Thorn Cycles Forum
Community => Non-Thorn Related => Topic started by: Andre Jute on January 10, 2015, 11:12:33 pm
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If you get hot under the collar at the mere mention of cycle helmets being made compulsory, don't read this. It is an article I wrote in 2010 to explain why the US is a good case for instituting mandatory helmet laws. It is long, closely argued, and you need to pay attention to the math.
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THE CASE FOR A MANDATORY CYCLE HELMET LAW ?(IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA) ?by Andre Jute
It is a risible myth that your average American is a tall-walking free ?individual untrammeled by government: he is in fact just as much ?constricted as a European soft-socialist consumerist or Japanese ?collective citizen, though it is true that the American is controlled ?in different areas of his activity than the European or the Japanese. ?To some the uncontrolled areas of American life, for instance the ?ability to own and use firearms, smacks of barbarism rather than ?liberty. In this article I examine whether the lack of a mandatory ?bicycle helmet law in the USA is barbaric or an emanation of that ?rugged liberty more evident in rhetoric than reality.
Any case for intervention by the state must be made on moral and ?statistical grounds. Examples are driving licences, crush zones on ?cars, seatbelts, age restrictions on alcohol sales, and a million ?other interventions, all now accepted unremarked in the States as part ?of the regulatory landscape, but all virulently opposed in their day.
HOW DANGEROUS IS CYCLING? ?
Surprisingly, cycling can be argued to be "safe enough", given only ?that one is willing to count the intangible benefits of health through ?exercise, generally acknowledged as substantial. Here I shall make no ?effort to quantify those health benefits because the argument I'm ?putting forward is conclusively made by harder statistics and ?unexceptional general morality.
In the representative year of 2008, the last for which comprehesive ?data is available, 716 cyclists died on US roads, and 52,000 were ?injured.
Source: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
The most convenient way to grasp the meaning of these statistics is to ?compare cycling with motoring, the latter ipso facto by motorists' ?average mileage accepted by most Americans as safe enough.
Compared to a motorist a cyclist is: ?
11 times MORE likely to die PER MILE travelled
?2.9 times MORE likely to die PER TRIP taken
By adding information about the relative frequency/length/duration of ?journeys of cyclists and motorists, we can further conclude that in ?the US:
Compared to a motorist, a cyclist is: ?
3 to 4 times MORE likely to die PER HOUR riding
?3 to 4 times LESS likely to die IN A YEAR's riding
Source: http://www.ta.org.br/site/Banco/7manuais/VTPIpuchertq.pdf (http://www.ta.org.br/site/Banco/7manuais/VTPIpuchertq.pdf)
It is the last number, that the average cyclist is 3 to 4 times less ?likely to die in a year's riding than a motorist, and enjoys all the ?benefits of healthy exercise, that permits us to ignore the greater ?per mile/per trip/per hour danger.
This gives us the overall perspective but says nothing about wearing a ?cycling helmet.
HELMET WEAR AT THE EXTREME END OF CYCLING RISK
What we really want to know is: what chance of the helmet saving your ?life? The authorities in New York made a compilation covering the ?years 1996 to 2003 of all the deaths (225) and serious injuries ?(3,462) in cycling accidents in all New York City. The purpose of the ?study was an overview usable for city development planning, not helmet ?advocacy, so helmet usage was only noted for part of the period among ?the seriously injured, amounting to 333 cases. Here are some ?conclusions:
Most fatal crashes (74%) involved a head injury.
? Nearly all bicyclists who died (97%) were not wearing a helmet. ?
Helmet use was only 3% in fatal crashes, but 13% in non-fatal ?crashes
Source: ?http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/downloads/pdf/episrv/episrv-bike-report.pdf (http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/downloads/pdf/episrv/episrv-bike-report.pdf)
This concatenation of facts suggests very strongly that not wearing a ?helmet may be particularly dangerous.
It looks like wearing a helmet saved roundabout 33 cyclists or so ?(of the 333 seriously injured for whom helmet use is known) from ?dying. ?
If those who died wore helmets at the same rate of 13% as those in ?the study who survived, a further 22 or so could have lived. ?
If all the fatalities had been wearing a helmet (100%), somewhere ?between 10% and 57% of them would have lived. This number is less firm ?to allow for impacts so heavy that no helmet would have saved the ?cyclist. Still, between 22 and 128 *additional* (to the 33 noted ?above) New Yorkers alive rather than dead for wearing a thirty buck ?helmet is a serious statistical, moral and political consideration ?difficult to overlook.
SO HOW MANY CYCLISTS CAN HELMETS SAVE ACROSS THE NATION?
