherlands look like this:
https://omidbikes.nl/wp-content/uploads/mat-zwart-7.jpg
Note the handlebars and upright rider position that basically prevent going over the handlebars during an emergency stop. That kind of accident just doesn't happen here.
Of course, even then, as a teenager I still managed to get myself into some interesting situations a couple of times. But never went over the handlebars :-P
I go back and forth about the helmet issue personally. Though I've almost never not worn one.
My general feeling is that it's not much of a burden to me. And while the cases where it's actually going to help are narrower than most people think (especially people looking from the perspective of a car impact), it does improve the outcome in those cases quite a bit. So it's worthwhile.
If nothing else helmets are good places to mount lights, which are definitely an important safety measure! :)
As a pedestrian who walks about 30m each way on my morning commute, it terrifies me that if a car strikes me at 31MPH I have a 50% chance of severe injury. At 42 MPH, it's a 50% chance of death ( https://aaafoundation.org/impact-speed-pedestrians-risk-seve... ). Atleast I have a separated sidewalk most of my commute, minus street crossings. I would never consider biking in my city because I have to be there on the street next to a bunch of cars.
The lack of helmet laws makes me safer on my bike regardless of whether I wear a helmet or not because it means fewer people are driving cars. Cars are far more likely to injure/ kill me than a solo crash, adding barriers to getting people to adopt bikes makes cycling more dangerous. The more people on bikes, the more cars expect people on bikes, better bike infrastructure, and it makes people in cars more alert to the presence of cyclists.
We have a fairly popular bike-share program here. People can poke a few buttons on their phone and get access to a bike instantly. With a helmet law, that's not the case, they have to be prepared in advance. The presence and popularity of that bike share makes me safer. Removing several hundred motorists from the road every day in our city has a far bigger impact on cyclist safety than the presence/ absence of a helmet.
I have had countless banged up knees, elbows, ankles and hands, but never had a head injury. I used to ride a motorcycle, and wore the full getup aside from pants, and I feel cyclists would be far more protected wearing a jacket and gloves.
Anecdotes aside- figures from the UK (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1119262/) show that it takes 8000 years of cycling to produce a clinically severe head injury and 22000 years for one death. From that same source, roughly 1% of all head injuries admitted into hospitals are from cycling, and 60% are alcohol related. Yet people would find it ridiculous if you suggested they wear a drinking helmet.
The fixation on helmets really confuses me. Its not helped that a lot of it seems to be pushed by people who seem to use it as some kind of virtue-signaling issue. There is just such a focus on a fairly burdensome piece of equipment that in a small percentage of rides in which an incident occurs, and in a small percentage of those incidents, this piece of equipment may help reduce the severity of your injuries, while all other equipment is left out of the conversation.
That is a hilarious and wonderful comparison. I'm gonna save that one for future discussion of helmets and safety.
This stat means absolutely nothing. It's coming from a place where not that many people cycle, the summary even says that cycling experienced a decline, so of course there's not going to be that many injuries from cycling when very few people are doing it. By contrast, British people drink a LOT, so of course they're going to have a lot of alcohol-related injuries. It's just like America: there's very little cycling, and a LOT of drinking and drunkenness, so it doesn't take any great intelligence to predict that there will be far more alcohol-related injuries than cycling-related ones.
And yes, maybe people there should wear drinking helmets, with the way people in those two countries love to get drunk so much.
>There is just such a focus on a fairly burdensome piece of equipment
"Burdensome"? Are you kidding me? Something that weighs a few ounces? I guess you think seatbelts are "burdensome" too.
And yes, I do wear gloves when cycling; they have pads to absorb vibration, and can be helpful if I fall and scrape my hands. They're far more "burdensome" than a helmet, since they take more time to put on (which still isn't very much).
Still my point about a drinking helmet stands- drinking is a dangerous activity- 60% of all hospital admissions for head injuries involve alcohol. Clearly we could reduce the severity and incidence of these injuries with helmets. It would be interesting to see how many "drinking years" it would take on average to get a head injury worthy of a hospital admission.
