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Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

As a few sibling posts have said, the point is that all else is clearly not equal. For whatever reason, there are places with more bike ridership and fewer deaths. This /despite/ not having helmet mandates. Indeed, the data seems to indicate that helmet mandates go so far as to make all bikers less safe.

The argument you are making is appealing, to be sure. I'd even go so far as to say I agree with it. Strictly, it is a non-sequitur to the point that is being made.

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> data seems to indicate that helmet mandates go so far as to make all bikers less safe

The only mention I saw of this in the article is a study where the cyclist wearing a helmet had a shorter average distance between bike and car than when not wearing a helmet.

Do you have another source, or are we going to base legislation on one study by one individual in one city?

The impression that I got was helmet laws make people feel like biking is default unsafe, which leads to less bikers, which leads to less visibility and less isolation of bikers (no demand, no tax dollars spent on infrastructure).

If you want safe biking, you need visibility and isolation. The visibility here is helped by, say, biker wearing blinking lights and reflectors. But also, just having constant presence of bikers on the road such that drivers get used to sharing it. The isolation is space between bikes and 3000+ pound hunks of accelerating metal, e.g. dedicated bike lines / bike barriers.

This is somewhat comparing the wrong metrics. The more people you have not driving a car and instead on a bike, the safer everyone is. Exactly like the more people you have out of a car and on a bus.

The bus is an easy comparison, as even on a bus, you would be safer with a seatbelt. But the added danger of not having a seatbelt is more than offset by the reduction in cars.

In my phone now, so not digging hard. Last time this came up there were quite a few studies linked.

I'll note that the one you referenced is not really that interesting. Trying to get individual behavior out of it may work, but it is the population wide metrics that were telling.

And this is absolutely no different than cars. Your gut is probably that we require seatbelts. But school buses are a glaring omission from that is. Public transit, in general. Even works on boating. When taking a ferry, just a boat, we do not require active vest usage.

Would they make you safer? Probably yes in both cases. Is it the needle mover in population wide metrics? Getting people out of an individual's vehicle and into a community one is seen as more important for safety. Similar logic seems to apply to bikes. Get people out of cars and onto bikes. Whatever increase in danger you may see in lax helmet laws could be offset by them not being in a car.

The article links to https://usa.streetsblog.org/2016/06/02/why-helmets-arent-the..., which positively correlates helmet wearing with fatality rate. Of course, correlation is not causation, and you could logically argue that most of the causation is the other way around, i.e. an unsafe biking environment induces wearing helmets - but at the very least wearing helmets doesn't seem to solve the issue.

The part where the other direction of the causation probably crops up is that, when a society focuses on wearing helmets for biking safety, biking safety will be lower than in societies that focus on biking infrastructure.

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