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Comment by AlbertCory | Hacker News Reader

If ever there was a deliberately-deceptive clickbait headline, this is it. Let's look at their overall conclusions:

1. A reduction in the number of cyclists on streets;

2. Financial struggle for popular bike sharing systems; and

3. More exposure among vulnerable populations to unnecessary interactions with police.

NONE of these support the clickbait headline. #1 and #2 say that MHLs reduce the number of cyclists. And #3 fails to control for "percent of populations who ride without helmets."

None of them say that a cyclist wearing a helmet is just as likely, or more likely, to get injured.

> The unfortunate truth is mandatory helmet laws simply don’t lead to their purported goal, which is to make streets safer.

No, that's never been the "purported goal." The goal is to protect people who already ARE cycling.

View on HN

This is a poor summary. The reduction in the number of cyclists is very easy to see as making things less safe for the remaining cyclists. The data is rather clear on that, oddly. The article even linked to the study they are basing that on at https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/02/27/safety-in-numbers-bik....

Do we know the full causal factors? I'd wager not. But it is a testable hypothesis as much as "mandating helmets will save lives is." Per the evidence of this article, that hypothesis is on much shakier ground than your post would allow.

The "reduction makes it less safe" is quite common. When something is "common and normal" everyone works around it, when something is rare nobody expects it.

This is why you can have less pedestrian fatalities in cities where everyone wanders into the roads seemingly haphazardly than in cities where there are fewer pedestrians and they usually cross with the lights.

Your article is statistically naive and doesn't prove anything like what you think it does.

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/02/27/safety-in-numbers-bik...

There are so many confounding factors in there that it would be laughed out of the room at any statistician conference.

No, it's not a "testable hypothesis." Maybe you can find a "natural experiment" where two localities are exactly alike, except one has a MHL and the other doesn't: like a city where two school districts with identical demographics are divided by an artificial barrier.

Even in your article, they admit the uncertainties:

> Do more people on bikes cause cycling to become safer, or does safer infrastructure attract more people to bike? There’s no conclusive evidence either way, but the answer is probably a mix of both.

I'd wager most of what they observed there is just "how well are cities build for cyclist" (prime example: Netherlands) and how competent average driver is (Germany) not some nebulous "safety in numbers"

The numbers lead to more bike infrastructure and safer riding conditions.

The truth is the opposite: more bike infrastructure and safer riding conditions with fewer barriers (e.g., mandatory helmet laws, cyclist licensing — another stupid idea that comes up with regularity) brings more cyclists.

Of course this is also the case. I am just saying it is hard to get cities to prioritize investments in cycling infrastructure without a large number of users.

bike infrastructure quality can be more important than quantity.

A lot of what we are getting for bike infrastructure in the US is horribly designed and often ends up being statistically more dangerous than no infrastructure at all.

A lot of our urban bike lanes, even the ones protected by barriers, fall into this trap. They make things safer in between intersections, but very few accidents happen in between intersections. But the poor design of the lanes causes increased risk AT the intersections. And the intersections were already where almost all the accidents happen. We have an epidemic of bike lanes designed by people who don't bike who have the irrational fear of being rear ended by a car as the #1 risk when that's actually one of the least common accidents.

The bad infrastructure puts more cyclists who don't really know what they are doing on the road and they don't understand the pitfalls of the lane design. So you don't see reduced bike-car collision rates.

> Your article is statistically naive and doesn't prove anything like what you think it does.

A major point here is that the burden of proof should be on the ones proposing to make something mandatory.

Intuitively you might think that mandating helmets would improve safety. But now we've got a plausible argument that it might not. At this point there should not be a mandate unless the proponents can conclusively prove that it actually helps.

Because if helmets make things safer, people are still free to wear them in the absence of a mandate. But if they don't, and you impose the mandate anyway, you are now actively causing harm that its victims have no way to mitigate.

Perhaps it should be left to the ER doctor’s discretion whether to save someone who chose not to wear a helmet.

Now do motorcycle helmets, and seatbelts.

Apologies, I should not have indicated that it "proves" that this is so. Rather, it does paint a convincing picture that something is there. It is akin to a smell test, if you will.