Driving is dangerous too- and in virtually any accident it seems likely your head is going to come into contact with something- even if it is an airbag, and the mv^2 is much higher- we could reduce the severity and incidence of head injuries if everyone wore a helmet, especially an NFL style helmet with a faceguard...
And you accept that wearing gloves is ok, but you don't wear a jacket- so you know you may fall, and possibly scrape along the ground a bit, but you don't wear a jacket that most motorcyclists consider to be basic standard gear.
Do you understand where I am going here? You assess risk a certain way and make tradeoffs in what you are willing to do to protect yourself, as do I. However, what your risk assessment has determined wearing a helmet as necessary and foolish not to, I see as just another unnecessary burden, choosing instead to wear armored gloves in winter, and accepting other risks. You may feel not wearing a helmet is something a fool does, but my years of riding have given me intuition (in other words, my developed common sense) that the head is highly unlikely to be injured, and statistics back me up on this.
If I did a lot of high speed road cycling, it would probably change things, but my rides around town where I top out cruising around 15mph and if I go down a hill hit 30 for a brief minute or two, its just not necessary or reasonably useful.
So wear your helmet, but I feel denigrating those that don't because your "common sense" tells you its necessary is misguided and somewhat ignorant.
Unfortunately, I don't have the luxury of biking to work yet, but if I did, I'd be using a backpack for what I hope are obvious reasons. Any good backpack these days designed for cycling has a clip on it that attaches to your helmet so you don't have to carry it around. I even did this years ago in college when I biked to class; it wasn't a burden at all.
>And you accept that wearing gloves is ok, but you don't wear a jacket- so you know you may fall, and possibly scrape along the ground a bit, but you don't wear a jacket that most motorcyclists consider to be basic standard gear.
Jackets are incredibly hot. Bicycles don't go fast enough to mitigate this. Some skin scrapes are preferable to getting heatstroke.
>but my years of riding have given me intuition (in other words, my developed common sense) that the head is highly unlikely to be injured
The problem is, if your head is injured, it's either game-over or you suffer mental problems for the rest of your life. Other bodily injuries you can usually heal from. A broken leg? It sucks, but it heals. Skin scrapes? Not a big deal usually (not at bicycling speeds). Worst case you get a skin graft but that's not normal for cycling. But a concussion can leave permanent damage; the brain doesn't heal the way the rest of your body does. To make a computer analogy, I feel like you're talking about the relative risks to various computer parts, and equating potential damage to your laptop's screen to its hard drive. The screen isn't important, nor is the rest of the laptop: you can replace them at any time. But the hard drive is unreplaceable (going back to the last backup, which unfortunately we don't have for brains yet): if anything happens to the hard drive at all, you lose all your data and all your work, and you can't replace that.
I ride bikes a lot, I rode 7 miles this morning on those "slippery/ uneven roads". Most of my friends ride bikes and we all know someone who has been seriously injured or killed by a car. If you eliminate cars bikes are extremely safe (for riders with reasonable hand/ eye coordination). The only injury type that comes remotely close to cars is mountain bike crashes or crashes while racing road bikes and those injuries are far less common and far less lethal than cars.
So yeah... I focus on cars, because they are by far the single biggest danger to cyclists.
> David Roberts: The Dutch don’t wear bike helmets. How safe is it to ride a bike in the Netherlands?
> Chris Bruntlett: We — like you — live in a place where helmets have been mandated by law, because they’ve been accepted as a commonsense safety device, normal as a seatbelt. But the Dutch show that [for them], safety in infrastructure, safety in slowing cars, and safety in numbers are all far more important than safety in body armor.
> David Roberts: Yeah, the US approach seems to be to up-armor the cyclist so that cars don’t have to change.
Helmets are obviously essential for reducing serious head injuries (although they're less effective than generally advertised[0]) and parents/individuals should strongly consider using them, but legislation should be focused on improving road safety through education, community outreach, and infrastructure design long before it starts to seriously restrict personal liberty and hampering adoption of better modes of transport. The Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, France, Germany, etc, have all showed that you can have world class cycling cities without requiring helmet use.
