Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Helmets are for any activity that has an impact risk to your head which includes cycling not just sports.

I live in Austria where few cyclists wear helmets yet my girlfriend who works in the local hospital sees patients coming in with serious head injuries on a daily basis from biking accidents that could have easily been prevented by wearing a helmet. Since then we both wear our helmets religiously.

You don't even have to get hit by a car. An unfortunate collision with a texting pedestrian, some dog on a leash jumping in front of you or another cyclist could be enough to smack your melon on the asphalt.

Just because you hear Europeans aren't wearing helmets doesn't mean it's the model to follow. I see wearing a helmet the same as wearing a seatbelt. Sure I never needed it since I never had an accident and it feels slightly uncomfortable but I know it could save my life.

It's up to you how much you value your head.

I highly doubt ebikes have a 50% share in Belgium. Do you have any references on that claim? Last year I visited Belgium's 4 major cities and almost every cyclist I saw was on some old half broken bicycle.

I think the biggest reason people don't see a bicycle helmet as necessary is from personal experience. I grew up on the 70's, long before kids helmets were in vogue. And I had several bicycle accidents.

Once I hit a curb, went over the handlebars, and skinned up my hands/knees and my wrists hurt pretty bad for a week or so after. Another time I wiped out at the bottom of a hill, tore a huge gash in the side of my knee. Then there was the time I chipped a tooth on a curb when trying to ride no-handed.

In all the falls I experienced, none of them involved a head injury that a helmet would have prevented (the chipped tooth incident could have been prevented by wearing a mouth guard, or by not being stupid). So based on that, it feels like helmets are useless.

Of course, in reality there is a huge difference between a kid riding a bicycle at single-digit MPH on neighborhood streets and back-woods trails, vs. going 15 - 20 MPH on roads or paved trails. At those speeds, it would probably be impossible for me to break my fall using just hands and feet, not to mention the possibility of getting distracted hand running into a street sign or tree branch. Logically I'm aware of all this, but still I have trouble with maintaining proper helmet discipline.

Your anecdotes of falling without hitting your head aren't very relevant. And if you had such an accident, you might not be capable of posting here.

https://www.vox.com/2014/5/16/5720762/stop-forcing-people-to...

Does this logic extend to showering, pedestrians, and automobile passengers and drivers? All suffer as many or more head injuries per year than cyclists.

They may have more head injuries than cyclists(citation?) but unlike cyclists you're not at risk of being run over by a car after a fall in your shower and also you're probably not showering at 25km/h when you fall so the potential damage is much lower.

here: https://bmcemergmed.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1287...

analysis: https://www.treehugger.com/bikes/why-dont-americans-wear-hel...

A head injury that results from speed or post-strike collisions is still recorded as a "cyclist head injury" so I don't think your points change the numbers.

Granted more suffer from shower injuries but how severe are the shower injuries vs biking?

That's an excellent question. Another is, how many more injuries (head- and non-head-related) are caused by the increased recklessness that drivers engage in around helmeted cyclists? https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2018/11/14/motorist...

Please note, I'm not trying to argue against helmets. The point is that arguments over helmets deflect the conversation away from the people sailing around recklessly in two ton metal boxes. Every time there’s a collision involving a cyclist, the question is "was he wearing a helmet?", not, "was the driver paying attention?"

The safest places to bicycle are in the nations where there's the lowest rates of cyclists wearing helmets. This is a car problem, not a bicycle problem.

Austrians use bicycles a lot more rigorously, but there is still a resistance to 'being told to wear a helmet' .. alas, it only takes one fall to demonstrate convincing evidence for why one should always, always, always wear a helmet.

Does anyone have head injury statistics? I know falls are a major cause of preventable death in the US, but I don’t even know how those break down between someone on a bike vs an old person falling over.

It's not just about death, it's also about brain damage. A broken bone is NBD compared to a TBI with often permanent damage.

You can lock helmets with bikes if you want. I used to lock my helmet with my u-lock on my bike, so if they cut off the helmet, then it isn't a very useful helmet. I now bring it with me in my bag mostly for hygenic reasons although.

Personally I would avoid locking a helmet up like that.

Expanded foam helmets are fragile by design. They are design to be disposable with even small knocks. So even accidentally banging them against your frame, dlock or solid post is a bad idea even if you can’t visibly see any damage.

You’re recommended to replace them at regular intervals also due to sweat damage.

That isn't much of a solution in practice. No helmet manufacturer puts best after dates, other than in fine print nobody reads and practically nobody replaces helmets unless they see visible damage.

Yep totally true.

Then again 3cm of expanded polystyrene foam vs a metal box with a engine in it... probably like a surfer forgetting to replace their “anti-shark bite” medallion anyway.

Another alternative: https://hovding.se/

Very popular here in Sweden. A little easier to stuff in your bag.

I hate that HN is a place where the ignorant simply flaunt their ignorance instead of trying to inform themselves.

"According to the Velofollies survey as well as other sources last year’s [2018] e-bike sales stood at slightly over a quarter million units; some 251,500 to be more precise. This accounts for a big 14.3 percent growth compared to the total of the year before. It makes electric bicycles by far the biggest category of the Belgian market with a market share that stands at close to 50 percent."

https://www.bike-eu.com/sales-trends/nieuws/2019/07/market-r...

According to your source that's 50% share of new bike sales in 2018, not market share of all bikes in Belgium. Not the same thing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com