So, yes, lets debate the confounding factors. If you can name some factors, they should guide us in how we would build tests to explore them. I didn't claim it was easily testable, but it is certainly testable.

Things are "testable" when you can control all variables except one (in this case, MHL). This is rarely possible in real life, except when a natural experiment presents itself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_experiment

So in this case, it might be "the same city, before and after MHL was enacted." Then we could graph the number of cyclists and the number of injuries, and you'd have something.

I would argue that things are "easily" testable when you can control all of the variables. For most of history, we have rarely ever controlled all variables outside of the easy cases. Typically, we define away much of the extra stuff. That has not stopped us testing what we can, just be sure to disclose everything else. Obviously, things are more confidently testable if you have controlled all variables, but that would be a crippling condition.

Basically, following the link in wikipedia will get you to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_control which allows for "A scientific control is an experiment or observation designed to minimize the effects of variables other than the independent variable (i.e. confounding variables)." Which is much less strongly stated than what you have. The idea is still there, of course.

ok. It's not really a "crippling condition" when natural experiments do crop up from time to time, though.

For example: if Amsterdam suddenly had an MHL, that would be one. In fact, any city that instituted MHL would be a natural experiment. The number of riders, the number of accidents, the % of accidents that involve injuries -- all those things would change, while the city design and transit situation (other than bikes) presumably would not.

> The reduction in the number of cyclists is very easy to see as making things less safe for the remaining cyclists.

Perhaps that should be the headline then. "Mandatory Helmet Laws Make Cyclists Less Safe" implies that going helmet-free is safer than wearing a helmet. I get that there's a logical thread the writer is following re: fewer cyclists create a more dangerous environment -- we could also follow that logic when talking about rising bike prices or any number of things removed from the actual noggin-protecting benefits of helmets. Not sure I'd go so far as to call the headline "clickbait," but a more precise headline would've more accurately described the actual story (which was interesting to me, and I learned something).

No, it does not imply that. You may infer that, but you do so incorrectly. The sentence is clear, and is referring to "laws", not the usage you claim to be implied.

To add, if he had bothered to read the article, they say that wearing helmets is good.

You are right: The headline "Mandatory Helmet Laws Make Cyclists Less Safe" is accurate in that the article you're about to read is about the _laws_, not the helmets. I stand corrected!

You seem to be interested in this question: "If I bike without a helmet, how much more likely am I to be injured than if I bike with a helmet?". And of course, the answer is that you are safer with a helmet.

But the article is interested in a different question: "If I bike, how likely am I to be injured?".

This question is very heavily influenced by the ratio of bikes to cars on the road. More bikes leads to lower chance of injury for bicyclists.

"overall traffic safety" is not a goal for MHLs for bikes, or motorcyclists; or seatbelt laws for car riders. Your first paragraph's question is the only relevant part of that.

But, that's not correct either.

MHLs could increase my overall risk of cycling accident enough to offset any gain from wearing the helmet.

There are studies that show drivers go faster and closer to cyclists wearing helmets (vs those without helmets). That alone could increase the risk of deadly car-bike interaction enough to offset the gains from wearing the helmet.

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

Edit - either way, I'm all for separate, protecetetd bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure. That's the "real" solution here - get bikes and cars onto different roads and what drivers do or don't do ceases to be a problem (almost, we still get drunken idiots driving down our protected bike paths outside DC).

That's not a useful perspective. It doesn't matter what the goal of the law is; it matters what effect the law has.

I would put it this way: the article's information might be useful if you are trying to decide whether or not to bike.

But if you have decided to bike, the article's information in no way means you should not wear a helmet.

Unfortunately, the clickbait headline mixes up these two very different things.

The article isn't for either of those things. Mandatory helmet laws are a matter of public policy, they have nothing to do with individual people making individual decisions.

The article's information is useful if you are a voter or a politician trying to decide whether mandatory helmet laws will help to make your city a safe place for cyclists.

> The article isn't for either of those things.

You'd never know it from the clickbait headline.

> Mandatory helmet laws are a matter of public policy, they have nothing to do with individual people making individual decisions.

Public policy doesn't do anything by itself; all it does is determine the incentives that people face when making individual decisions to do or not do things. So correctly describing the effects of a public policy is very important to individual people trying to make individual decisions.

