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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

The same is true in the Netherlands.

Honestly, if they are biking around campus, they don’t need helmets. Helmets are needed on American roads because of poor biking infrastructure (not an issue on campus or in the Netherlands). The article is taking liberties using nationwide statistics to criticize local behavior.

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Are you sure? Just falling over on the bike while stationary (I admit I've managed this before) without being able to partially break your fall. could outright kill you if your head hits the pavement. (An uncontrolled fall from standing height to concrete such as by fainting can kill.) Even if you don't die, head impacts are really bad for the brain.

You could also hit your head after tripping while walking, but people don’t wear helmets on walks. I think the point was that there is a comfortable level of risk people are willing to take. If you remove cars from the equation, then the perceived risk is much lower while biking.

Falling on a stationary bike is a lot easier than you'd imagine. And the extra foot off the ground that you will be, can easily add to the damage.

I remember when I first started using clipless peddles, you free the foot on the wrong side, and odds are high you are hitting the ground. Stupid easy to do.

This is a trivially small amount of people. If it wasn’t - people wouldn’t even bother with learning how to clip in. They’d be like, “oh no, clipless pedals is what killed my pa back in ‘04.”

I have yet to meet anyone that hasn't at least come close to falling on clipless peddles.

Falling != death.

This seems a bit of a non-sequitur. Falling from a bike is enough to cause head trauma. The claim here is that a helmet is useful and effective, not just from a moving bike, but from a stationary one. Adding to that, merely mounting a bike is already a greater risk of falling than most folks do.

Is it a certainty? Of course not. But, by that same argument, seatbelts are useless the vast majority of the time. Indeed, on most moving vehicles I'm on (busses/trains), I don't wear them. Not even offered in many cases. I still support and recommend them where they are available. Same for helmets.

Who's using clipless pedals to putt around their school campus?

If you're doing some sort of recreational/sport biking, then ya, a lot more people are going to agree you should be wearing a helmet.

Fair, though my point was more that experienced riders that use clipless are still prone to falling.

Around campus, problems from not balancing with a backpack are more likely.

Though, I do mean to say I don't think it is a certainty. Just that it is more likely than you'd think. And helmets are good at low speeds. They are not just a high speed protection.

I don't think I can underline this point enough. Helmets are just as effective on the slow/no speed fall as they are on the high speed ones. In many ways, I wouldn't be surprised if they are more effective there.

Humans have evolved reactions to protect their head when they fall at running speeds. For example, you instinctively throw out your arms to break the fall. It's when you are biking faster than a fast human can run that helmets become really necessary.

Appeal to evolution is silly. First thing you learn when skating or any real parkour like things is how to properly fall.

So, I can't say you are wrong, but I would love actual studies to settle this.

The statistics don’t lie. Biking in the Netherlands is incredibly safe even without helmet wearing.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09257...

Turns out there are other ways to make cycling safe. One could argue that helmet wearing might make it even safer, but we are talking about optimizing a number that is already very low.

I’ve been to Stanford before and the campus is pretty car free. It is big and mostly flat, so most students have bikes to get from one building to another, but you aren’t speeding around or anything, it’s a very Dutch biking experience.

But the Dutch have experience, from a very young age.

Biking could indeed be even safer in the Netherlands if people wore helmets:

https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/neur.2020.0010

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

Arguing that it’s a small optimization is one thing, but that doesn’t mean it’s “not needed”.

But you look like a dork. And what about your hair?

The discouragement of biking is a big deal in the Netherlands. They’d rather have everyone biking casually than a few dedicated speedsters decked out with the right equipment.

We have these boomer speedsters wearing helmets now, on electric bikes racing through traffic like they were boomers.

We hate 'em.

I presume you meant discouragement of helmets.

> I presume you meant discouragement of helmets.

I assume he didn't - the point is asking people to wear helmets discourages biking. In practice it's overall healthier to not ask people to wear helmets.

Ah, along those lines. Yes, I can confirm there is no discouragement of cycling. Like ever, not even when you are totally drunk.

Having visited Amsterdam once, I'm honestly a little surprised there are so few cycling accidents. The number of bikes is huge and the flow of it looked a bit like a controlled chaos.

The Dutch seem to have understood the street smarts and the unwritten rules of cycling (as applies to their environment) really well, so that probably explains it, along with a cycling-friendly environment.

