cycleup

Closetbiker - thanks for bringing up this interesting subject while I'm recovered enough from the flu to argue, but not quite back up to coding speed (so I can goof off without guilt :-).

I think the first thing you're missing is that helmet wearing is something people almost everyone gets used to. My Specialized M1 is basically a big, yellow, comfortable hat to me. The only people I hear complaining about helmets are very small group of enthusiastically cranky types like yourself (hmm, perhaps we agree on the excellentness of old Bridgestones? :-)

Clearly if helmet campaigns stop people from cycling that's a problem. But I don't find the DL Robinson abstracts convincing - sure you'd expect a temporary drop but what happens down the road so to speak? In the absence of hard data I'm gonna side with not going to discourage cycling in the long run.

Now it is clearly hard to do good studies on this issue. The Australian (McDermott) study, however, does look pretty convincing on the advantages of wearing a helmet. Reducing head injuries by nearly half is pretty excellent. (I notice your FAQ doesn't talk about McDermott btw.)

(Here's the abstract, btw):

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/q...&dopt=Citation

BTW - In the presence of solid work like that combined with the people any serious cyclist knows personally who've been told by their emergency room physician that their crushed helmet reduced their brain injury - the throwaway "jackpot in a lottery" line in the FAQ is pretty much totally stupid.

Speaking of which, the stance of that FAQ, quite frankly stinks. The author, for all his protestations of being "frank and accurate" is clearly interested in being neither. He's utterly biased, and if at all honest would have titled the thing the "Why I Hate Helmet Laws and You Should Too FAQ." His kind of sophomoric objective superiority rubs me the wrong way, especially when it's so obviously disingenuous.

So I'm gonna give being pro helmet law a whack - cause your FAQ writer is a jerk :-)

So, if people were rational about things like wearing helmets (or reacting to FAQs) we could leave it up to them. But as you keep implicitly arguing (when claiming they'll think bicycling's dangerous if we make them wear a helmet) people respond to the cues they see. Whether they bicycle and how is not a purely rational decision for most folks, it's mostly monkey see monkey do.

So whether people wear helmets isn't going to depend for the great mass of people on whether it's a good idea, it'll depend on whether the people around them wear them. So not wearing a helmet does effect more than your well being - its part of creating a "helmetless norm".

Does that mean that it's worth the additional inconvenience, cost and burden upon helmet opponents of a mandate? Maybe so, if they cut head injuries in half, if Walmart sells good comfy $20 helmets, people seem to be willing to wear them, and the law doesn't permanently discourage cycling, I think it may well be worth that gain.

If you want to win converts, though. I'd suggest getting some real data on the permanently discouraging cycling side of things. That would be a real argument, for me anyway.

closetbiker

It's too bad you think the writer of the FAQ is a jerk because, if you look around at many respected pages this list is always recomended as a good one. The OCBC is also not an individual but an umbrella group of a number of Ontario advocacy organizations that fight for a cyclists rights to the road and endorses the phrase coined by the world's leading bicycle transportation engineer, John Forester, "cyclists fare best when they act and are treated as drivers of vehicles". Forester's vehicular cycling principles are the basis of the Canadian Cycling Association's CAN-BIKE cycle skills training program. The OCBC advocated that the province's Ministry of Education introduce the necessary policies for all Ontario's children to acquire the vehicular cycling skills as taught by the CAN-BIKE program. Little has been done by the provincial government to address these needs.

You could say they have a point of view, but who doesn't? The BHSI sure does. Everything has limitations and statisticss have a natural bias by being a product of who produces it and what aims the producer has. Statistics can still be useful though.

Being Critical means more than simply pointing to the flaws in a statistic. Every statistic has flaws. The issue is whether a particular statistic's flaws are severe enough to damage its usefulness. The BHSI and the OCBC both have information we all could use.

I think the main thrust of my argument is put forward in a couple of links put up by Leo. the first link on the fist post shows cycling has a smaller death rate per exposure hour than driving. The second link to the BMA shows an even more important point. The health benefits gained while cycling far exceed it's risk - even without helmets.

I think we both can agree cycling is a good thing for society. Better health, one less car and such but were cycling is less respected and understood, more unusual, we find all kinds of misconceptions about it's risks and more leway given more usual forms of transportation like driving and walking. How is it, one must insist on helmet wearing on one individual over another, if both have equal risk?

I think the point you make about the discouragement of cycling through helmet laws or not being used to the look of helmets is moot. There is a predudicial point being made when one group is asked to do something that another group is not, even though the situatin is the same for both of them.