New York is not the United States but we're not seeking certainly, ?only investigating whether a moral imperative for action appears.
First off, the 52,000 cyclists hurt cannot be directly related to the ?very serious injuries which were the only ones counted in the New York ?compilation. But a fatality is a fatality anywhere and the fraction of ?head injuries in the fatalities is pretty constant.
So, with a caution, we can say that of 716 cycling fatalities ?nationwide, helmet use could have saved at least 70 and very likely ?more towards a possible upper limit of around 400. Again the ?statistical extension must be tempered by the knowledge that some ?impacts are so heavy that no helmet can save the cyclist. Still, if ?even half the impacts resulting in fatal head trauma is too heavy for ?a helmet to mitigate, possibly around 235 cyclists might live rather ?than die on the roads for simply wearing a helmet. Every year. That's ?an instant reduction in cyclist road fatalities of one third. Once ?more we have arrived at a statistical, moral and political fact that ?is hard to ignore: Helmet wear could save many lives.
THE CASE AGAINST MANDATORY HELMET LAWS
Compulsion is anti-Constitutional, an assault on the freedom of the ?citizen to choose his own manner of living and dying ?
Many other actitivities cause fatal head injuries. So why not insist ?they should all be put in helmets? ?
37% of bicycle fatalities involve alcohol, and 23% were legally ?drunk, and you'll never get these drunks in helmets anyway ?
We should leave the drunks to their fate; they're not real cyclists ?anyway
? Helmets are not perfect anyway ?
Helmets cause cyclists to stop cycling, which is a cost to society ?in health losses
? Many more motorists die on the roads than cyclists. Why not insist ?that motorists wear helmets inside their cars? ?
Helmets don't save lives -- that's a myth put forward by commercial ?helmet makers ?
Helmets are too heavily promoted ?
Helmet makers overstate the benefits of helmets ?
A helmet makes me look like a dork ?
Too few cyclists will be saved to make the cost worthwhile
THE CASE FOR A MANDATORY HELMET LAW IN THE STATES ?
235 or more additional cyclists' lives saved ?
716 deaths of cyclists on the road when a third or more of those ?deaths can easily be avoided is a national disgrace ?
Education has clearly failed
? Anti-helmet zealots in the face of the evidence from New York are ?still advising cyclists not to wear helmets ?
An example to the next generation of cyclists ?
A visible sign of a commitment to cycling safety, which may attract ?more people to cycling
© Copyright Andre Jute 2010, 2015. Free for reproduction in non-profit ?journals and sites as long as the entire article is reproduced in full ?including this copyright and permission notice.
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Thanks for this, Andre--a good piece of work. What responses did you get from readers in the U.S.?
I don't need to be convinced of the value of a helmet: as a longtime motorcyclist, I've always worn one on my two-wheelers, motor- or pedal-powered. 2 months or so ago, I think it was, Crazyguyonabike featured a forum where the OP asked readers what had prompted them to wear a helmet. (Can't find the specific reference -- a search for 'helmet' generates 100 pages!) This thread managed to get beyond the usual point-counterpoint merry-go-round, perhaps because those replying were helmet-wearers. My story involved my only fall on a 2-wheeler: pottering along at about 25-30 km/h on my motorcycle on a tiny backroad in central Ontario on a summer day about 50 years ago, dodging a kid on his bicycle, I clipped his rear fender and went over the bars, doing a three-pointer on my helmeted head, my shoulder and elbow. I lost a bit of skin from my elbow, but otherwise, no harm done to anyone, and I'm at least able to write this half a century later.
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Thanks for this, Andre--a good piece of work. What responses did you get from readers in the U.S.?
Thanks, John. I published that piece on rec.bicycles.tech as the culmination and summary of a series of articles in which I demonstrated the derivation of my statistics and conclusions that cycling is safe enough, extends life, and the more so if one wears a helmet. In resisting the earlier articles the anti-helmet zealots (AHZ) had been burned so badly as a reward for trying amateur polemics on me that several had slunk off. The remnant pretended sullenly not to see the article. Entertainingly, they now all use my numbers and rationale, while still claiming that I say cycling is dangerous!
Cyclists elsewhere should be careful about extending conclusions about helmet mandation from American data and circumstances. In particular, many of the questions to be answered are psychological, cultural and sociological rather than merely statistical, even in nations that superficially resemble America in its domination by the automobile, of which Canada and Australia are prime examples. On the other hand, a personal decision on whether to wear a helmet informed by the New York study seems to me universally logical, if you aren't already convinced by the many reasonable cyclists who wear helmets.
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TL:DR: Bikes are dangerous. Helmets might marginally improve this.
