Bike helmets: what the science says about an American safety obsession

The conclusion makes it clear that every expert they spoke to made it unambiguously clear that helmets should be worn:<p>&gt; Regardless, experts I spoke to were unanimous about what these flaws don’t mean: that helmets are useless. They all believe you should wear one.<p>This is one of those articles that reads like a lot of claims <i>against</i> something, even though the conclusion is very clearly in favor of it.<p>There are some valid concerns about how bike safety needs to extend beyond just the helmet, but the middle sections trying to suggest that maybe helmets are bad just feels like bait.

I grew up in Canada, where helmets are required by law and barely anybody cycles to commute. I immigrated to the Netherlands where cycling is a casual and de facto mode of transportation and helmets feel gratuitous and unnecessarily hampering. I&#x27;m currently visiting my family in Canada where the sidewalks are so icy simply stepping out of the house risks head injury, but nevertheless wearing a helmet to protect myself as a pedestrian seems gratuitous and unnecessarily hampering. Casual skating? Little to no helmets. Amateur ice hockey? People start wearing helmets.<p>Yes, wearing a helmet will protect you from a head injury from falling, but some things should be people centered and &quot;it protects you&quot; is really reductive. North America is really centered around automobile usage, even pedestrians are relegated to beg buttons and cycling nor simply walking about often doesn&#x27;t feel like the casual activity that it can be.

Head injuries are a leading form of death for car occupants, so why don’t we wear helmets when driving?<p>“While car accidents contribute about 14% of the aggregate TBI cases in the US, they are the leading cause of TBI-related deaths among children and young adults”<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;treatnow.org&#x2F;knowledgebase&#x2F;car-accidents-and-brain-injury-statistics-2020&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;treatnow.org&#x2F;knowledgebase&#x2F;car-accidents-and-brain-i...</a>

At an individual level, helmet wearing makes sense, but at a societal level, designing infrastructure better is where it&#x27;s at in terms of keeping people safe, and that&#x27;s probably a far bigger win.

<p><pre><code> When it comes to the dangers threatening cyclists, wearing a helmet is like bringing a knife to a gunfight. America’s top-selling vehicle model, the Ford F-Series, weighs up to 7,500 pounds. Its hood stands 4.5 feet tall—at the height of my chin. </code></pre> I get that point. And the other points made here about defense against traffic and cars. But helmets protect against WAY more than getting hit by a truck. They protect you when your foot gets stuck and you fall over backwards onto concrete. They protect you when you flip over and the bike comes back around and the chain ring takes a chunk out of the helmet instead of your head. Helmets stop injuries and many other ways.

Long article discussing various societal aspects and knock on effects, but ultimately the key bit is towards the end:<p>&gt;Regardless, experts I spoke to were unanimous about what these flaws don’t mean: that helmets are useless. They all believe you should wear one.

The problem isn&#x27;t bikes or helmets. You can count on one hand the number of cyclists who die every year in the Netherlands and no one wears a helmet there.<p>The problem is cars. Cars kill the people they hit.

The discourse around cycling safety is infuriating.<p>It&#x27;s bad enough when people jump in with incomplete multivariate comparisons and jump straight to a conclusion. You can&#x27;t just compare cyclist fatalities between two cities on different sides of the planet without also why people are cycling, what they&#x27;re cycling on, what&#x27;s been done to cities and roads to make it safer already, etc, etc.<p>Then you throw helmets in. More cyclists wearing helmets died? But wait, your data only shows hospital admissions from RTAs. How many cyclists in helmets rode away from their accidents? How many more road cyclists wear helmets anyway?<p>Then you do a Dr Ian Walker and start muddying all that with psychology.<p>Then what happens if your enforce helmets?! Everybody stops cycling and obesity rates rocket? What data says that?<p>It&#x27;s a mess. There are so many variables. Too many variables. We chase after them, trying to explain human behaviour and prove that helmets are magic, or evil; quickly forgetting how easy it is to die by one simple head trauma, and how easy it is suffer that coming off a bike.<p>Yes, safe infrastructure appears to be a massive factor, but cities and countries that need it most can&#x27;t just regenerate their road networks overnight. We should be talking about helmets as a stop-gap; a way to make cycling safer right now with the goal that regeneration follows to improve things for everyone.

I&#x27;ve only been in one bicycle accident. I was being a dumbass and attempted a sudden stop on a small iron bridge, when it had rained the previous night after a dry spell.<p>The wooden deck was thus very slippery, and about one second after touching the brakes the bike was horizontal and I smacked the side of my body and helmet against the wooden deck. Since it happened so quickly, my hands were still holding the handlebars when I hit the deck.<p>While not concrete, that wood wasn&#x27;t exactly pliable and while I have no idea what would have happened without a helmet, I&#x27;m quite glad I didn&#x27;t get to find out.

I&#x27;ve been an avid cyclist for 50 years, am a daily year-round bike commuter in a mid sized city in the Midwest, and use my bike for both transportation and recreation.<p>&quot;Single minded devotion to the helmet&quot; makes for engaging controversy, but it isn&#x27;t what I observe out here in the trenches. People wear helmets, but they almost always choose routes with less car traffic when possible. In my opinion, <i>route choice is probably the single most important cycling safety measure</i>. What it suggests to me is that real riders are actually making pretty good safety choices.

