Six jours

Maybe if you take some of that crap off your handlebars you'll be able to see where you're going. "I ran into a big, obvious, easily avoidable, stationary object, so you should wear a helmet" isn't a compelling argument.

RaleighSport

Interesting, so you're hypothesizing commuters and freds with a full on cockpit crash because they have too much stuff? Or are you just being snide? I honestly can't tell.

Six jours

I must be losing my touch. I thought the snidety was obvious.

If I'm making any kind of a serious point, it's that people who randomly run into incredibly obvious and unmoving objects need far more than just a few ounces of foam to keep them safe - and have absolutely no business giving safety lectures to other cyclists.

LesterOfPuppets

More weight on the bars DOES make bicycles handle more poorly @ low speeds.

just sayin.

Me? I just stay at least 10' away from parking blocks and curbs when traveling @ low speeds. Then my bare head can smack some nice, smooth, flat concrete

RaleighSport

So how much weight is enough to matter then? I've never fully loaded my front rack on my utility bike, but even when adding something 15 lbs I did notice the handling was as you say poor. Hmm and if this pans out, isn't that even more reason to wear a helmet?

RaleighSport

How much weight do you carry on the front of your rando?

Six jours

I deleted that, because it was pointless even by helmet thread standards.

At any rate, I usually have about seven pounds in it. It's gone as high as 15, which makes handling pretty weird. But I still haven't crashed into any highly visible, easily avoidable objects and then landed on my head in a life-threatening fashion.

Zinger

If they're weaving all over the road with speakers in their ear they need a heads up. On a crowded bike trail with strolling pedestrians and cyclists of all ages it's sometimes a courtesy, sometimes a nice way of saying "watch your line".

curbtender

Pretty easy for some young whipper-snapper to say, but when the age gets to you...

martianone

COD;
don't be sorry for your question.
Since the beginning of bicycle time (even before we were born), cyclists have ridden without helmet.
i live in a very rural area; riding around on our local dirt roads and lazy lanes, usually have just a cycling cap on my head. I always wear glasses and some type of glove. IMHO, a mup is one of the most dangerous places for a cyclist - so I wear a helmet the rare time I get on one. Also in dense urban or crazy suburban areas, plus while mountain biking or part of an organized ride. Otherwise I'm a free man.

rekmeyata

Here we go again. Bicycle since the beginning of time, my gawd. Ok, since cars were around since 1769 there wasn't seat belts either for almost 200 years, so that means we don't need seat belts either.

The only time I need a seat belt is in dense urban or crazy suburban places too, so in the country I don't need them. I'm a free man too.

Can we get any sillier.

3alarmer 

.........smart money says yes.

Zinger

I-Like-To-Bike

I don't need or find it a courtesy for some stranger to come from behind me when I am riding properly and say "watch your line" in a nice way, anymore than I need a stranger saying in an oh-so-concerned voice "where's your helmet?"

BTW was the cyclist who originally surprised you by not wearing a helmet and wearing a headset, weaving all over the road, requiring your attention and subsequent posting of your astonishment?

elcruxio

I'm interested.
How many in this thread use their bikes as primary transport?
I get the vibe (in the US forums and also local Finnish discussions) that those who mainly use the bicycle as a hobby (racing, etc) advocate helmets louder than those who use bicycles as a part of life accessory. Many who are car free or just use a bicycle a lot for everyday activites seem to be more "meh..." about helmets.
I'm practically car free and my helmet use is pretty much divided such that
training - helmet on
everything else - helmet off

Wogster

The whole helmet issue is that some jurisdictions want to legislate helmet use, this is often termed being a nanny state. In states with state subsidized health care, where things like traumatic brain injuries can cost the state a vast amount of money, this seems to make sense. It makes sense, providing you can prove that helmets prevent traumatic brain injuries, fact is, this has not been proven, because people have received traumatic brain injuries even with a helmet on. The only way to prove the effectiveness of helmets, is to stage a crash, with and without a helmet and compare injuries. Doing so, however you take a risk that helmet manufacturers don't want to take, and that is, in some scenarios current helmet designs, have no effect, and in others they simply shift the injury to an unprotected critical area like the neck.

One issue with helmets, you will find that non-bicycle riders are the loudest proponents of mandatory helmet laws, riders who have been riding since 1965, most of that time without a helmet are the loudest opponents of mandatory helmet laws. Me, I wear one, but like to defend the right of others not to wear one.

iflabs

Wait? What? Helmet manufactures know full well helmets don't work and are deliberately playing along?

Zinger

I wouldn't say it if you weren't all over the road, lol. If somebody said it to you I have no idea what the circumstances were. On a narrow bike trail it's sometimes necessary just to get by someone who isn't aware that you're there and is going much slower than you. Sometimes it's strolling pedestrians or weaving little kids that I don't want to hit even though I slow to a crawl before going by. I don't make a habit out of saying "passing on your left" to everybody.....just when it's necessary....you see.

Some wear them some don't. I'm relating from 35 years of cycling. What I said was that ear muffs are more dangerous than riding without the bucket, imo. And I don't wear one every chance I get. If someone hurt your feelings then it probably wasn't me since I don't live in Iowa.