> all it does is determine the incentives

You say that like it's not a HUGE thing. Incentives will determine the entire transport ratios of a region.

Biking on freeways is for misfits and weirdos :)

> You say that like it's not a HUGE thing.

I said no such thing. Obviously incentives are important.

I'm just pointing out that incentives act on individuals making individual decisions. So to claim, as the GGP (not you) did, that public policy has nothing to do with individual decisions is simply wrong.

> You'd never know it from the clickbait headline.

What headline are you seeing? At the time of this comment, the clickbait headline is:

> > Mandatory helmet laws make cyclists less safe

Which is clearly relevant for:

> a voter or a politician trying to decide whether mandatory helmet laws will help to make your city a safe place for cyclists.

and not clearly relevant for individual people making individual decisions, whether about biking at all, or about wearing a helmet when they do. (It's obviously possible (even likely) that relevant information might show up, but the clickbait headline isn't actually claiming that.)

It's easy to interpret the headline as telling you what the article is actually saying...if you already know what the article is actually saying.

But my initial reaction on reading the headline was: "Huh? They're saying wearing a helmet makes you less safe? That doesn't make sense! A helmet protects your head." I suspect I'm not alone (at least one other poster in this discussion has called the headline "deliberately deceptive clickbait", which is an even stronger claim than just "clickbait").

What would be the correct article title, that wouldn't be like a paper abstract?

How about "Public policy on helmet laws has unintended consequences"?

If you have already decided to bike, the article's information means that passing a mandatory helmet law is expected to make you less safe, because the effect of having less bikers causing less safety outweighs the effect of motivating you to wear the helmet more often.

> If you have already decided to bike, the article's information means that passing a mandatory helmet law is expected to make you less safe

You can change your decision of whether to bike or not based on information about the effects of mandatory helmet laws. Some people might choose not to bike any more based on that information.

But if, taking the effects of those laws into account, you still decide to bike, the article says nothing to contradict the obvious common sense that you'll still be better off wearing a helmet than not.

As I see the title (just in case it has been changed), it is "Turns Out, Mandatory Helmet Laws Make Cyclists Less Safe".

This simply doesn't indicate that wearing a helmet makes cycling less safe. Perhaps someone might misread it that way, but that would be a mistake in terms of both logic and rhetoric.

The choice to ride with or without a helmet is different for different people. It depends on where you are going, how many other bikers take that route, how fast you will bike, to what extent is it biking in traffic and what just bike trails, and also have you been there before, and do:you think:you should always wear a helmet. One weird factor is that people (car drivers and bike riders) have a certain tolerance to risk, so cars will get closer if you have a helmet on.

https://www.bicyclelawyer.com/cycling-law-blog/study-shows-c...

I bet that people also drive with a bit more risk tolerance when they are wearing a helmet than otherwise, and of course more likely to get that helmet for a fast, risky, fun ride than a quick trip to the grocery store.

Interestingly, if you are seeking to reduce your personal odds of dying, it is a no brainer to bike. The cardiovascular health benefits outweigh the chance for getting hit by a car.

Edit: add the link

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2031394/Cycling-w...

The title is a little misleading in common language, but is technically correct.

There are multiple aspects that lead to mandatory helmet laws causing in lower safety for cyclists.(many laws have a side-effect of making some group of people less safe)

Read the title three times and tell me where it says that helmets make cyclists less safe?

But that problem can be addressed in other ways - primarily better infrastructure (though I'd like to see better driver education too, e.g. as per the Netherlands where drivers are encouraged to open doors while parked in a manner that ensures they see any oncoming cyclists before doing so). We have MHL where I live and while I think there's a good argument for relaxing them at least for certain cases, I am grateful for having grown up in a culture where wearing a helmet is expected/ normal while riding a bike - they've certainly saved me from more serious injuries multiple times (including cases where I've hit the top of my head on branches etc. while riding!). But the fact that so few places in the world do have such legislation is telling - if a law truly is effective with limited downsides it tends to get adopted far more universally.

The infrastructure doesn't get built until you have large demand from existing cyclists.

Building out better infrastructure is usually the most effective way to increase the number of people cycling (and to make it safer for those already doing so).