Remember we learn as very young kids, not only to properly cycle, but also the limits while playing.

I'm sure it's something that becomes instinctive, and that develops best at a young age even if it can be learned a bit later as well.

I don't know if the environment regarding play is somehow different to other European countries so I'm not sure what you mean with that. I believe engaging in play that tests one's limits without risk of serious injury makes a person more aware of one's body and limits, though, and I find it a good idea, too. I wonder if the Dutch have a different culture somehow in that respect.

I also learned to ride a bike as a child, and so do most others where I live, but the culture regarding what's considered safe or typical cycling is somewhat different here.

Is your argument that any small optimization is needed?

Any form of transportation could be made safer with helmets, presumably cars far more so than bikes. Hell, surely some number of people suffer brain injury after falling out of bed. Should we all wear helmets to sleep?

No safety steps are needed. The criteria should be whether the cost of the intervention results in more benefit than if that cost was spent elsewhere. If you're going to have no defined ceiling on additional safety measures, the obvious step is to stop bicycling and choose a safer form of transport, or to stop traveling.

Virtually everything can be made safer, including sleeping and breathing. You don't have to prove it. You have to prove its cost-effectiveness.

Traffic and road infrastructure for cycling and cars is radically different from the US. Has anyone attempted to compare cycling injury and death data while controlling for street design, relevant laws, and driver behavior?

> we are talking about optimizing a number that is already very low.

In the US, we have almost zero change of optimizing the factors that are better at reducing not only bicycling but traffic injury and fatalities generally. Americans are so enamored with the personal automobiles that fixing the roads and infrastructure is basically a non-starter. Holding that factor constant, the safety of wearing a helmet starts to become quite significant.

It's difficult to compare it if you also don't compare the culture. If you look are /r/idiotsincars, most of the commenters from the US would be treated as murderous psychopaths, as they can't comprehend people can ride bikes for anything else than sports and they are considered to be "blocking" 4 lane highways.

Yeah, I alluded to that with "driver behavior", which is determined by culture. Those murderously psychopathic car-centric attitudes are part of why the US transportation infrastructure is how it is and why it's so hard to change it. What is it with Americans willingness to allow the most extreme selfish points of view harm the public good?

Bike helmets are mainly for falling off a bike by yourself, not being hit by a car, generally.

it's why bicyclists don't wear the same helmets as motorcycle riders.

The risk remains the same

Then you would expect the Netherlands to have a lot more injuries than the USA, since the number of miles biked without helmets is a lot higher. For some reason, it isn’t. They actually found in the 70s that yes, the problem is cars.

The standards for biking in Netherlands are very different... people treat it more like walking than like driving, as far as I can tell. Everyone's upright on a comfy bike and going pretty slow... the distances are shorter so you don't need to be a spandex cyborg to commute, and there are so many people it's probably hard to pass anyway. You don't wear helmets or carry poles walking, even though you could easily trip (someone I know got injured accidentally stepping off a curb).

I've only been to Amsterdam a couple times but my favorite snapshot of biking there was a lady biking hands free fiddling with her eye makeup (I think?), being passed by a hands-free dude wearing a suit, talking on his phone with one hand and other hand just kinda hanging alongside his body ;)

People fall off bikes or flip over handle bars and land on their heads without the infra straw man everyday. The simpler conclusion is, if other people are doing it in my group and I don't want to think about it, I'll do it that way too. Wear your helmets to protect all that Stanford learnin.

If they’re biking around campus, they also don’t need masks.

But they probably need to wear it both where they are going and where they come from, so why not keep it on? Whereas they don't need a helmet for anything else in the day.

Any good mask will make it very hard to breathe under strenuous activity. N95 masks also get blocked after an amount of air passes through them so they become ineffective. Best not to wear them if you’re gonna be in the wind.

But we're talking about biking across campus, not biking for sports. So not really "strenuous activity" where you'd notice that. (even just because you don't want to be sweaty at the other end either)

Uw is a bit different than Stanford in that it is built in a hill. So if your next class is on upper campus, you might not have any choice but to sweat.

I wear N95s in india every day and even the slight breeze can definitely start blocking the mask faster. Also even slightly increased breathing starts producing more aerosols and that starts blocking the masks as well. Unless of course even while cycling your heart is at resting rate, then kudos to your health.