I&#x27;ve been riding bikes for over 50 years. I&#x27;m legally required to wear a helmet but I don&#x27;t when I&#x27;m just poking along the local parks on the way to the shops. I could get fined :-(<p>There&#x27;s a strong cycling culture around here. Some of them ride in packs on some major roads. I&#x27;d never do that, with or without a helmet. Recently there was a major incident. One death, a bunch injured. <i>The dead one had their head severed.</i> The helmet didn&#x27;t help.<p>[edit: I usually <i>do</i> wear a helmet for any major ride]

&gt; Helmet mandates intimidate potential riders, they argued, by framing cycling as an activity so dangerous it necessitates body armor.<p>But that&#x27;s sort of the point in America. The act of not being in a car is a non-standard and dangerous option compared to the rest of the world.

What we should care about is the aggregate public health impact of the intervention. In the case of bicycles and motorcycles I think people attribute magical safety benefits to helmets that don’t exist.<p>Similar to protective gear in hockey actually increasing injuries I suspect that the impact of helmets is bimodal: some people respect the risk of going XX mph nearly unprotected and others view their protective gear as a shield.<p>I’m also willing to bet that the biggest change in safety for bike helmets is actually people outside of the urban areas most likely to have safety mandates

So if whites were ticketed more for wearing helmets that would be perfectly fine? I don&#x27;t like this newspeak. I suppose there is this ideal ticketing distribution we are not told of that would keep the law on the books?<p>I am pro helmet, but anti-nanny laws. I don&#x27;t wear my helmet when I&#x27;m making a local trip to the grocery, but will on longer varied rides. God help me if I were ticketed for not wearing a helmet. I ski too... and don&#x27;t wear a helmet... I&#x27;m not a maniac on the slopes. My 2 cents.

Everythingwrong.... Safer but drop law. Law but only some peoples are ticketed. Biking is what everybody know it is but helmets change impression and be a thread to healthy occupation. Safety obsession ? More like fear of lawyers and you never know when multi-milion verdict hits you... Looks like law is actual problem in freedom country...

The point is not that you shouldn’t wear a helmet — you should whether in the city or not — but that cities enforcing helmet laws should instead be focusing on policies and urban changes that improve the safety of riders by creating a safer riding environment rather than putting all the onus on the cyclists.

There was a post recently in Australia where someone posted a picture of their helmet broken, saying they were glad to have been wearing a helmet. There were countless posts of people having been involved in all sorts of accidents either from automobiles or themselves and all said that their life may have been altered following the accident had they not been wearing a helmet.<p>Having grown up in Australia where they&#x27;re mandatory, I don&#x27;t think twice about it. I find the bickering about helmet safety in the US something very similar to your gun laws and gun violence.<p>Stop bickering and splitting hairs and wear a damn helmet. You have to wear them when you&#x27;re on two wheels with an engine.

Can&#x27;t have them. Automatically bad hair day. Also impairs my &#x27;third eye&#x27; as in sense of hearing, thus my situational awareness. Also one more piece of kit to lug around.<p>No, thanks, keep it!<p>Wear these if you feel like it:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gettyimages.de&#x2F;fotos&#x2F;michelin-man" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gettyimages.de&#x2F;fotos&#x2F;michelin-man</a><p>I won&#x27;t!

Offtopic: Is there a helmet for Neck safety? I am more concerned about the cranium to spine down.

The article tries extensively to dance around the fact that all else being equal, if your head is hitting the ground you&#x27;re better off wearing a helmet. In the worst cases, you aren&#x27;t worse off. Acceleration is what kills, and because you can&#x27;t change the starting speed nor the end speed (0 m&#x2F;s), all you can change is time.<p>That doesn&#x27;t mean they have to be enforced legally, of course. So rather than attacking the merits of helmets, the argument made in the article would be more compelling if it focused on the unalienable right of humans to get severely injured doing stupid stuff for fun or profit.

&gt; “Mentioning whether or not Eric wore a helmet is akin to blaming an egg for cracking against a pan,” wrote Ng’s friend<p>It&#x27;s funny how reports of ejections from a crashed motor vehicle never mention that the driver wasn&#x27;t wearing a seat belt as if their death was an act of god but cyclists have to be chastised as a blame shifting exercise to justify continued ostracism.

I&#x27;ve never bounced off a title so hard. &quot;Safety obsession&quot; is an absurd phrase in this context. <i>No society on earth</i> is &quot;obsessed&quot; with the safety of adults, in the way we use the word &quot;obsessed&quot; to e.g. describe helicopter parents. One can easily argue that specific rules are ineffective or have unintended effects, as the <i>body</i> of the article appears to at a glance, but that&#x27;s not a problem with being somehow overly-dedicated to safety - it&#x27;s a problem with making rules. Making rules is a hard problem.

Why don&#x27;t they use the revenue from the helmet tickets of the privileged, white riders (who clearly have the money to buy a helmet) to provide free helmets to brown and black riders? That seems to me like the better solution and would drastically improve equality.