>Seatbelts do not protect anyone other than the person wearing it but societies have deemed making them mandatory is a that good idea.
This is a dangerous misconception, unbelted rear passengers seriously increase the risk of fatal injuries for the driver and front passengers[1] and in general increase the overall amount of injuries, which should be obvious when you consider that unrestrained passengers essentially become ragdoll missiles in the event of a crash.
[0] https://sciencenordic.com/cars-and-traffic-cycling-denmark/b...
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/138037...
Every study I've ever seen contradicts your statement here.
You are all over this thread making strong, sweeping claims about bike safety and your only supporting data point seems to be "KE = 1/2mv^2". But there are entire cities in Europe where biking with no helmet is the norm, lots of people do it every day, and serious accidents are all but unheard of - there are other comments on this post with citations to back that up. There is also evidence that getting more people out biking increases bike safety more than anything else [1], and requiring helmets for everyone at all times makes this very difficult to achieve.
Please stop passing off your gut feeling as fact, it is spreading misinformation and - though I know it seems counterintuitive - actually making biking less safe. To be clear, kinetic energy being proportional to the square of velocity is a fact, that fact's impact on real world bike safety is a much more complicated question.
Disclaimer for what it's worth - I've been biking to and from either work, school or social events about once a day for the past 11 years, and I almost always wear a helmet :)
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2015/02/24/the-mor...
Secondly, there are a lot more than two factors at play to make the "cyclists killed per billion of km of bicycle travel" number. Culturally bikes need to be accepted. I don't see how helmets preclude cultural adoption.
And, yes, people are sometimes forced to take other steps that are primarily about their individual safety, such as wearing seat belts. I mostly disagree with those laws as well.
> I don't see how helmets preclude cultural adoption.
Case in point. It seems completely common sense to me that helmets are a massive barrier to widespread adoption! Leaving aside the issues it introduces with bikeshare logistics, having an additional thing to keep track of and carry around and periodically replace (helmets can go bad!), here's something that I suspect you may not have considered: women! Whether it seems reasonable to you and me or not (and I'll be honest, it doesn't seem reasonable to me), the 2 reasons every woman I've ever asked gives for why they wouldn't want to use a bicycle to get around more are
1) sitting on the seat is awkward/uncomfortable when wearing a skirt or dress
2) helmets would ruin their hair
Requiring helmet wear makes cycling a nonstarter for a large chunk of 50% of the population (how I wish I had a citation for this! as far as I've been able to find, nobody has done any kind of survey that attempts to figure out if this is as widespread as I've observed personally). This alone makes me opposed to it, never mind the exaggerated claims of helmet efficacy
Try watching a video of people in Copenhagen riding bikes. Women wear dresses and skirts there all the time while cycling. Same goes in Japan; women commonly wear dresses/skirts there and ride bikes.
It's both. Safety doesn't necessarily require helmets, as Netherlands and Danmark demonstrate. I imagine barrier to entry by requiring helmets would be a huge blow to bicycle culture here.
Also keep in mind, jogging can cause traumatic injuries. But I agree, biking does pose more risk as you have less control than being on your feet.
Maybe if your country is flat as a pancake. If there's hills, then yes, people really can hit 20mph, even with casual bikes.
In NL, the average is ~20kph for muscle-powered bikes on bikes like [1]. Sports bikes like [2] are not usually used in commutes and considered as dangerous as scooters if used at speeds of 20mph. E-bikes legislation takes 25kph as the limit above which the cyclist is required to follow certain extra rules, and of course muscle-powered cyclist reaching that speed should perhaps also be legislated accordingly. The reason it isn't is difficulty of enforcement, but there are people advocating a maximum speed for bike infrastructure [3], at 25pkh.
[1] https://omidbikes.nl/wp-content/uploads/mat-zwart-7.jpg [2] https://s3-wielrennen-xjspucykgif.netdna-ssl.com/welke_wielr... [3] https://www.fietsersbond.nl/nieuws/een-maximum-snelheid-op-h...
Instead they will sit in a car and die from heart disease, obesity etc.