Originally Posted by pacificaslim

You are still not getting the point! The point is that research shows that crashes where one may sustain a head injury are very rare. And that the negative of those head injuries would be vastly outweighed by the positive health and safety benefits of more people riding bikes!

It boils down to something like this. Which would you prefer:


a) helmets are promoted/mandated, this makes cycling seem dangerous, few people ride bikes because their parents were afraid to let them do such a dangerous thing and so a whole generation grows up without becoming bike riders, instead people get fat and drive cars (which pollute and make the streets unsafe for bikes and pedestrians), but the few people who fall on their heads are protected slightly because they had a helmet on...

vs.


b) helmet use is ignored and cycling is promoted as the safe activity that it really is (when one looks at the true statistics), many people ride bicycles and stay more fit and this decreases the cost to society, while also making it safer to ride bikes because there are so many on the road that car drivers are more accommodating. The occasional person sustains a head injury that a helmet may have helped, but overall the costs to society are still lower because of the health benefits of having so many more cyclists on the road than in case "A".


Case "B" is what you have in countries with high cycling populations, and Case "A" is what you have in the USA. Cycling is NOT dangerous. It's like walking. Stop telling people it's dangerous and that they need helmets to do it, because this scares people away from cycling.