Originally Posted by
CarinusMalmari
A couple of peculiar revelations in light of all your earlier statements. You not only turn out to be "pro-death" (as you call it yourself) at times, you also admit you skip wearing your miracle safety device for idiotic reasons. Not that any Dutchie would give a **** if you opt to wear a helmet. It's a non-issue here. Btw, you really don't come across as someone who actually lived in the Netherlands.
I don't think "Holland" is the best place to ride a bicycle in the Netherlands. Amsterdam, which you earlier mentioned as about the safest place to ride a bicycle, is about as ****ty as it gets in the Netherlands. And it was a lot worse "many years ago". The rest of you understanding of Dutch traffic seems equally sketchy, and seems to be based on some "One less car" blog that portrays the Netherlands as a nation of bicycle Nazis rather than real-life experience with it.
If you look at the big picture, utility cycling is the default cycling type almost everywhere. It's a common mistake that the USAsian situation is the default, as some people assume.
The only time I saw the 13% statistic used to imply helmets cause accidents, is in that TED talk. Dutch people don't even really see bike racing and mountain biking as cycling, but as different activities altogether. Different activities that come with different rules.
Again a lot of yelling and gratuitous assertions from the MarinatedCalamari, as if he mattered. The Dutch may be certainly advanced in their cycling but they are a microscopic data point when it comes to the cycling wold, and outliers at that.
The fact, remember facts? Is that the majority of cycling is done either in cities where they mix cars and bicycles in an dangerous manner, where safety measures have been put together hastily to cope with the rapid increase in the cycling fashion, or otherwise is done as sport cycling, that is, people training in bike trails, back roads, suburban or rural settings, which has less traffic but speeds are higher.
The Dutch example for bicycles is like the Swiss example for guns. Exemplary but almost irrelevant because it involves a minuscule amount of people, doing differently what the vast rest of the world does.
So the Dutch can be referenced as an example to follow and then forgotten, because improvement it's not going to happen overnight, we have to live with the world as we find it, and cycling in the US will continue to be frequently a hair-raising experience for a long time.
Safety and legal reasons warrant wearing a helmet in the US. The very poll in this thread confirms a majority think so, so we are on the right track.
For the pro-death faction I have good and bad news: They should not be concerned that head injury is their primary danger, because people so wooden are basically a fire risk.