Thought experiment: what if we looked at wearing a helmet as a choice the same way that anti-vaxxers would say the COVID-19 vaccine is a choice? If so, should people who choose not to wear a helmet while bicycling be subjected to the same social and economic consequences as people who "choose" not to get vaccinated?

Not wearing a helmet does not affect people around you.

True, but the potential for needing medical care, hospitalization, or funeral services which could result in someone else being unable to receive care is similar.

Ah yes, the famous bike crash pandemic of 1954.

It's a thought experiment, not a statement of fact.

"the potential for needing medical care, hospitalization, or funeral services which could result in someone else being unable to receive care is similar" reads as a (patently false) supposed fact.

There is no plausible future in which medical care needs to be rationed due to an overwhelming number of bicycle accidents.

The best thought experiments start with what may appear to be, or are in fact, false premises.

If you include indirect effects, lots and lots of our actions and choices become morally charged. It's a good thing to include that in one's thinking, at least if you want to get higher than average in terms of ethical thinking, but it quickly becomes untenable if taken as an absolute.

Opting for not taking the stairs and using an elevator instead probably has some kind of a statistical relationship to needing hospital care. Choosing a sport or physical activity that includes a greater risk if injury is, in some sense, ethically worse than choosing one that gives the same benefits with a lower statistical risk of causing strain on the healthcare system. Technically, if you live in an area where snow and ice are present in winter, wearing wrist braces (or maybe even a helmet) while walking would reduce your risk of needing medical care in case of a fall. (The need for medical care for injuries to limbs due to falls is an actual thing.)

It turns out most of these are actually social or personal choices. You can analyse the statistical risk and the expected cost to healthcare and end up with different costs for various activities, but just the fact that there is a statistical or potential cost matters little.

To extend it to covid, the vaccine doesn’t fully prevent transmission either. It reduces it (likely, I don’t think we’ve seen a robust study in this department), but since it’s not enough to reach herd immunity this point is moot

The argument has now become you’re taking up hospital beds because you didn’t get the vaccine. The same logic applies to not wearing a helmet.

And to take it further: are we ok with unvaccinated covid patients taking resources from those not wearing safety helmets, or vice versa?

The rate at which people catch covid and get hospitalized is incomparably higher to the rate that people are getting brain injuries from riding a bike.

You can use the same "philosophical experiment" to ban being fat or drinking alcohol.

> to ban being fat or drinking alcohol.

No, you can't. At least not unless you ignore research and still believe that weight gain and addiction are purely choices and can be morally condemned. See e.g. Addiction is a brain disease, and it matters: Leshner, A. I. (1997). Addiction is a brain disease, and it matters. Science (New York, N.Y.), 278(5335), 45–47. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.278.5335.45

Your amount of social interaction is also a choice that will dictate your ability to get Covid. Should be obvious that this is comparable to your example from the lockdowns that have been ineffective.

> the lockdowns that have been ineffective

In the US they were ineffective half-measures with little to no real teeth. In other countries they mitigated the pandemic within weeks by having lockdowns that sustained the people and organizations affected and were strict enough to mean something. Saying "amount of social interaction is also a choice" is only true when the lockdowns were performative and the choice was given. And now the US, which is less than 5% of the world population, accounts 14% of all deaths due to COVID-19, not counting excess deaths.

My point was more about social interaction - not the lockdowns. It's an example of how social interaction is clearly a choice as much as being fat, drinking, cycling, etc.

Almost everything is a choice but we have a system setup to incentivize people to do certain actions more than others... making certain choices easier to take on than others. That's the problem I'm having with your argument. Present better and easier options for people and they will take them.

> being fat

That is not a choice. The causes of obesity are complex.

That’s a valid point. How did you decide which rate crossed the line? A defined rate is needed to enforce this fairly.

To get ahead of this, I’m probably going to respond we should focus on combatting obesity over anything you can propose. The rate it’s consuming both hospital and other resources dwarfs nearly any other condition aside from old age.

Others can see you.

To the extent you mean "others will see your behavior and possibly emulate it as part of a social norm", you're correct. If a critical mass of bicyclists wears helmets, the social pressure to conform to helmet-wearing would result in higher rates. Conversely, saying, "I don't see anyone else wearing a helmet, why should I?" is also a consequence of social norms; norms can override rational risk/reward choices.

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