Reductio ad absurdam: Reasonable person would buy car with curtain airbags.
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TL:DR: Bikes are dangerous.
I don't agree. In the context of the extended lifespan that follows from the health benefits of cycling, cycling is safe enough.
Also, it can be shown that the most experienced cyclists are much safer than casual cyclists. I suspect that your average touring cyclist will as and when reliable numbers become available be shown to be in the higher percentile of safety, even taking into account the longer distances he covers.
Helmets might marginally improve this.
According to the New York study cited above, not wearing a helmet even the low-spec helmets we now have makes cycling three times more dangerous than wearing a helmet (at least in the city).
The problem with helmets is that they are certified for a pretty limp spec, to protect the profits of the makers. It would be easy to make a better helmet inside the same average weight, or even lighter, but no one does because the specification is so artificially low. It really amazes me that cyclists spend their energy raging against helmet-wearers rather than campaigning to get helmets certification requirements upgraded.
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If it's safe enough and we're experienced why champion compulsion then ???
Ultimately it's a political/civil rights/free society matter just like motorcycle helmet compulsion was. Fred Hill died in prison for this http://www.mag-uk.org/en/aboutmag/a6325
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If it's safe enough and we're experienced why champion compulsion then ???
I'm not championing helmet compulsion. That's a political matter and I'm not an American. What I did was to make a statistical analysis and list its most obvious conclusion, that mandatory cycling helmets in the States would save lives. It's up to Americans whether they want to save American cyclists' lives.
Ultimately it's a political/civil rights/free society matter just like motorcycle helmet compulsion was. Fred Hill died in prison for this http://www.mag-uk.org/en/aboutmag/a6325
That immediately raises the question, if you conceded helmets for motorcyclists, and seatbelts for the occupants of cars, what's the problem with conceding helmets for cyclists? Your case is already fatally undermined by precedent.
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Appropriate of this discussion, an interesting study was recently brought to my attention: http://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/01/09/study-what-puts-cyclists-at-greatest-risk-its-not-what-you-wear/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+streetsblog%2Fehob+%28Streetsblog+USA%29 (http://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/01/09/study-what-puts-cyclists-at-greatest-risk-its-not-what-you-wear/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+streetsblog%2Fehob+%28Streetsblog+USA%29)
The report says "When a cyclist is killed or seriously injured, the responses you hear often pin the blame squarely on the victim. Why wasnt she wearing a helmet? Or, Why was he wearing dark clothing?
"But according to a new study [PDF] by a team of Canadian university researchers, those factors dont seem to have much impact on the overall severity of injury when cyclists are hurt in collisions."
"The report looked at injury severity among about 700 adults in Toronto and Vancouver who were hospitalized after a bike collision or fall. Researchers teased out which factors had the biggest impact on the extent of peoples injuries."
In particular, "The study looked at all types of injuries, not just head injuries. Helmets only prevent head injuries and only certain types, researchers noted. Those effects did not register in this study, which found helmets had no statistically significant impact on overall injury severity."
You can certainly reduce bike accident injury frequency and severity by not riding a bike, but that's not the point, is it? Wearing full motorbike gear might also help, although it'd be mighty uncomfortable and would probably cause some accidents.
While wearing helmets may make us feel a little more secure, and may just work to prevent a particular injury from occurring, it actually distracts us from the real issues of safe riding, including separation from motorised traffic, riding behaviours, equipment condition, etc.
Theoretically, the more people encouraged onto bikes by removing these disincentives (anecdotally, MANY people don't ride because of helmet laws), the more bike friendly the culture becomes. It worked for Denmark and Holland, didn't it?
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The Netherlands and Denmark enjoyed the benefit of already having a cycling culture, an incalculable advantage.
That's a really good point, that a helmet isn't a magic bullet that will save you from a broken collar bone or leg or worse. The problem with a systems approach to cycling is that the most likely outcome is licensing of cyclists and their bicycles, to control their skills and machinery, exactly as for cars, a worse intrusion upon privacy than merely mandating helmets.
At present neither cyclist nor cycle needs anyone's permission to be on the roads. So I take the view that cyclists own those roads, and the motorists are there by license, a license which can be withdrawn in cases of anti-social behavior. If this sounds strange to you, that is precisely the case in The Netherlands, when you reduce it to bare bone. We don't want to upset that balance by attracting the attention of politicians to an area they haven't yet legislated for.
What all this comes down to isn't really about cyclists, it is about educating intransigent motorists. Which bring us back to the Dutch and Danish cases, where every motorist is also a cyclist, and many cyclists are also motorists, and the culture we admire so much was thus in place before the infrastructure grew so massively.