Politicians usually don't do anything unless they see a demand for it on their citizenship. Just hoping they will build better infrastructure is naive. And if you want to increase the number of cyclists, laws that make it harder, like helmet requirements, will of course slow the demand.

Politicians have access to the studies showing that such infrastructure when built has the desired effect, and studies showing that the number one reason people don't cycle more is that they feel unsafe riding among traffic, regardless of helmets. Governments have the job of providing infrastructure to enable cities to function, and in many cases better bicycle infrastructure is the cheapest way to achieve it.

They ignore it as long as there is a vocal contingent of people against cycling infrastructure because of cost or because it may create a slight disruption to a car.

Some do, sure. But thankfully at least where I live governments (both state and local-level) have seen the benefits of improving cycling infrastructure and are continuing to do so. A good many car drivers are quite happy to not have to share roads with bikes too! Well-built cycling infrastructure makes roads better for all users, esp. if it can reduce the number of unnecessary car trips.

There also studies about how car on-ramps can be built, how sidewalks should be routed, how schools should be organized, etc. etc.

And money has to be split between all those things. A government has to provide for its people’s needs and if its people show no interest in cycling, some other more pressing problem is going to take priority

They do build bridges for cars even where no one is swimming across, though.

but would you have hit your head if you weren't wearing a helmet? maybe you would have been more cautious! maybe people are slightly more careless/risk taking when they take certain safety measures?

Cars in the 1950s had what amounted to spikes in the middle of the steering wheel and it didn't cause people to be more careful.

> And of course, the answer is that you are safer with a helmet.

I'm not claiming you're wrong, just that it's not a home-run "of course": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation

I agree, they don't do a fantastic job of justifying the title. However, #1 and #2 are related, and the article does try to explain why they cause less safety. More people biking means both fewer cars, and people driving cars are more aware of bikers.

> Safety in Numbers is a straightforward concept: More people on bikes creates safer conditions on our streets. The National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO), which represents professional planners from 81 cities from around the United States, pointed this out in their own pushback on NTSB’s recommendations.

If you follow the links in the article you'll come to some actual research about the topic https://www.bmj.com/content/332/7543/722.2.

As someone that has commuted through urban and industrial environments for years on bicycle I don't care what statistics say about assertions and possible changing circumstances for cyclists safety.

Wear a helmet. Your skull doesn't care about this study.

And titles like could lead to people to thinking that they won't need one. Which is unsafe for cyclists.

I want you to read that a bit more slowly. And then explain to me how this isn't a paraphrase of "I don't believe in science and studying things."

It would help if you ack that the article encourages helmets. They are not trying to say to not wear them. They are arguing that the practicalities of how "mandates" work out cause more issues than they solve.

I, for one, fully accept that "more studies" would be good. I also always wear a helmet. I don't think either of those are good rebuttals. And any blanket statement of "I don't care what evidence there is," is almost certainly the wrong foot to be on.

People are surprisingly bad about reading words and instead reading something entirely different.

It's clear from even the short HN title that we're talking about making helmets mandatory by law, not whether you should wear them.

> And then explain to me how this isn't a paraphrase of "I don't believe in science and studying things."

I think a more accurate description would be "I don't waste my time with bad science and sealioning" (of which I accuse the article, not you).

Take the "dropped precipitously" link from the article. Does it link to an article about the before-and-after effects of the helmet mandates in Sydney in Melbourne? No. Does it talk about a drop in bicycle usage, irrespective of any relation to the mandates? Also no. It's an uninstrumented observational article about the lack of adoption (specifically) of bike share programs in several Australian cities, with no meaningful analysis of policy-based or temporal factors (outside of the changing coverage areas of the bikeshare companies). That study has zero relation to the claim for which the posted article cites it. Trying to pass it off as if it does is entirely in bad faith.

Articles like the one linked in the OP are a dime a dozen, and disregarding them based on simple heuristics is a good use of everyone's time. If one has a bold scientific claim to make, they should either present the data alongside the article in which they make the statement, or accompany it with a peer-reviewed article that does.

I am sympathetic to the concern here. But you would do a much better task by attacking the stats, not by blanket dismissal of the ideas.

