I have a bike helmet but only wear it for some rides - i.e. the long-distance or fast ones. When I ride into town for shopping, I don't wear it. I hope it will always remain my personal choice.
Anyway, the arguments are:
a) Mandatory bike helmets mean you can't run a bike-share scheme because who wants to wear a much-used sweaty helmet? How can the people running the scheme sanitise them?
b) Mandatory bike helmets put people off riding. They are inconvenient to carry around with you if you cycle to get somewhere (work, meeting, lunch date, etc) rather than just for recreation. It's estimated that 30% of cyclists (in Melbourne, I think) stopped cycling when helmets became mandatory. This is hailed as a success by politicians in Australia because cycling fatalities also fell by 30%. Miracle!
c) They probably don't protect you that much - anything over 12mph or a collision with something other than the pavement, and they're not guaranteed to do anything to help you. (Specialized helmets are made to the older Snell standard, which is a bit safer; I have a Specialized.)
d) They give the impression that cycling is super-dangerous and you need all sorts of safety gear, which puts people off. In some areas, it is dangerous (I'm thinking parts of the US which seem actively cyclist-hostile) but the risks of inactivity (heart disease, diabetes, stroke, etc) outweigh the very slight risk of traumatic head injury, in many parts of Europe at least. So, get people on bikes regardless, you'll save lives as people become fitter from cycling.
e) More of a political point, but the main danger of riding a bike comes from reckless or distracted motorists. Helmets represent masking the symptoms rather than dealing with the real problem. They also shift the blame from dangerous drivers to cyclists: how many times do we see descriptions of car-on-bike collisions with the stock phrase "the cyclist was not wearing a helmet"? Victim blaming, especially in cases where the cyclist was crushed to death by a 30-ton vehicle (little bit of polystyrene won't fix that, sorry).
The main ways I protect myself when riding are visibility (always use bright lights, my back light can be seen even in bright sunlight) and safe, assertive riding (e.g. taking the lane when necessary, approaching a junction for example). So many cyclists fail badly at safe riding that I think mandatory training would be better than mandatory helmets. But really I don't support either. For me, cycling is a safe activity and a helmet is usually not needed.
+1. Mandatory training or some of kind education or just plain warning/ticketing bikers for riding unsafely is a key point. Just as there are a ton of inattentive drivers, there are a ton of inattentive bicyclists that do not ride defensively and put themselves in unnecessary dangerous situations.
> a) Mandatory bike helmets mean you can't run a bike-share scheme because who wants to wear a much-used sweaty helmet? How can the people running the scheme sanitise them?
The idea being tossed around in Vancouver is to have a helmet rental station integrated with the bike station that will steam-sanitize the helmets. The bike share implementation date has already slipped a year from original plan of spring of 2012, so it'll be a couple more months until we can tell how well it'll work. What that'll do for cost of the program is also a question...
I'd heard about Vancouver. It seems like a kludgy solution when (for example) the "Boris Bike" hire scheme in London (UK) has 15M journeys with no fatalities or serious injuries. So you could just not have helmets for bike-hire riders and do away with a lot of expense. I suspect the politicians are not fully aware of the arguments one way or the other, and just assume that more safety gear must make you more safe.
+1 for "assertive riding" and "taking the lane when necessary"
Cyclists need to be assertive, ride a safe distance away from parked cars and the kerb (so you can't be doored or have pedestrians step out in front of you), and generally expect drivers NOT to see you, and take avoiding action just in case.
Sure, riding in the middle of the lane when necessary will annoy car drivers, but it will force them to see you and keep you safer.
I find this the most important question. They aren't expensive (£15) and if you're going to bike then you're going to get sweaty, rained-on, etc with or without a helmet.
So I guess if you're put off cycling by a simple helmet then I really cannot seeing you sticking with it through any kind of adverse weather either.
Bikes themselves have almost no retail value; they are stolen despite this because it is so easy to steal them and because the consequences are largely non-existent. A helmet wouldn't last 30 minutes hanging from your bike in a larger/crummier city than Portland; people would steal it just because they could.
This simply isn't true; just try comparing ebay searches for "used bike" vs "used bike helmet."
Anecdotally, in the DC area people lock their helmets to their bikes all the time. I've had one bike stolen here but never a helmet. In fact when they stole my bike, they left the helmet that was locked up with it.