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Wasn't making a case m'lud. Jus' sayin'. Fred took the stance he did precisely because it was a precedent....
This might make the case for helmets stateside though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0npCFw9TEnA
Namaste
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This might make the case
New York City! It really is nuts!
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your maths is wrong, and your assumptions are incorrect.
you assume that because 74% of fatal accidents included a head injury that all these fatalities were caused by the head injury. 100% of the fatal accidents included clothing, but clothing did not cause the fatalities...
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Denmark and the Netherlands have not had their bike cultures as long as you think, although it's fair to say they never had the car culture to the same degree as the USA, Canada, Australia or even the UK. AFAIK, their bike culture is largely postwar, and in the case of Denmark, post 1960. (Of course, bikes had always been popular, just not as well catered for.)
The bike culture arose from a realisation that by adopting the USA-style car culture sweeping the world after WWII, their cities would literally have to be destroyed and rebuilt to accomodate motor transport. Luckily, it was unaffordable and unacceptable. The growth in their bike (and pedestrian) culture grew out of necessity, but was enabled by a new approach to urban planning which emphasised the human scale. The flow-on effect of a bicycle-inclusive transport infrastructure and the huge adoption of bikes for transport, is a much greater respect for cyclists' rights on the road and a far lower accident frequency.
So it is our great hope that if this culture can be adopted or "learned" in those places, we can get at least part of the way here.
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your maths is wrong, and your assumptions are incorrect.
In that case, we can stop wasting time on that article right here. Thanks.
you assume that because 74% of fatal accidents included a head injury that all these fatalities were caused by the head injury.
Read what I said again. In particular, try to get a feeling for the connection between these four items:
Most fatal crashes (74%) involved a head injury.
? Nearly all bicyclists who died (97%) were not wearing a helmet. ?
Helmet use was only 3% in fatal crashes, but 13% in non-fatal ?crashes
.... [for sources and reasoning see original article] ....
If all the fatalities had been wearing a helmet (100%), somewhere ?between 10% and 57% of them would have lived. This number is less firm ?to allow for impacts so heavy that no helmet would have saved the ?cyclist. [Emphasis added]
What you see is just the executive summary article. I explained in earlier articles how the numbers are derived. The anti-helmet zealots on RBT, at whom the article was aimed, were desperate to discredit it, and include several professional mathematicians, and guess what, not one of them was foolish enough to accuse me of incompetence, or even of the lesser crime of rash math. Objectively, I'm being overly cautious.
The inescapable fact is that many American cyclists, very likely hundreds of American cyclists, every year die needlessly on the roads because of irrational resistance to helmets by people who in cars automatically belt in. Quibbling around the edges of the numbers and the logic chances nothing because I've already built in huge (5.7x) safety margins to the statistical extensions.
The statistics and logic are unassailable. It is now a moral and political question. Do Americans want to save those cyclists or will they let them die for a "principle" they betray daily?
You are of course welcome to make your own analysis. You could start with my numbers (above) showing that in terms of total life expectancy and social benefit, cycling is safer than was previously thought by even the most rabid anti-helmet zealots. After that, you'd better ignore the New York study altogether, pretend it doesn't exist, because as a multi-year full universe headcount (not a sample) conducted by thousands of unimpeachable witnesses (policemen, nurses, doctors), it is rock-solid, no fingerhold for quibbling, and it points only one way.
100% of the fatal accidents included clothing, but clothing did not cause the fatalities...
Let's apply your argument to a proven commonality: 100% of the dead cyclists were by definition on bicycles, but being on bicycles did not cause a higher rate of fatality than being in an automobile. That's an obvious falsehood, arrived at by the same method you choose.
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Look you can post your long "articles" as much as you like, but the basic statement you made at the start is plain wrong. You state 74% of deaths had head injuries. You then seem to take this to mean died from head injury. If you cannot see the difference then there really is no point.
Reading your guff again, bonus logic fail - that 13% of the serious injuries were saved from death because they were wearing helmets. No attempt at removing other causes.
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Look you can post your long "articles" as much as you like, but the basic statement you made at the start is plain wrong. You state 74% of deaths had head injuries. You then seem to take this to mean died from head injury. If you cannot see the difference then there really is no point.
Reading your guff again, bonus logic fail - that 13% of the serious injuries were saved from death because they were wearing helmets. No attempt at removing other causes.
I did not, repeat not, state that 74% of the dead cyclists died of head injuries. You made that up. I most certainly did not "seem to take this to mean" god forbid that I should write so ineffectually.