Following a few links from the main article easily gets to https://www.seattlebikeblog.com/2017/09/01/missing-the-fores..., which has https://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/06/13/wapo-is-wrong-head-in..., and ultimately points to there being something with just getting more folks on bikes. Especially for short trips that are likely the norm for bike share systems.

There is some intuitive sense to this. Is why short bus rides don't require seatbelts. (Though, I confess I can't remember the rules for cross state busses. https://www.cga.ct.gov/2016/rpt/2016-R-0318.htm has some info on school busses, but I'm not entirely clear that is applicable here. Except in as much as it is clear that comparing helmet laws to seatbelt ones is... dubious.)

Again, if you have legit complaints, make them. If you feel safer wearing safety gear at a personal level, you are correct. If you think that safety gear at a society level is a no brainer, I challenge you on that assertion.

I don't believe I ever dismissed the idea. I dismiss the bad-faith article about the idea.

Fair. I mostly read the dismissal as only based on the headline, which I feel is still unfair. But, I can take responsibility on that uncharitable read. Apologies.

Cracked bikehelmet this morning due to black ice, still f'd due to hurting my foot badly when going down but honestly... without a bike helmet I would be in hospital for sure.

Without a bike helmet perhaps your confidence would better match your surroundings eg: black ice. If I biked all winter in full hockey gear I’m certain I would fall more often because I would not be scared to death of slipping on black ice and getting running over by the truck behind me

the point here is very simple: have you ever crossed a street on bicycle alone? and have you ever crossed the same street in a group of bicycles?

THIS is the real difference.

I don't see your point. If I cross the street in a group, I pay more attention to others in my group as opposed to approaching traffic. That would be less safe in my opinion because I'm relying on someone else's judgement who may also be distracted by the group.

> I don't care what statistics say about assertions and possible changing circumstances for cyclists safety.

Why not? Shouldn't we want to increase cyclist safety? Wearing helmets does that, both the data and common-sense concur here. But article was making a different claim. We shouldn't have laws MANDATING helmet use due to unintended side-effects actually producing more net-harm than the whatever deterrence impact the laws have in increasing helmet use. This is really not an obvious conclusion and requires reviewing the empiric data - but I suspect it is right.

> And titles like could lead to people to thinking that they won't need one.

Yes - the title is badly phrased. They are trying to present a subtle, nuanced argument that is not-obvious to a casual reader scanning headlines or even an article summary.

So absolutely everyone should wear a helmet, and absolutely nobody should be required to wear a helmet. There must be a name of this sort of paradox.

Yes, it's called reality. It's only a paradox for obsessive right brains, pushing their glasses up their noses, pointing their fingers in the skys, grunting smacking noises, semantics!

Multiple things can be true at once. MHL hurt cyclists, and having a helmet on makes your head hurt less when you fall.

Cyclist safety is _not_ an individual responsibility. It's a collective one. Mandatory helmets promote a state of affairs where cycling is considered a leisure opt-in activity, a fig leaf for shameless victim blaming when drivers do run into a cyclist (should have worn a helmet har har). The collective psychology of drivers, - reckless, inconsiderate, entitled - combined with a street design that actively encourages speeding and reptile-brain fueled jostling for position is what is hurting cyclists. This is why mandatory helmet laws are harmful, they are actively nurture a deadly collective mindset.

Plus, we are not making drivers where helmets. In a crash, having their head packaged inside a helmet will benefit drivers too. So maybe let's start there.

I agree with your collective argument - but safety is _also_ an individual responsibility. People should still wear helmets for their own safety, if they determine that it makes sense for them.

Yeah you're right, it's an individual responsibility as well, I was writing a little too cavalier. The true danger, death and mutilation, the one that is scaring people of riding altogether, is coming from drivers mostly though.

No:

1) Everybody SHOULD, for their own benefit, wear a helmet.