I think it is telling that I never see helmets left locked to bikes in public. Even if it is as safe as you suggest (and going by the amount of other worthless things that have been stolen off my bike, it is not...), the fact that the general public does not perceive it as such is what is relevant to the discussion.
It's very easy to lock a helmet up with your bike--just put the lock bar or chain through the "ear triangle" on the female clip side.
Sure, someone could still steal it by cutting that strap, but what is the point of a helmet that can't be clipped on? And if bike helmets are so unpopular, why would anyone steal one to begin with?
Finally, if your bike helmet is stolen, then you are simply biking home without a helmet--which is the condition you'd be in anyway if you didn't bring a helmet in the first place.
If you take off you engineering hat when you look at the situation it becomes less simple.
First off, having something stolen does not merely mean you now lack that object to most normal people. Theft is a violation of your property, and by extension, yourself. Having anything stolen carries with it psychological consequences; it is unpleasant. (And this is to ingore that for many people bikes serve several roles, some of which people may see helmets as necessary and some less so. Furthermore the options are not "bike with or without a helmet" but rather "bike with or without a helmet, or just avoid the mess and get there any other number of ways". When mandatory helmet laws are in effect, that is the decision people are making).
You are also attributing to much logic and planning to theives and vandals. The people who sell their wares online are the tip of the iceberg, damn close to the "criminal masterminds" of the bike crime world. The junkie who is just looking for crape to trade or give to a pawn shop doesn't give a shit what something is worth; if he can easily steal it, he will. And the punk kids who think it is fun to trash stuff don't really care either.
If you want to leave your helmet locked to your bike, more power to you. There is no way in hell I am going to do that in a city though.
And nothing is wrong with the idea of safer flights by banning weapons.
The implementation is crap and (mostly) useless though, in both cases.
If bikes _need_ to wear helmets, that's just taping about other problems. If bikers cause problems on their own (crossing red lights, driving insane and ignoring the law) I'd suggest that they wear helmets or stop using that bike.. If bikers are regularly hit by idiot car drivers and 'wearing a helmet' seems to help, soemtimes, somewhat, maybe, then the problem is elsewhere and should result in
- harsher penalties for the car drivers (20 times the mass, 80+ times the horsepower). Let them bleed in court, if the bikers bleed literally
- better infrastructure (note that this is point 2 for me. There's no excuse for being an ass even if there's no dedicated bike lane)
So .. the question you totally ignored is 'Why helmets in general and why do people force them on others in the first place'. Why?
My mother worked in a head trauma unit while I was young, and I particularly take umbrage with that last bullet point. While wearing a helmet won't do you much good when you ignore a stop sign and get plowed over by an SUV, neither will a seat belt save your life if you lose control going 110 down a tree-lined rural highway.
I'm rather shocked at the number of comments in this thread that just extrapolate anecdotes. Your mother's profession has nothing to do with this whatsoever, unless it involved studying the actual statistics of bicycle helmet safety.
Whether a bike helmet makes you safer has nothing whatsoever to do with statistics; it is simple physics. You can try it yourself by hitting your head with a rock--with and without the helmet on.
Right, and adding more programmers to a software project will always make it finish earlier (try it yourself by writing a small app with a friend), and flying is always more dangerous than driving (try losing your engines in an airplane and in a car).
No, it really is just simple physics. Arguing this point just makes it look like you don't understand the limitations of epidemiology.
Allow me to illustrate the fallacy with this joke: A man is arrested at the airport because he has a bomb in his backpack. When questioned by police he claims he brought it for safety because "what are the odds that there would be TWO bombs on the same airplane?"
Put another way: you don't need a population study to decide whether feeding rat poison to kids is a good idea.
Now if we were talking about whether mandatory helmet laws make people safer, population statistics are essential tools of policy analysis.
But if we are talking about one single head, we know the helmet increases safety based on the simple rock test I outlined above.
I thought we were talking about the population as a whole, not a single head. Not mandatory laws, but a culture where helmet use is de facto required versus not.
I also recall studies where wearing a helmet was found to be more dangerous overall, for the individual, because drivers assume that helmeted bicyclists are more skilled and don't give them as much room, leading to more accidents.
My point being that you can't simply take a simple "rock + head + helmet = better" and assume that conclusion is correct. This stuff is complicated. And everybody in this thread trying to pretend that this stuff is not complicated is really pissing me off.
