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Comment by mensetmanusman | Hacker News Reader

I remember when Google was first presenting on driverless technology about 10 years ago, and they mentioned how you have to go right to full self driving, because any advanced driver assistance will clash with human risk compensation behavior.

Risk compensation is fascinating; driving with a bike helmet causes the biker and drivers around the biker to behave more dangerously.

Is society sophisticated enough to deal with advanced driver assistance? Is it possible to gather enough data to create self driving ML systems?

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> Risk compensation is fascinating; driving with a bike helmet causes the biker and drivers around the biker to behave more dangerously.

Do you have a truly reliable source for that? Because I hear this statement once in a while, and it feels flawed.

A helmet protects you from severe head injury if you are in an accident. There are more reasons for accidents than reckless car drivers. For example:

- Bad weather

- Driver not seeing the biker at all (no matter with or without helmet)

- Crash between 2 cyclists

Parent did not say that helmets make you less safe. They said that helmets make drivers around the biker behave more dangerously.

https://www.bicycling.com/news/a25358099/drivers-give-helmet...

3.5 inches on an average of ~1 meter was the measurement, in a study that a single researcher performed using himself as the rider.

This result is both weakly supported and small, and it shouldn't be considered actionable.

Risk compensation probably also works the other way, looking forward to all news cars standard supplied with a new safety device that cuts traffic accidents to a small fraction of what they used to be, the only ones remaining are all fatal for the driver.

A nice and very sharp 8" stainless steel spike on the steering wheel facing the driver.

> A nice and very sharp 8" stainless steel spike on the steering wheel facing the driver.

Didn't we have those in the 50s and 60s? Maybe not sharp, but collapsable steering columns are a significant improvement to survivability.

> Risk compensation is fascinating; driving with a bike helmet causes the biker and drivers around the biker to behave more dangerously.

Source please

Here you go:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00014...

https://psyarxiv.com/nxw2k

I cannot open the study in the first link but the second on seems to actually refute the claim instead of supporting it.

> There is a body of research on how driver behaviour might change in response to bicyclists’ appearance. In 2007, Walker published a study suggesting motorists drove closer on average when passing a bicyclist if the rider wore a helmet, potentially increasing the risk of a collision. Olivier and Walter re-analysed the same data in 2013 and claimed helmet wearing was not associated with close vehicle passing.

Keep reading.

> We then present a new analysis of the original dataset, measuring directly the extent to which drivers changed their behaviour in response to helmet wearing. This analysis confirms that drivers did, overall, get closer when the rider wore a helmet.

Yes, you're right. I should have read the whole thing.

I remember reading that viewpoint in this essay: https://cyclingtips.com/2018/11/commentary-why-i-stopped-wea...

there are some sources and studies linked. i.e. countries with the highest rate of helmet use also have the highest cyclist fatality rates

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