2) Nobody should be REQUIRED BY LAW to wear a helmet

There is no paradox, unless you assume that every good thing thing should be mandated by law and every bad thing regulated. I was actually surprised to read this article and discover the arguments against the helmet law mandates. Usually the argument is something like: "yes mandates save lives, but freedom is more import." But this argument was different -- do to complex system interactions removing the mandate saves lives on net. So, with or without laws most regular riders are going to wear helmets. However, just one example from the article, with the laws there are fewer people riding which makes the roads less safe for bikers. Lots of bikers promotes awareness of bikers by drivers, and encourages infrastructure investment, and prevents thus prevents accidents. We have data that shows this happens in practice. It also encourages both helmet and non-helmet wearing bikeshare adoptees, which in-turn also creates ridership, and a culture of bikeriders, which in turn reduces accidents. So even while you have more non-helmet wearing riders (which is a small fraction of riders) it reduces the _conditions_ that cause accidents sufficiently that there are on-net fewer accidents.

The society with the most cyclists disagrees with you. I'm confident their bike safety record is better than countries with mandatory helmet laws.

https://www.google.com/search?q=dutch+cyclists+don%27t+wear+...

Your argument that you're safer with a helmet might be true but you're probably being hypocritical in that there are plenty of things you do in life where you'd be safer with a helmet were you don't personally wear a helmet. Apparently you'd be ok if the government forced you to where a helmet at all times except sleeping because by the same argument, it's safer to walk with a helmet than without therefore there should be a law requiring it

The article goes on to explain why these conclusions make cyclists less safe.

Basically, the only reason that bicycling is unsafe is cars. Cars are only a threat to cyclists when they share the same roads, which is only a problem because not enough people bike. The best way to ensure safety for cyclists is for there to be dedicated bike infrastructure that is completely separated from car infrastructure, and that's only going to happen once enough people switch to biking.

>None of them say that a cyclist wearing a helmet is just as likely, or more likely, to get injured.

That is not said or implied by the headline.

> The goal is to protect people who already ARE cycling.

If that's true, it's an idiotic and shortsighted goal. We have to do better than that- the goal should be to promote bicycling as a safe and accessible alternative to driving for everyone. 8-year-old children should be free to bike to school unsupervised without the risk of getting hit by a car. Mandatory helmet laws don't solve the problem, they make it worse.

> Basically, the only reason that bicycling is unsafe is cars.

How is that true? I fall off my bike and hit my helmet on pavement once every couple of years or so. I am quite thankful I wear a helmet regularly.

Bicycling is of course much safer with less cars.

> I fall off my bike and hit my helmet on pavement once every couple of years or so.

That seems extremely unusual. Are you MTBing / using skateparks / etc?

> That seems extremely unusual. Are you MTBing / using skateparks / etc?

No, just riding around streets. Typically from a large stone or something in the walkway, or I try to jump a curb and miss it by a bit.

I don't have the best balance in the world.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> > I fall off my bike and hit my helmet on pavement once every couple of years or so.

> That seems extremely unusual. Are you MTBing / using skateparks / etc?

As someone who commutes exclusively by bicycle and who goes on 80+ mile rides on the weekend, I used to hit the pavement about once a year. I now ride with elbow pads in addition to a helmet, and I think I've developed a pretty good instinct for what could go sideways. I don't have control over every factor, and being a normal animal that gets tired or distracted, I expect falls to happen again in the future.

Some of the ways I've hit the ground include hitting a patch of icy road after 3 days of 50+F temps because that spot happened to be covered by shadow no matter where the sun was that time of year, hitting a small wet metal grate at the entrance to my employer's parking garage where the bike cage is, and the driver of a truck passing too close and hitting my hand which was out signaling my intention to turn.

Speaking nothing of the hundreds of times I've identified a hazard and avoided it by adjusting my road position, slowing down, bunny hopping, or sometimes even stopping and dismounting when I'm in the middle of the stroad (once when I found myself in a mess of overlapping streetcar tracks all around me). But even with a 99.9% success rate at responding to hazards correctly in the moment, I can expect to fail once every 1,000 hazards or so. That's why I wear protective gear.

Sounds like you ride pretty serious distances. Do you also ride them at serious speeds? Most people ride at a very relaxed pace, about 15 kph or so, and don't really fall off their bike except while learning or in traffic accidents. But if you go 30 kph regularly, that significantly increases the speed at which unexpected things happen, reduces your time to react, and increases the speed at which you hit the pavement if you fall.

Speed matters a lot. There's a good reason why most bike racers wear helmets, while most regular city bikers or leisurely bikers do not.