If, despite being told twice now that I didn't, you still claim I said so, prove it. And not from vapid suspicions but from my actual words.
Nor did I say "13% of the serious injuries were saved from death because they were wearing helmets" as you claim. If you think I did, prove it, again, from my actual words.
"Guff"... "logic fail"... Before you start slinging abuse, let's see you prove your claims with actual facts rather than potstirring and smoke.
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Ok. Straight from your words. 33 saved from death because they were wearing helmets. This is 74% of 13% of 333. Either your numbers are wrong or your trying to obfuscate your logic with fluff and denial.
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Hi All,
With a topic proven so divisive on so many Fora, I'm monitoring closely. Please continue to keep your discourse gentlemanly and passionate about the ideas, rather than personal.
All the best,
Dan.
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Hello,
In my day to day life experience I have personally discovered that mostly those who shun helmets do so because of a number of factors.
Firstly these people who shun helmets are people who don't want helmets made compulsory because they want to 'decide'. So they decide against usually with a pig headed attitude.
These people have never fallen and whacked their head whilst doing so.
Or indeed they simply look stupid wearing a helmet!
I say that in all the instances of people objecting, that I see the particular point of view. But I still say that the day I changed my mind was eye opening.
Yes, I came off and it frightened me into helmet wearing.
A helmet only saves lives if worn. A helmet only saves lives if riders fall on there upper body/head area. A helmet will not save a life if the rider is crushed under a heavy vehicle OBVIOUSLY!
People who do not wear a helmet, do so out of choice. Personally I wish helmets had been around when I was a child as I bear the scars....
Think you people who write describing how helmets don't work. I fell of on a slippery road, my head hit a fence post with a horrendous whack. My helmet split! I am alive...I am not brain damaged.
Regards,
John
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The problem I have with all those "the helmet saved my life" stories is you just don't know. You are inferring an outcome based on your perception of the events. As most people don't understand this they over ascribe safety benefit to the helmet.
The safety benefits of helmets are murky at best, with various studies going either way. There are 2 problems with focusing on the helmet though.
1. head injury use with cyclists is on par with walking and being a passenger in a car. If helmets are beneficial for cyclists therefore they have to be beneficial for walking and car passengers. The require them for one group and not the other is therefore inappropriate.
2. Its a massive red herring, placing the blame of the injury on the victim rather than the cause. Somewhere in the region of 70% of vehicle accidents are caused by the driver. Rather than looking at protection for the victim (which is along the lines of blaming people for not wearing stab vests when they get shivved up in a mugging) we should be looking at why the driver felt it ok to mow down cyclists.
Andre's article has a number of problems with it all around the assumptions he used.
1. That 74% of head injuries were the cause of fatalities. Looking at the report a large proportion of those are marked down as "head and other injuries". We just don't know the cause of death. It could have been body trauma with a head graze for all we know.
2. That 33 (see above for bad assumption 1) had their lives "saved" by their helmet. We don't know that. We don't know how severe their injures were, and we don't know that the helmet changed the injury from death to only serious. All we know is that 43 people with serious injuries wore helmets.
3. That the spread of helmet use was distributed across the injured population. We don't know this, as its never stated. All we get is total numbers for helmet use, head injuries etc.. For all we know all helmet users had leg injuries. The report never states this.
4. That the ratios of lives saved by helmet use (see bad assumption 2) for serious injuries is applicable to those that died. Again we don't know this. There are other factors that could have just as big an affect that are not recorded or taken into account. Alcohol use, reckless cycling, etc. could all be confounding factors in the deaths but we've not normalised for them in any way.
It would be useful if Andre were to put up how he derived the 57% figure as well, as I just cant work out where he got that one from.
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Hello,
Statistics?!!??
Use your brain whilst you can!
Anyone can use excuse after excuse not to wear a helmet.
I whacked my head whilst wearing a helmet. The sound is echoing in my head whilst I write. My helmet split!!
I am alive, I have no brain damage.
I am not saying that in 'all' instances that helmets save lives..But helmets save lives sometimes. I would rather be alive 'sometimes' than dead 'once'. How about you?
Compulsion NO.
I would rather that other people saw how clever I am to be wearing a helmet. It is after all 'common sense' to protect!
Even Cricketers wear helmets and they are not on the busy roads. Before anyone mentions a cricketer dying when struck by a ball recently.....
Regards,
John
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Hello,
Statistics?!!??
Use your brain whilst you can!
Anyone can use excuse after excuse not to wear a helmet.
I whacked my head whilst wearing a helmet. The sound is echoing in my head whilst I write. My helmet split!!
I am alive, I have no brain damage.
