Hacker News Reader

Comment by jorma75 | Hacker News Reader

You should really wear a helmet 24/7!! Also body armor. Listening to music on a bike is clearly suicide. Please do not take ANY risks. At all, ever.

Also, become an entrepreneur. Take the plunge. Live your dream.

View on HN

Well one of the common "why not try it" arguments for entrepreneurship is that even if your company fails, you're not going to die.

But if you fail when riding a bike on a busy street, you might very well die.

What's the benefit of not wearing a helmet when biking?

The same benefit as not wearing a seatbelt in the car. You feel more free, less restrained. I've cycled across half of Japan without a helmet and I did not feel in danger even for a single moment. Then I did one trip in Central London and vowed never to cycle without a helmet again.

Oh, okay, I can buy that. Guess I'm thinking like a city rider. I used to read a lot of bike blogs in SF and in almost every case where the biker was seriously injured, they were not wearing a helmet.

I have problems with the general tendency of always minimizing risk. When did risk become something to avoid at all cost? Follow that path and you end up avoiding everything that makes life worth living. It's not about whether you should wear a helmet on a bike. It's about accepting the fact that you are going to die and stop worrying about it and start living.

I don't want to die but I'm not going to let the risk of dying get in the way of living. BTW I wear helmets when skydiving and riding my motorcycle :)

I think it's one thing to overly minimize risk, it's another entirely to take stupid risks where the payoff doesn't match the risk. I play sports and get injured from time to time (I am still healing from an ankle injury sustained months ago), but it's worth it given how much fun I have - but I still bought shin guards because getting taken out for a week because of a bad kick just isn't worth it (that's more time I could be playing soccer, for instance). It's the same thinking with bike helmets. I want to be around to bike more.

The benefit? You're not sending out the message that biking is dangerous. Would you send your kid out cycling if everyone is wearing helmets? When cyclists are called "road warriors"?

A helmet is necessary when road racing where there is a distinct risk of dropping over your handlebar: remember, a helmet only protects against hits directly on the top of your head.

Normal commuting? In the city? Biggest risk is getting hit in your soft side by a car or tipping over and hitting the road with your legs or hand or so. Where does the helmet help there?

Best protection: more cyclists on the road. Nobody in the Netherlands wears a helmet (apart from road racers) and you don't get 2000 killed cyclists per day :-)

A modern helmet protects more than 'directly on the top of your head', it absorbs energy any time it hits the ground before your skull.

Not sure where you get your info, but it is flat out wrong. It's not at all uncommon for bicycle commuters to hit an opening door or pulling out car, go over the handlebars, and smack their head on a very hard window or body panel--right where a helmet would protect them.

Ask any ER physician in a city (I know several) about head injuries from bike commuting and they will no doubt have stories.

As for sending the message that biking is dangerous: biking is dangerous. The correct message for kids to learn is that most things in life worth doing are dangerous, and the key to a successful life is learning to properly manage risk. Wearing a helmet is part of properly managing the risk of riding a bike.

Depend on the country, or more likely on the amount of cyclists. In the Netherlands, they consider the 1000kg steel cars to be the real dangerous threat, not the cyclists. It may sound like a play of words, but it isn't. Everyone cycles, so when you hit a junior cylist, you've pretty much potentially hit everyone's kid. People have been known to get a veritable witch hunt on their asses by local newspapers that way.

The car driver gets the blame, not the cyclist that forgot to wear a helmet.

So the key to safe biking is lots of bikes. Sadly, dressing up like for an execution ("I will get hit by a car door and the car owner can just say sorry and move on so I'll wear body armor") won't get society nowhere.

Note that it might very well be an individual's best choice in some countries, probably also in yours... But it is a sad best choice.

It's not about blame, it's about preventable injury. It's about reducing the chance you'll get a call from the hospital saying "your kid has had a bike accident and she is in a coma." I've had friends who work in ERs have to make those calls. In many cases if the kid had been wearing a helmet they would have had a mild concussion. Instead their life as they knew it is over.

If you don't want to wear a helmet, that is of course your decision. I just object--strongly--to your contention that helmets aren't necessary in commuting. That statement is just not based on any measurable facts.

Wearing a helmet is attacking the symptom and not the cause. The cause is that you're biking in a bike-unfriendly environment where the odds are against you. A better solution would be to educate drivers better and assign them more responsibility if something goes wrong, and introduce bike lanes etc.

It's one less thing you have to do before you can get on with riding. If you want to drive, you put your key in the ignition and go. If you're cycling, you need special shorts, a water bottle, a lock, check your tire pressure, pull it down from the rack in your garage, get your helmet... the list can go on.

Or, have a beater sitting outside with 60psi, forget the helmet, wear your jeans and just get on with it. The longer distance you ride, the more extraneous stuff become necessary, but it's still nice to avoid it if you can.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com