Forcing Helmets on Cyclists Would Crush Bicycle Use, Says UK Transport Minister
forbes.com
forbes.com
Nobody in the Netherlands bikes with a helmet, and it is incredibly safe to bike here (around 10X fewer fatalities per KM ridden than in the US). If you want evidence that biking without a helmet is perfectly safe - there you go. A case study done by an entire country with 18 million inhabitants for a period of 100+ years.
Bike safety is an infrastructure problem. Nothing else.
Wearing a helmet will not make up for bad infrastructure - biking with bad infrastructure and a helmet is still incredibly dangerous. After you have good infrastructure, biking is already safe, especially when you use a Dutch bike that forces you to sit upright [1] making it far less likely you will fall on your head.
Wearing a helmet might improve safety by a marginal amount beyond that - but so would wearing a helmet while walking, or wearing a helmet while in a car.
Comparing helmets to seat belts is nonsensical. A seat belt is attached to your car. A helmet has to be carried with you after you leave your bike. Once you use a bike for everything that means you must carry a large helmet with you everywhere you go. It is very inconvenient for people that actually use bikes as their daily mode of transportation, from going to work to going grocery shopping to going to the gym.
I see a lot of helmets with holes in them... I wonder if it couldn't be made easier to run bike locks through them and leave them chained/locked to your bike while you're away.
What is the rate for non-fatal yet debilitating head injuries?
Personally I wear a helmet biking around "safe" areas to reduce the likelihood of serious head injuries, such as those that might be incurred if another cyclist collides with you, or if you fall to the ground somehow.
Ski/snowboard helmets seem like a decent idea as well.
Circumstances where helmet use is an issue: Very cold weather where you may have enough warm stuff on your head that the helmet rides too high (I wear it anyway) and fancy hairdos that would be crushed by a helmet - not an issue in my country since the sporty set that rides has little overlap with the fancy hairdo set - may be different in which bike commuting is more encultured.
You might think so, especially if you are someone who is comfortable wearing a bicycle helmet; but in practice, sensible or not, helmet mandates do have a long-term impact on ridership rates.
In Seattle, where I live, the county board of health recently repealed the helmet law, because thirty years of experience showed that it did more harm than good.
As an individual, you should of course choose to improve your safety by wearing a helmet; as a society, however, safety in numbers has much more of an effect than helmet-wearing behavior, and the safest policy choices are therefore those which eliminate barriers and encourage the greatest number of people to ride bicycles, as often as possible.
I don't necessarily agree with a helmet mandate (I think adults have the right to exercise their own judgment on whether or not a given piece of equipment is necessary for one's own safety, so long as it doesn't put others at greater risk of harm), but this particular objection doesn't seem like it's rooted in reality.
I find it strange that someone in the UK can argue that requiring bicycle helmets is the best way forward, or even one of the ten best things to do, when two neighbouring countries have had massively more success than the UK, and and those two don't require helmets, or even use helmets very much.
I wear helmet. It's not that. I just find it strange that it's politically possible to say things that are so weird when you look at them from the viewpoint of a neighbouring country.
A written parliamentary question sounds like a fairly serious thing? Not exactly shitposting.
I think it's because these arguments generally are bad-faith attempts to distract from doing things that would be effective. Most of these people aren't interested in more or safer cycling.
The real audience for this MP are the people out there who would prefer to blame cyclists for everything including their own demise.
Helmets became mandatory for motorbikes on 7 February 1973.
Motorcycle helmets also offer other useful benefits beyond extra protection in a crash that make them desirable (see https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/wfrik2/d...)