I am not saying that in 'all' instances that helmets save lives..But helmets save lives sometimes. I would rather be alive 'sometimes' than dead 'once'. How about you?
Compulsion NO.
I would rather that other people saw how clever I am to be wearing a helmet. It is after all 'common sense' to protect!
Even Cricketers wear helmets and they are not on the busy roads. Before anyone mentions a cricketer dying when struck by a ball recently.....
Regards,
John
Perfect example of anecdote overriding evidence. If the helmet split it gave you no benefit. The point impact force was so much that it overrode the helmets ability to absorb damage and fractured. If it had compacted then the helmet would have absorbed some of the impact force. If it was a straight split it basically did nothing. On top of that, you don't know if the impact would have been fatal without the helmet. Going by the report Andre highlights 213 people had head injuries that did not kill them...
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My point is that, while helmets may or may not save some lives or injuries in certain instances, (John obviously feels his accident was one), they are shown time and again to be really peripheral to bike safety. Unless someone can show me how helmets actually prevent accidents, from Andre's quoted statistics we can assume that no more than 13% of the cohort were wearing helmets. Thus, the vast majority of cycling trips made (by people in that study, at least) were perfectly normal with no traumatic events.
My assertion is that, by dissuading people from riding (for whatever reason, be it obstinacy or fear of "helmet hair" - a particular reservation amongst female would-be cyclists), compulsory helmets can actually have a far worse effect on personal and public health.
As I mentioned before, this debate often boils down to the effectiveness of helmets, when that is really not the issue. Since there are numerous ways to die in a bike accident, should we be made to wear Kevlar jackets, gloves, anti-skid pants, shin and knee guards, eyewear and other PPE? A few more injuries may be prevented, but MANY more people would be dissuaded from cycling. This is the basic error in these government initiatives.
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If the helmet split it gave you no benefit. The point impact force was so much that it overrode the helmets ability to absorb damage and fractured. If it had compacted then the helmet would have absorbed some of the impact force. If it was a straight split it basically did nothing.
Not exactly true. The helmet would absorb way more energy if it crushed rather than fractured, but it must have absorbed something - otherwise it wouldn't have split! ;)
But generally agree with you, and in with what Sammy wrote above. The numbers presented above show a correlation between wearing a helmet and safety at best, but any quantification of this correlation is pure guesswork and I cannot see any causality here whatsoever. Second, using figures from NYC to argue for helmet compulsion in the US is dubious. Three, don't see how he the leap from supposed benefits of wearing helmet to mandatory helmet wearing is made (side-effects include fewer cyclists, resources needed for policing helmets etc. - the impact of which is not discussed at all). Finally, it's not so much about wearing a helmet or not but about wearing a good one, correct size, and correctly fastened. If you don't replace your helmet every time you drop it, and every 3-5 years anyway, its effectiveness is questionable.
To me it's not about my personal freedoms but, unlike in the case of seat belts or tobacco smoke, about the complete lack of conclusive evidence.
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Perfect example of anecdote overriding evidence. If the helmet split it gave you no benefit. The point impact force was so much that it overrode the helmets ability to absorb damage and fractured. If it had compacted then the helmet would have absorbed some of the impact force. If it was a straight split it basically did nothing. On top of that, you don't know if the impact would have been fatal without the helmet. Going by the report Andre highlights 213 people had head injuries that did not kill them...
You are talking rubbish. The plastic cover split but the interior was indeed crushed. It makes no odds I am still living to tell the tale.
But of course I am knowledgeable and because of real incidents not just Bar room chat! Hypothesise as much as you wish.
I know how hard my head hit. I know because I am alive.
John
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As an aside:- Of course Horse riders wear helmets (usually)
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Did anyone break up any polystyrene packing for the bin over xmas? Not very strong is it! Noisy though.
If ALL the people I hear of who had helmets break during accidents had not been wearing them, bicycling would be about as dangerous as a summit attempt on Everest!
I think our consumer society leads some people to believe that safety can be purchased by preying on basic human fears. It can be upsetting to have this belief challenged.
Would you feel any safer playing Russian Roulette in a polystyrene hat?
Correlation is not causation!
Making policy from one! single study is a little obtuse??
Helmets address a symptom. Motor vehicles are the root cause. IIRC only about 7 of the deaths in the NY stud did NOT involve another vehicle! ie almost no one died of "falling off a bike"!!
Cycling casualties are but one of the externalities of current levels of vehicle usage http://www.wisegeek.com/what-are-externalized-costs.htm A systems approach clearly shows helmets to be a side issue.
Honesty and Sammy summed up the rest better than I could.
