A helmet is an expensive fashion accessory. Many cyclists believe helmets lend prestige to them, as a sign of the dangerous things they do. That's why there's such hostility directed at people who wonder what the big deal is about helmets. It's as if you're telling the other cyclists that they're not really daredevils after all.

As to all the stories about lives saved with helmets, well, what can you say? The internet is a strange place. It's where fifty-year old men cruise comfortably on their recumbents at 30 mph. It's where guys add 3mph to their riding speeds with aero wheels. And it's where every other poster has his life saved by a helmet once a year.

Road riders don't wear body armor (well, other than helmets, that is). So, where are all the postings about the broken bones, skin grafts, infections, and what not, that should inevitably result from so much unprotected skin? I mean, these people have what would have been fatal collisions with their heads all the time. There must be utter devastation wrought on the other, unprotected parts of their bodies, with all of this spectacular crashing.

I was looking at another non-cycling board, one that is peopled mostly by people in the U.K. The topic of large, wild cats came up. (For those who don't know, it's a common claim in Britain that there are large, wild cats roaming about here and there, undetected by the authorities.) Guess what? About every other person didn't just know about these cats, they had *seen* them-- or, at least, had seen "very unusual" happenings that seemed explicable only by assuming there were panthers about. And a lot of them were in London or Manchester, not just up in Scotland somewhere.

So, if the power of suggestion is strong enough to conjure tigers from the urban darkness of London, it's certainly strong enough for people to imagine their lives were saved by helmets in ordinary spills, spills that statistics tell us couldn't be fatal in anything like the numbers claimed here.

In the U.S., 900 people a year die in cycling collisions. Most of them are children, riding dangerously. A disproportionate number of the rest are riders at night without lights. So, out of fifty million or so adult cyclists riding in daytime, a few hundred every year are killed on their bikes. Compare that to this board, on which the death rate would be 25% or so every few years if we take the helmet scare stories on their face. And this is a board filled with a disproportionate number of expert, fit, experienced adult cyclists with proper equipment.

Helmets are fine. Wear one if you want to. But there's not much more call to do so on a bike than in a car, walking on the sidewalk, in your garage, or in the shower. It's certainly not necessary to do so to ride a bike on a paved road.