Mind you, I've fallen a couple of times too (usually in icy or otherwise slippery conditions I wasn't properly accounting for at the time). But never hit my head. Worst I think was when I scraped my hands as a kid.

> Do you also ride them at serious speeds?

There's a hill near my house where I used to regularly hit 70kph. There's a super-sketchy cross street right at the bottom of that hill with motorists always trying to white-knuckle gun it into traffic, so I've stopped doing that.

For all of my crashes I was going at or under 15kph. Which is probably why I'm still here to tell you all about it.

70 kph definitely sounds like helmet speed to me. Though I admit as a kid I was sometimes clocked (by someone with a speedometer) at 40-50 kph on my city bike on slight downward slopes, and I never wore a helmet. But those were only brief bits under fairly optimal circumstances. The last couple of times I fell (less than a handful over the past 30 years) were all extremely icy road conditions. Almost all, because I just remember one where a car brutally cut me off turning into a side street while I was barreling down the road at pretty extreme speed. I avoided a collision by making an extremely tight turn into the same side street. That was a street that really should have had a separate bike path.

(I think it was here [0], though I don't remember crossing that raised sidewalk; maybe they changed that since then, or I misremember.)

[0] https://www.google.com/maps/@52.3507984,4.854121,3a,75y,108....

The article directly addresses your first point. More cyclists on the streets means individual cyclists are safer. There are a couple of factors at work there:

* More bikes means less cars, and cars are dangerous. Less cars means less danger.

* More bikes means car drivers are more used to seeing bikes, more likely to expect and consider bikes, and will take bike traffic more seriously.

* More bikes also makes bike-specific infrastructure more attractive to invest in. The city isn't going to build a separate bike path for a single biker, but for a thousand, they might.

Countries with the highest bike safety don't have mandatory helmet laws. Of course that's partially because those mandatory helmet laws are simply less necessary there, but also because they've found more effective ways to make bikes safer, while stimulating instead of discouraging bike use.

> No, that's never been the "purported goal." The goal is to protect people who already ARE cycling.

The real goal is often to reduce the number of people biking. This is why there is strong correlation between supporting mandatory helmet laws (and bicycle taxes, license plates and mandatory training) and opposing safe infrastructure such as segregated bike lanes.

MHLs also put the burden back on the vulnerable road users, allowing spineless politicians to blame the victims.

> The real goal is often to reduce the number of people biking

Where is the evidence of that intention? This seems more like the case of unintended side-effects to me.

No strong evidence but this things* come from people really disliking cyclists, at least in my experience.

*supporting mandatory helmet laws, mandatory insurance on bicycles, other bicycle taxes, license plates on bicycles and applying car-related legal requirements in general, requiring driving license to use bicycle, ban on cycling by children, opposing safe infrastructure such as segregated bike lanes, opposing any bicycle infrastructure, wanting to ban cycling on roads, wanting to remove cycleways.

> The goal is to protect people who already ARE cycling.

if you have 4x as many people on bikes, the cyclists with helmets are safer due to the "safety in numbers" effect. If you've done any urban bike riding you'd see this is obviously true.

When there are more cyclists on the streets, car drivers are used to taking care of them, so its safer for the individual cyclist. Also, for many people, being safe includes not getting stopped by police. It's a different kind of safety, yes. This isn't really hard to see, so i think your hate of clickbait is clouding your vision. There is no deception, mandatory helmet laws make cyclists less safe. At least that is the authors opinion.

There is a trend of increased incidence of severe injuries when wearing a cycling helmet in countries that introduced mandatory helmets.

EDIT: Evidence: https://road.cc/content/news/268605-wearing-cycle-helmet-may...

This is without any supporting evidence, where one would expect some. What do you mean "a trend" ?

Do you mean "more injuries overall" or "more injuries per cyclist"? Or something else entirely?

Number of cyclists on the streets is incredibly important to safety. If drivers aren't expecting cyclists they pay less attention to them and aren't as practiced in how to drive safely around cyclists.

Perhaps, but cars aren't the only hazards bikes face. Bikes wipe out on ice, on potholes, on stopping suddenly and flipping over the handlebars when a pedestrian steps out in front of you (biker's fault, yes, but I've seen this happen). Without a helmet, an otherwise minor accident can result in serious brain damage, car or no car.

