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Comment by retrac | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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”.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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 ;)

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.

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