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You are talking rubbish. The plastic cover split but the interior was indeed crushed. It makes no odds I am still living to tell the tale.
But of course I am knowledgeable and because of real incidents not just Bar room chat! Hypothesise as much as you wish.
I know how hard my head hit. I know because I am alive.
John
No I'm not talking rubbish. Its physics... As you had not said there was compression previously I was working on flawed data. That being said the compression abilities of polystyrene is limited, and bicycle helmets are only designed to reduce forces generated by a crash below 12mph onto a flat surface to a level where head trauma is less likely (there's a specific joule requirement but I cant remember it) and the more you exceed these design requirements the less benefit helmets give you.
I'll grant you that if the helmet is fitted correctly then it'll also protect your head from cuts and grazes as well.
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Did anyone break up any polystyrene packing for the bin over xmas? Not very strong is it! Noisy though.
If ALL the people I hear of who had helmets break during accidents had not been wearing them, bicycling would be about as dangerous as a summit attempt on Everest!
I think our consumer society leads some people to believe that safety can be purchased by preying on basic human fears. It can be upsetting to have this belief challenged.
Would you feel any safer playing Russian Roulette in a polystyrene hat?
Correlation is not causation!
Making policy from one! single study is a little obtuse??
Helmets address a symptom. Motor vehicles are the root cause. IIRC only about 7 of the deaths in the NY stud did NOT involve another vehicle! ie almost no one died of "falling off a bike"!!
Cycling casualties are but one of the externalities of current levels of vehicle usage http://www.wisegeek.com/what-are-externalized-costs.htm A systems approach clearly shows helmets to be a side issue.
Honesty and Sammy summed up the rest better than I could.
Actually, landing on your head actually hurts and can kill!
Cars are not the whole problem. A cyclist can be killed simply by falling off and hitting his or her head or landing so as to break his or her neck!
I wear a helmet and am a sensible person. Those who choose not to are their own worst enemy in my opinion.
If I ignore my Doctors advice and not take my Warfarin, my Beta blocker or my Ace inhibitor pills today am I being sensible?
When I woke up in the intensive care unit of hospital I wondered where I was. I am alive but it was ' apparently' because it cannot be proven, very fortunate because I had been (or so I was led to believe) by the doctors within inches of death!
I actually did believe them and I do take my medication. The reason being is that I believe that if I do not take these pills I would very likely die within a few days. I have no proof but I am grown up and have a daughter who I love. I will not take risks that I need not, because I care. Do you care for your own wellbeing or your loved ones? Perhaps not!
Always those whose ignorance costs and those who trust. Which one are you?
Helmet issue always causes dispute. Why oh why?
See the future it may not be rosy.
Regards,
John
John
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Hi All,
With a topic proven so divisive on so many Fora, I'm monitoring closely. Please continue to keep your discourse gentlemanly and passionate about the ideas, rather than personal.
All the best,
Dan.
Can't tell you how sorry I am that I posted this as an extension to Bikewaser's "why we shouldn't cycle with helmets".
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No I'm not talking rubbish. Its physics... As you had not said there was compression previously I was working on flawed data. That being said the compression abilities of polystyrene is limited, and bicycle helmets are only designed to reduce forces generated by a crash below 12mph onto a flat surface to a level where head trauma is less likely (there's a specific joule requirement but I cant remember it) and the more you exceed these design requirements the less benefit helmets give you.
I'll grant you that if the helmet is fitted correctly then it'll also protect your head from cuts and grazes as well.
Hello,
The best thing that you could do to prove your point, is to fall of a wall or your bike whilst bare headed, making certain that you land on your head on concrete at approx 12 mph.
Let us know how you get or, or tell your next of kin to let us all know?
It is very frustrating but at least I know I feel happy with my choices.
Regards, I am not going to post further contribution.
John
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Ok. Straight from your words. 33 saved from death because they were wearing helmets. This is 74% of 13% of 333. Either your numbers are wrong or your trying to obfuscate your logic with fluff and denial.
No, this won't do. You're off on another tangent. You put words in my mouth, and I asked you to prove that I said them with a direct quotation. You can't do that because I never wrote those words, so you blow more smoke. This is a method of obfuscation that I remember from the Marxists of my youth, since deposited in the wastebasket of history.
This is what you have to do before I'll answer any further points from you:
I did not, repeat not, state that 74% of the dead cyclists died of head injuries. You made that up. I most certainly did not "seem to take this to mean" god forbid that I should write so ineffectually.
If, despite being told twice now that I didn't, you still claim I said so, prove it. And not from vapid suspicions but from my actual words.
