Originally Posted by
wphamilton
I don't see the helmet as less useful with bike-auto collisions. The helmet is primarily for hitting the ground and that's generally going to happen regardless of how the accident occurs. Unless we're thrown up in the air we'll hit the ground with the same impact whether we're hit by a car, or riding 30 mph, or fall over at a light. So it's not really true that the helmet is useless when high-speed autos are involved - at most we can say that it's sometimes superfluous, if the collision itself causes critical injury. But that doesn't always happen.
The helmet is
less useful in bike-auto collisions because fatal bike-auto collisions usually involve multiple massive injuries. That doesn't, of course, mean that no one has ever had his life saved by a helmet in a bike-auto collision. I just don't see significant objective evidence that it happens very much. If bicycle helmets really were effective in such scenarios, then why would motorcyclists and car racers wear such big heavy helmets?