Originally Posted by
CrankyOne
The differences in infrastructure and overall danger is the reason to use the rate rather than any other number. You are roughly 9 times as likely to be involved in an injury/fatality crash riding a bicycle in the U.S. as in The Netherlands. But the types and percent of injuries are fairly consistent. Regardless of how many total crashes there are you'll have a relatively certain percent of broken collarbones, broken wrists, broken femurs, etc. The larger the sample the more consistent these become country to country. So for every 1,000 crashes you'll have about 70 broken collarbones and this will be consistent in the U.S. and NL and DM and DE and wherever. So while the infrastructure in The Netherlands reduces the total number of severe or fatal crashes it doesn't have much impact on the types of injuries sustained in those crashes.
The same happens with head trauma. For every 1,000 fatalities about 320 will involve TBI or Traumatic Brain Injury. It's actually a bit higher in the U.S., about 36% I believe, but this is not a significant difference. If helmets were effective then the number of TBI's per crash, the rate, would be significantly lower.
I think you need to provide some support for your numbers. Again, according to the CDC, 60% of bicycle fatalities in the US involved a head injury. Not 36%. Less than half of Americans wear helmets on a regular basis. The rate of helmet use is not "very high" as you claimed. According to the CDC, helmets are about 80% effective in reducing head injury.
If stats from the CDC aren't convincing then here's the first paragraph from the
Institute for Road Safety Research in the Netherlands:
One third of the cyclists who are admitted to hospital with serious injury after a road crash are diagnosed with head or brain injury. Approximately three-quarters of the head and brain injuries among cyclists are caused by crashes that do not involve motorized traffic; as many as nine out of ten young children who sustain head/brain injury, do so in crashes not involving motor vehicles. These are mostly cyclist-only crashes. This type of crash is difficult to prevent, but it is possible to limit the severity of the head and brain injury by wearing a bicycle helmet. According to the most recent estimate (Elvik, 2011), the risk of sustaining head injury is 1.72 times higher for cyclists who do not wear a bicycle helmet than for the cyclists who do, with a 95% confidence interval of 1.33-3.45. For brain injury, the risk seems to be 2.13 times higher (with a confidence interval of 1.33-3.45). If all investigated head and neck injuries are considered together, the risk increase appears to be smaller but still present (factor of 1.18, 95% confidence interval: 1.02-1.35). Research in other countries has shown that the bicycle use sometimes decreases, particularly during the first few years after the introduction of mandatory helmet use. The longer-term effects or the significance of these results with regard to the situation in the Netherlands are not known.
According to them, the risk of brain injury is about twice as high without a helmet. If you are more likely to be involved in a serious crash in the US than you would in the Netherlands, wouldn't it make more sense to wear a helmet here than there?
You should really read the whole article. I think you would find it interesting. People in the Netherlands don't wear helmets because they don't want to. Just like no one wanted to wear seat belts when I was growing up. It's not because they don't work.
Again, I will state that if somebody is willing to accept the risks of not wearing a helmet that is their choice, but please don't try and talk people out of using one. The OP didn't ask whether they should wear a helmet or not. They asked which one to get.
The problem I have with these arguments is that people start with the conclusion: "I don't want to wear a helmet" and cherry pick stats that support that notion or perpetuate myths. Since this is a safety issue, I feel compelled to reply but discussions like this aren't often fruitful so I'm going to drop it.