Edit: to make sure we're not talking past each other, there are at least five different relevant questions here:
1. If wearing a helmet was required by law, would this be a net gain for society?
2. If wearing a helmet is heavily encouraged by society but legally optional, would this be a net gain?
3. Is wearing a helmet regularly a net gain for the individual?
4. Is wearing a helmet on one particular ride a net gain for the individual?
5. Is wearing a helmet in a crash a net gain for the individual?
The only question answered by your simple physics is #5, which also happens to be the least useful question in the list. Even #5 is not obvious the way you make it sound: it's entirely possible, although probably not actually the case, that the added weight increases the risk of neck trauma more than the protection of the skull reduces the risk of head trauma. In any case, none of the other four questions are answered at all by your thought experiment, even though those four questions are what we should be examining when we ask the question of whether we should wear a helmet while riding, and whether we should encourage or require helmets in general.
When I was a kid, my best friend's brother died because he was not wearing a bike helmet. I do, in fact, always wear a bike helmet.
The argument is not whether, if hit in the head, you are more likely to get a head injury. It is clear that bike helmets reduce those injuries.
The question is, if we required everyone to wear helmets, or required everyone to not wear helmets, which would result in less injuries/fatalities. And secondarily, if it turns out that bike helmets reduce injuries and fatalities, has it been worth the cost, vs other things we could spend money on, say legally required non-slip surfaces for bathtubs.
There are multiple factors that could affect this, here are two such things:
I don't think cheap and light are fair points there. Sure, it could be worse, but no helmet is definitely cheaper and lighter than a helmet. (aside from possible medical bills, but I feel that's covered under the 'keeps you safe' point).
The first point just begs the question.
The third one is questionable at best.
The last two are just incorrect.
I think the "no helmet" thing is just a weird bit of biker culture that's going to eventually die out, much like smoker culture is dying out in the US.
> I think the "no helmet" thing is just a weird bit of biker culture that's going to eventually die out, much like smoker culture is dying out in the US.
Is this a US-only claim, or do you reckon people in Amsterdam and Copenhagen will see your light and start wearing helmets?
It's not going to happen in Western Europe, because it is not really necessary. Most of my family and friends have used bikes nearly daily since they were three or four years old. I know of no-one who had a head injury.
Biking without helmet is perfectly safe here (Netherlands), because of traffic laws and bike lanes.
I commute to work by bike in Philadelphia, and not just in the good weather. In the last year I've missed three days--once the day after I cracked a rib going down in snow and twice when I woke up to a flat tire and didn't have time to swap it out and make it to work on time. (I've got better tires and am much better at replacing a tube, now.)
You know the old saying, cheap/good/fast, pick two? With bike helmets it's attractive, comfortable, or cheap: pick one. You can get a sweaty, dorky Bell for $30, or you can get a sweaty, cool Bern for $70, or you can get a comfortable, dorky Rudy Project for $200.
You comment and m0nty's about Specialized brand helmets meeting a stricter standard prompted me to do a little helmet research. I was a bit skeptical of the slim Bern helmets. I think simple physics demands that to stop a moving head on impact slowly enough to avoid concussion, one must use a (dorky?) a "spaceship on your head" helmet. There's no getting around that to go from velocity v to 0 without accelerating more than some threshold time requires a certain amount of space.
Now, I don't know if the thresholds chosen by ANSI or Snell or whomever will make a real difference in a crash, but Consumer Reports rated Bern helmets poorly in "impact absorption".
Yah, the author claims that we Americans cling to our "helemet = safety" notion dogmatically, but then she takes it as fact that people won't ride bikes if the law says they have to wear a helemet. But I don't think wearing a helmet is really that bad that it's keeping people from riding.
Like the fact that biking is aerobic exercise and people hate that.
The policy implications are very interesting and I'm sure it might affect behavior at the macro level, but for me as a cyclist, I'm going to wear a helemet AND ride a bike, so it seems like I don't fit her model.
Seriously: The more vulnerable you look, the wider a berth car drivers will give you. If you ride erratically down a road, swerving a bit as if drunk, cars will go yards out of their way to pass you.
If you ride confidently in a straight line, they woosh past with inches to spare. That's just human nature: The more likely something is to cause a problem, the further away from it you stay.
By the same token, drivers will give helmetless cyclists a wider berth than those with helmets - they rate higher as a potential hazard.
The statistics show that introducing and enforcing helmet laws reduces the number of people cycling by about half. That's bad for the health and fitness of your whole society.
