Bicycle helmets probably have some protective value, but not nearly as much as has been claimed, or most people seem to think.Most of those are not actually about whether helmets are helpful. My hunch from what I've seen is that individually, helmets are beneficial. Not super-beneficial, but they are indeed helpful. Collectively, they cause problems by making drivers less cautious around bikers, but the solution to that is driver education. And the inequitable enforcement of helmet laws is not best solved by removing the helmet laws.
Wearing a helmet does nothing to prevent you from being hit by a car.
Real bicycle safety involves learning how to ride properly.
Crash helmets could easily save more lives for motorists than bicyclists.
Helmet laws restrict freedom of choice, may result in the targeting of minorities, discourage cycling, make cycling more dangerous for those who remain, and shift the blame in car-bike collisions to helmetless cyclists even if it was the motorist who was at fault.
The next time you see a broken helmet, suspend belief and do the most basic check – disregard the breakages and look to see if what's left of the styrofoam has compressed. If it hasn't, you can be reasonably sure that it hasn't saved anyone's life.This is not to say helmets are useless; it's more to say that the net effect of helmets (especially if mandatory) is a public safety negative, because it reduces the number of cyclists on the road, and the only factor known for certain to increase bike safety is to substantially increase the volume of cycling traffic on a given roadway.
In BC, if a cyclist is hit by a car and is wearing a helmet, the driver assumes full liability for the accident. If a cyclist is hit by a car and is not wearing a helmet, they split liability 50/50.That strikes me as a really stupid, lazy way of doing things. I can't see any relationship between fault in a traffic accident and what one of the parties is wearing on his or her head.
And in this case the immediate externalities seem relatively trivial: looking dorky, carrying it around, paying for it.Honestly, I know people mock this, but it messes up my hair. And I'm a woman who works in a professional environment, so I'm expected to have non-fucked-up hair. I've figured out ways to deal with it, but it would be a lot less of a hassle if I didn't wear a helmet.
Thank God for Copenhagenize and cycle chic.I kind of despise Mikael Coleville-Andersen, and I'm a woman who cycles for transportation in everyday clothes.
Bike on the roads, however, are frightfully unpredictable.I find that a little hilarious, because I don't think that drivers even realize how unpredictable they are. You could easily end my life by opening your door without looking. Every time I cycle past a row of parked cars, I need to account for the fact that one of them could open a door and kill me. When I approach parked cars, I move to the left to the center of the lane to stay out of the kill zone, and I'm sure the cars behind me think "oh, that cyclist is so irresponsible and unpredictable." But I am doing that because I know that I can't count on drivers taking the two seconds it would require to look in their mirrors before opening the doors of their parked cars, and I'm the one whose life is on the line. And in general, part of the reason that bikes are "unpredictable" is that we're constantly having to improvise to deal with infrastructure that isn't set up for us and that puts us in danger. If that bothers you, one way you could deal with it is to advocate for better cycling infrastructure and more enforcement of laws that would protect cyclists if anyone gave a damn about them.
Crashes involving bicyclists are, however, commonBy any reasonable definition it just isn't true.
craichead there does not seem to be a correlation between bike usage and helmet laws.Is that true? The study someone cited above suggested that there isn't sufficient evidence to conclude either way.
A 1996 study determined the likelihood of a bicycle accident by facility type. (This is the only major study that adjusts crash data for the number of miles bicyclists actually travel on these facilities.) The study found that riding on the road is not only safer—but much safer—than riding on these other types of facilities.You put yourself at tremendous risk riding on the sidewalk. You may believe you are being safer, but you are not.
Source: William E. Moritz, “Adult Bicyclists in the United States,” in Transportation Research Record 1636
Bicyclists are 25 times more likely to experience an accident when riding on a sidewalk than riding on a major street—even one that neither has a designated bike lane nor is designated as a bike route. And bicyclists are twice as likely to experience an accident on a multi-use trail than on an unmarked street.
. . . .Not only is there potential for a collision with a pedestrian. More importantly, motorists are not expecting a bicyclist, moving much more quickly than a pedestrian, to cross the street in a crosswalk. So, motorists often fail to detect bicyclists on sidewalks and strike the bicyclist in the crosswalk.
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posted by entropone at 2:15 PM on October 28, 2011 [24 favorites]