Leo C. Driscoll

Check out a surprising 2003 study, "Safety in numbers: more walkers and bicyclists, safer walking and bicycling", IP (Injury Prevention) Online, https://ip.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/9/3/205.

Based on walking and biking data in 68 California cities in 2000, 47 towns in Denmark 1993-1996, and walking and biking data in 8 countries in Europe in 1998. Peter L. Jacobsen, Public Health Consultant in Sacramento, CA found that "The likelihood that a given person walking or bicycling will be struck by a motorist varies inversely with the amount of walking or bicycling [in the locality]. This pattern is consistent across communities of varying size, from specific intersections to cities and countries, and across time periods."

Jacobsen concludes that "A motorist is less likely to collide with a person walking and bicycling if more people walk or bicycle. Policies that increase the numbers of people walking and bicycling appear to be an effective route to improving the safety of people walking and bicycling."

Interesting, if true! It follows from this that if adolescents do not consider helmets cool, then it may be a better strategy to focus on encouraging them to bike (with or without helmets) by providing (for example) secure bike shelters) than to mandate wearing helmets (say, hypothetically on a large campus like BU).

But this is not intuitively obvious. If thousands more adolescents were to ride bikes at BU (with or without helmets), I think there would be more road kill on Commonwealth Avenue (a scarey, dangerous highway that runs through the middle of our campus). The crazed motorists know today that they are speeding through one of the densest areas of Boston where adolescents routinely play chicken with cars or rush across the wide boulevard partly because (unlike in Brookline, an adjacent town) there are no effective mechanisms to signal that pedestrians can safely cross two lanes plus east-west trolley tracks.

On the other hand, last summer, I experienced three near day-time collisions as I climbed the hills of Dhún na NGall on a 20-inch Dahon folder (as a vehicle in the left lane). Since I only met one other biker (an amazon from Holland), perhaps the very fast drivers were astonished to encounter this small 2-wheel apparition and thought it was "a sióg" (a fairy) that they should run off the road into the ditch ;-)

But since hill-walking is the aerobic sport of choice of the natives, using Jacobsen' model would lead us to expect less carnage along the roads in Dhún na Ngall than in all of Ireland. Stay tuned- I would expect that this is the case given the fact that Ireland is unsafe at any speed- for sheep, pedestrians, bikers, or motorists! BTW, in Dhún na Ngall, there are more sheep than people, but I did not see any safety in numbers ;-) Rocketing down the hills I sheared my share of sheep ;-)

"There is no mystery as to why Ireland is in the unenviable position of being the third worst in European league tables of road deaths. Poor driving skills and even poorer driving behavior have made an enormous contribution to the number of road casualties. Driving is an acquired skill, and a demanding one on Ireland's busy roads. As well as the right skills, drivers need the right attitude -towards speed, other road users, alcohol, drugs and fatigue." https://www.dir.ie/news/news8.htm

On my next adventure on Ireland's roads, I''ll be on a 2004 Dahon Matrix with DH helmet and armor!

So any anecdotal evidence to support or not support Jacobsen's thesis?

randya

In Portland, bicycle use has more than doubled over the past decade (based on actual traffic counts), whereas the number of reported cyclist injuries and fatalities has stayed approximately constant.

I can't find real good statistics on the City's web page to support this, but they are available, and I can try and track them down if you're interested. https://www.trans.ci.portland.or.us/Bicycles/default.htm

Some stats on the increase in bicycle use between 1990 and 2000 can be extracted from the census data, here: https://www.trans.ci.portland.or.us/B...iles/frame.htm

Leo C. Driscoll

So Portland's investment in infrastructure-bike networks- probably led to a "dramatic increase" in biking between 1990 and 2000. We would have thought before reading Jacobsen's report that more biking during that decade would have caused a big increase in fatalities and injuries. But the fact that reported fatalities and injuries stayed fairly constant seems to support Jacobsen's counter-intuitive thesis (more biking, safer biking). But in Portland, it's more like the odds of being injured or killed in 2000 may be significantly lower than the the odds in 1990. This is interesting. I'll contact Jacobsen to find out if his study identifies improved infrastructure in other cities as a determinant of "safer biking" and whether improving the odds (of not being injured or killed) is a practical metric.

Leo C. Driscoll

Biked onto the BU Campus this morning. Real feel was -17 F. Thousands of students walking- some biking. What did the walkers have in common with the bikers? About half the walkers had no hats; half the bikers were not wearing helmets. Forget infrastructure- the real feel could go to -34F and everyday we could have speeding cars hit bikers without helmets or have walkers with hypothermia collapse in an Expresso Royale, and we'll continue to see Supercuts and other hip hairdo's being loaded into ambulances.