Nor did I say "13% of the serious injuries were saved from death because they were wearing helmets" as you claim. If you think I did, prove it, again, from my actual words.
"Guff"... "logic fail"... Before you start slinging abuse, let's see you prove your claims with actual facts rather than potstirring and smoke.
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No, this won't do. You're off on another tangent. You put words in my mouth, and I asked you to prove that I said them with a direct quotation. You can't do that because I never wrote those words, so you blow more smoke. This is a method of obfuscation that I remember from the Marxists of my youth, since deposited in the wastebasket of history.
This is what you have to do before I'll answer any further points from you:
So your saying because you didn't type the exact words, even though you used that exact method to generate you numbers, that the point is invalid? Amazing double talk there. Not sure what Marxists have to do with bicycle helmets?
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Two of these points below are just plain wrong, the result of a failure to comprehend the source material, and two are based on a misunderstanding of how this kind of statistics is done plus an unwillingness to grasp connections between the available data sets.
I shall be happy to explain each once you withdraw the words you tried to put in my mouth and now can't prove I said.
Andre's article has a number of problems with it all around the assumptions he used.
1. That 74% of head injuries were the cause of fatalities. Looking at the report a large proportion of those are marked down as "head and other injuries". We just don't know the cause of death. It could have been body trauma with a head graze for all we know.
2. That 33 (see above for bad assumption 1) had their lives "saved" by their helmet. We don't know that. We don't know how severe their injures were, and we don't know that the helmet changed the injury from death to only serious. All we know is that 43 people with serious injuries wore helmets.
3. That the spread of helmet use was distributed across the injured population. We don't know this, as its never stated. All we get is total numbers for helmet use, head injuries etc.. For all we know all helmet users had leg injuries. The report never states this.
4. That the ratios of lives saved by helmet use (see bad assumption 2) for serious injuries is applicable to those that died. Again we don't know this. There are other factors that could have just as big an affect that are not recorded or taken into account. Alcohol use, reckless cycling, etc. could all be confounding factors in the deaths but we've not normalised for them in any way.
It would be useful if Andre were to put up how he derived the 57% figure as well, as I just cant work out where he got that one from.
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You said through your maths, the very numbers your whole argument is based on, that 74% of deaths are caused by head injuries. This is quite obvious to everyone reading it, and trying to deny you said this, because you did not explicitly state it is a bit silly really.
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You done it all on purpose Mr Jute ;D Were you a Maoist?
"The interdependence of the contradictory aspects present in all things and the struggle between these aspects determine the life of things and push their development forward. There is nothing that does not contain contradiction; without contradiction nothing would exist." Mao Zedong Wikipedia
Some would say you need to wear a helmet before banging your head against this issue.
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To go at this in a slightly different way... Andre wrote this:
It looks like wearing a helmet saved roundabout 33 cyclists or so ?(of the 333 seriously injured for whom helmet use is known) from ?dying.
Show how you derived the figure of 33
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You done it all on purpose Mr Jute ;D Were you a Maoist?
"The interdependence of the contradictory aspects present in all things and the struggle between these aspects determine the life of things and push their development forward. There is nothing that does not contain contradiction; without contradiction nothing would exist." Mao Zedong Wikipedia
Some would say you need to wear a helmet before banging your head against this issue.
A Maoist! (VOICE RISING IN OUTRAGE) Good god, no! I'm an economist of the Chicago School; I'm not likely to support a philosophy that leads to such mismanagement that the Head of State has to announce that he uses only one sheet of toilet paper.
On the present subject, you're right, I need a hat, but not a cycling helmet (those are very poor protection, as has been repeatedly said above) but a pickelhaube of good, solid, German steel. There are enough imperonderables in bicycle accident numbers not to add people who try to put words in my mouth that I never spoke. Dan is right, this subject is toxic, a fast way to lose your friends. The hell with it, like John, now revealed as a smart guy, I'm out of it, and back to work.
See you elsewhere. Ciao.
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If not a Maoist, then definitely an AP.
Only joshing ;D
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Hi All!
Given no real forward progress is being made on the helmet discussion and bad feelings are rising among members, I'm locking it for a week or so and then will open it on an experimental basis.
The basics of the discussion are distilled in the following:
"A man convinced against his will remains unconvinced still".
In the absence of mandate, helmet wear seems a personal choice. Where helmet use is mandated, avenues exist for political action to overturn or maintain it, as the majority of voters prefer.
This is a hot-button topic for which there is no universal right answer and strongly held feelings can make for bad feelings. Let's give it a rest for a bit, go out for a ride or three, take deep breaths and enjoy what Nature has to offer those who choose to enjoy it on two wheels.
Best,
Dan.