Originally Posted by
CarinusMalmari
Around here, the modal age for wearing a bicycle helmet is 6 or so, and at that age a minority of mommies make a whopping 2-5% of toddlers or so wear one, so YMMV between societies. Typically cyclists don't wear bicycle helmets, btw, and helmet-mongering is a rather unique obsession in a couple of cultures. And as far as I can tell popularity of bicycle helmets is a good way to recognize a failed bicycle culture that does a p!ss-poor job to ensure real bicycle safety.
First off there is no such thing as "real safety" in anything we do. However, you are correct in that education of people about bicycle awareness is indeed "piss poor". The education needs to start in elementary schools with how to ride a bike safely and work it's way right on up to drivers education with teachings about bike awareness in driver education. But even our driver education schools do a piss poor job on how to teach future car drivers how to drive correctly, then once their on the street driving OR especially a bicycle rider, the law enforcement does another piss poor job of making sure that traffic laws are obeyed. I find a lot more bicycle riders disobeying every form of traffic law there is and cops will see a cyclist act like a moron and do nothing, the only real time a cyclist gets into trouble legally is when they're involved in an accident then the cops responding to the scene will put the cyclist at fault.
But regardless of all the above safety is never a guaranteed event, this is why seat belts are required, why you must wear one on takeoff and landing on aircraft, why you must wear a life preserver on a small boat, why there are all sorts of safety do and don'ts listed on just about everything you buy, etc, etc; and thus because safety is not guaranteed no matter how safe you are one should wear a helmet just in case...no matter if the helmet only provides even a 10% chance of reducing injury or death. Personally I think helmets should be required by law for both cyclists and motorcyclists.
Statistics speak for themselves:
Bicycle Helmet Statistics