It's also possible to have mandatory helmet laws and still have lots of cyclists. Vancouver Canada is a good example. Lots of cyclists. Good cycling infrastructure. Mandatory helmets. They do get black ice.

Maybe we should just make helmets mandatory for drivers. Then perhaps they'll hop on a bicycle instead.

There's a really big difference between cars and other hazards. All the other hazards for a cyclist are them hitting something which is a lot safer than them being hit by a vehicle that weighs a ton or two.

The ground weighs a lot more than two tons. It really depends on speed, and hitting the ground hard can be very deadly -- especially without a helmet.

I'm solidly on team helmet but F=ma is dominated by several tons of SUV. It's really hard for almost any other situation to reach the same energy levels and on average that's what determines how severe an impact is.

That's true if and only if the SUV is moving at a high relative speed. Otherwise an SUV will not out-inertia the Earth or anything bolted to it, like a concrete paver, a brick wall, or a lamppost. And yes, if the car hits you at a high speed, you're no better off than a pedestrian and the helmet is unlikely to help.

But without a helmet, it really doesn't require much energy for a head strike to be a fatal or life-changing injury. If riders face a baseline risk from non-car collisions, there's a strong case to be made for mandatory helmets, even if it means the risk from car collisions increase.

one thing you're missing is that the ground always hits you from the same direction, and you always have a bit of warning. the dangerous car hits are being hit from the side which can happen without any warning.

That is true only if the SUV is moving quickly. It would still be true regardless of whether the SUV weighs a hundred tons or a hundred grams. I'm not missing it.

Hitting things other than cars is what helmets are good for. If you are in a bike-car accident no helmet will protect you - you need a several ton cage around you if you want a chance. (motorcycles face the same issue). However there are a lot of things other than cars that you can get in a bike accident with, and most of those are things where helmets are helpful.

If I could get significant discounts on health or car insurance by wearing a helmet I would (though I'm not sure I'd fit in most cars with a helmet on).

#1 supports their argument that a cyclist is more likely to be involved in a vehicular accident and therefore more likely to suffer an injury with mandatory helmet laws.

Less overall cyclists means less visibility and less awareness by motorists (ie. if you encounter less bikes, you're less likely to watch out for them)

> The goal is to protect people who already ARE cycling.

By forcing them to either abandon cycling or become criminals?

We increasingly see dangerous substances being made legal while still pushing for the criminalization of getting from A to B.

I hope they make you wear a helmet on the sidewalk too. I only want you to be protected.

> By forcing them to either abandon cycling or become criminals?

They have a third option: suck it up and comply with the law.

And why shouldn't I be allowed to risk my life the way I see fit? Who am I endangering by cycling without a helmet?

Who am I endangering by driving without a seatbelt?

You should also be allowed to do that.

Wearing a seatbelt might free up a hospital bed for someone else.

You are: 1. Consuming medical and emergency resources by creating easily preventable severe injuries 2. Raising raising insurance premiums or burdening public hospitals with the same 3. Potentially burdening the legal system (with a higher likelihood of insurance disputes and because more severe injuries are correlated with a higher probability of a lawsuit against other driver) 4. Endangering your passengers (possibly your children) by making it likely you will be unconscious or less able to get them to safety after a collision and teaching them habits that will make them more likely to die in an accident over the course of their lifetime So, yes, it's completely reasonable for society to impose almost zero cost on you to fasten a seatbelt in exchange for avoiding potentially huge externalities.

the argument is that mandatory helmet laws make cyclists less safe, not that simply wearing a helmet makes one unsafe. i don't see what is misleading. yes it is an attention-grabbing headline but it is supported by the article.

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

Missing from this is any proof of a connection between "close passes" and injuries:

"The new paper from Walker also re-affirms that wearing a helmet was indeed associated with more “close” passes when you take into consideration that in some places, the law dictates more than one meter of room."

and any increase in accidents, let alone injury accidents.

It seems obvious to me that if drivers are passing closer, then there's less room for error, either by the driver not judging distance or the cyclist needing to avoid a pothole etc. There's also the intimidation factor - a lot of people are put off from cycling due to not feeling safe, and having vehicles pass at speed within a metre is extremely scary.

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