I'm beginning to see what they mean about helmet threads, lol.

chasm54

In a way, yes. Helmet manufacturers are very careful NOT to claim that a helmet will prevent serious injury. And, in fact, the figures seem to indicate that they are right not to do so. Helmets offer protection against superficial impacts to the scalp. They may (may) prevent some skull fractures. However, they do little or nothing to prevent concussions and there have been suggestions that they may actually increase the chances of diffuse axonal injury to the brain, which is often caused by rotational forces - the head is twisted round and the brain bounces around inside the skull, shearing blood vessels etc. The most interesting fact, in my view, is that where helmet use has increased the incidence of serious injury to cyclists appears to have been unaffected. So whatever helmets are doing, preventing death and serious injury doesn't seem to be it.

If you fall off at low speed onto your head a helmet might well save you some pain and injury. But the more severe your crash, the less relevant being helmeted will be. The forces involved when you are hit by a car, for example, utterly and instantly overwhelm a helmet.

The argument in this thread and its predecessors isn't really about whether one should wear a helmet or not, it is about whether one should retain the freedom to choose.

License2Ill

Helmet standards stage crashes every time they test a helmet. We know the energy, we know the headform mass, we know the g-forces, etc. There is no mystery to what difference they make when a head hits a surface. Without a helmet, the headforms show what happens. At any of the drop heights(1-2.2 meters), more than 300g will be transmitted to the headforms without a helmet on it. Now whether or not that means something to somebody is up for interpretation, but to overlook this is being oblivious to reason.

License2Ill

You make a lot of statements without any source of citation and when you did site something, you blatantly disregarded the actual statements from the link. Where is the information about diffuse axonal injuries, or any association of helmet use and injury rates? That helmet use and injury rate notion reminds me of the idiotic gun nut argument that places with gun bans have high crime.

There is absolutely no evidence of an increase in diffuse axonal injury from helmet use at all. It doesn't exist.

chasm54

[Curnow, W.J., 2005. The Cochrane Collaboration and bicycle helmets. Accid. Anal. Prev. 37, 569–573] In that paper Curnow points out that the Cochrane analysis of helmet effectiveness is flawed because helmets will not protect against brain injury caused by oblique impacts giving rise to angular acceleration. Other commentators have suggested that it may be worse than that, because the vents on modern helmets may have a tendency to catch on irregular objects or surfaces and actually create rotation that would not otherwise have occurred.

The latter is speculation, I think. At least, I am not aware of any research that would rule it in or out.

My personal view is that it's unlikely that helmets have often given rise to injuries that would not otherwise have occurred. My decision not to wear one is essentially based on my calculation that when cycling my risk of any head injury is extremely low, and on the fact that real-world accident statistics do not tend to show that increased use of helmets has a marked impact on the incidence of death or serious injury to cyclists. So, they are probably efficacious for minor injuries but less so in severe crashes. In the former case I'm happy to take the small risk. In the latter, the risk is still small and the helmet is unlikely to make a crucial difference.

My objection to helmet promotion is that it leads people to believe that cycling is a dangerous activity. This discourages people from cycling. Worse, it discourages them from letting their children cycle. That is bad for the public health (the most ardent helmet-promotor would agree, I think, that the health benefits of cycling outweigh the risks) and has al sorts of other negative societal and environmental consequences. And cycling is actually a very low-risk activity. Recent evidence to the Transport Select Committee in the UK parliament, based on official Dept of Transport statistics, indicated that in Britain one cyclist is killed for every 28 million miles cycled. The idea that one needs protective clothing to engage in an activity that safe is ... remarkable. I'll put it no stronger than that.

License2Ill

Yeah, there is no evidence that oblique injuries are occurring at all, let alone exacerbated by helmet use. There may be concerns about it, but there is no actual evidence of it at all. It may be someone's idea, but it's completely unfounded and dismissed by every single one of the standards makers that have analyzed the data, hypothesized, etc. It's baseless speculation.

Of course, the leap that helmet promotion leads to discouraging cycling as an activity is an even greater one, and not even close to a good reason not to wear a helmet. This discussion just got even sillier with that one. Next thing you know we'll be arguing that helmets make skydiving look dangerous, hang gliding, and that brakes on cars make them seem scary because it allows people to go faster in them around corners, which scares little old ladies out of the fast lane, and we wouldn't want that.

Wogster

Taking a 4lb steel ball, dropping it 1.5m means nothing compared to potential injuries, because of a few issues, one is that a head is attached to a body, and the head and body are in motion. How that combination travels through space, when affected by the laws of physics and impacts an immovable surface, is unknown at this time. We make the assumption that helmets prevent injury, but without a comparative study, which could be accomplished using crash test dummies, and using data gleaned from automotive testing. Helmet testing in it's current form, is only useful in determining if a helmet is useful if you fail to unclip properly and fall over to the side.

chasm54

This is a pretty silly statement, actually. There is good data from Australia that making helmets mandatory reduced the numbers of cyclists. To compare cycling with skydiving or hang gliding in terms of risk is simply nonsensical. And to suggest that objecting to helmet promotion is analogous to encouraging people to ride or drive without brakes is barely worth dignifying with a response.

Plus, the idea that "there is no evidence that oblique injuries are occurring at all" may be literally true in the sense that the data may not have been gathered, but is absurd in real life. You think all the impacts suffered by heads, helmeted or otherwise, are linear?

Do you by any chance work for a helmet manufacturer? Or sell helmets?