I think the mask point fits in that a hemet 'hedges your bet' on safety out in public. With cooler weather, a mask gets more comfortable to wear and a helmet keeps you from burning the bald spot among other things...

I was hit by a drunk driver in 2009. Wasn't wearing a helmet. Had a broken scapula, a concussion and bruising all over, recovered OK but could've easily died on the spot. At the time I used a helmet occasionally, mostly for training and racing, and continued doing so.
About 2 years ago I started wearing a helmet on all my rides, even to the grocery store. Can't really say why, I don't believe a helmet can really save your life in most serious crashes. But it's better than nothing, and could prevent some brain injuries. I doesn't bother me much, so I wear it.
But I'm against mandatory helmet laws, and don't look down upon those who choose to don't wear a helmet.

But from a public health and public policy standpoint, masks and helmets are completely different: A mask protects the wearer to some degree, but it provides significant potential benefits to others by reducing the spread of potentially infected droplets coming from the wearer's mouth; a helmet only protects the person wearing it. So it is perfectly rational to concern yourself with other people's masking practices, as they may affect you; I won't say that it's irrational to concern yourself with whether other people wear helmets, but I sure can't imagine being as worked up over it as some people (like GlennR ) seem to be. It's like worrying about what other consenting adults do in their bedrooms: it doesn't affect me, so I don't really care.

What about if you are in the hospital and run up a large bill? Who do you think pays for it? If you have insurance then the fees go up, just like smokers pay more because they have more health issues. If you don't have insurance then tax payers pay for it.

And if you have family, it will impact them.

I see families riding all the time where the kids have helmets and the parents don't. First of it sets a bad example. And if the parent falls and suffers traumatic brain injury, they saddle their kids with a lifetime of taking care of them.

BTW.. A childhood friend was hit by a car at age 8 and was in a comma for 2 months. He has brain damage and now at the age of 64 lives in a home since both his parents passed and has been angry and bitter than he all had normal lives and his just sucks.

Would a helmet of helped... it couldn't hurt.

So your actions do have an impact on others, no man is an island.

Are you a professional nanny, or is it just a hobby?

With your attitude, how can you even be happy in a world in which others have the freedom to make different choices than you've made? I mean, you seem really bothered by decisions, made by others, which have no material impact on you. (As for your claim about the hospitalization costs for uninsured cycling injuries? Find me data to demonstrate that this is anything beyond a trivial rounding error in our nearly $4 trillion annual healthcare expense in the US.)

Under your "logic," we'd better ban everything other than sitting in a lounge chair and watching TV -- because people get hurt and killed while riding bikes EVEN WITH HELMETS! And the same happens to some people who drive cars, ride in airplanes, paddle canoes, eat steaks, walk on icy sidewalks, work on farms, etc etc etc.

To be clear: I wear a helmet every time I get on a bike. But bossing people into wearing them, when it's literally none of my business, is not my thing. No one appointed me to worry about any family other than my own. Same goes for pretty much all of the other decisions people make that don't materially impact me: they are none of my business. Do you want people telling YOU how to live YOUR life?

Just take some responsibility.

Please post a picture of yourself so if I find you laying on the road bleeding from the head, I can wave as I ride by.

Your post is a non-sequitor -- you haven't even attempted to address my points. I can understand why you didn't try.

You seem angry and spiteful just because someone disagrees with you, and that's sad. If I saw you and your bike in the ditch, I would stop to help you -- whether or not you had a helmet. I really would. Hell, I have, for someone else. But I guess we're different that way.

So they don't end up coming across like a useless waste bucket who looks at society through the tiny little pinhole the way you do.

You remind me of a four year old child who fails to understand the consequences of how your personal decisions may affect others.

Whats this I hear? Am I being threatened by said waste bucket? Over the internet? How are you going to carry out your threat?

Sounds like someone needs a time out.

I am proof of a flaw in that logic. A helmet saved my life. I spent 5 days in a coma in a neurosurgical ICU. Three weeks on the hospital. Years passed before I could earn enough money to pay more than peanuts in taxes. I never learned what my stay cost but it was not a small number.

Had I not been wearing a helmet, I would have gone on one ambulance ride, not two, then to a funeral home and burial. (Maybe not even that first ride. First ride might have been the morgue truck. So, what? $5000? (in 1977). A service? Whatever, it would have been far less.

I visit this thread every once in a while. I watch the same school kids rolling out their same arguments. I learn nothing I didn't already know.

this proves my point... 'nuff said.

I one crashed at 16mph and hit my head. I sat there for 15 minutes before I felt steady enough to ride home. When I got home I noticed my 2 week old helmet was cracked... best money I ever spent.

Koyote is advocating for personal choice. I'll agree with him on that but wear a helmet most of the time. Most of the guys I see riding without helmets are doing it solo which is probably much safer than riding in groups. I've been places with helmet laws, no big deal, I'm already wearing one. So if you legally don't have to wear one, I don't see the problem going without. Just ride in a safe manner.

If I have another crash as serious as that first, I have prayed many times that I do not live. You're cute "this proves my point... 'nuff said." shows me you have little understanding. I would far rather die than be sentenced to have to go through that (or equivalent) recovery again.

Maybe stop riding.

Make sure you have a living will, a DNR and your family knows your wishes.

"Maybe stop riding" could be sound advice. But I think the rest is the most ridiculously pessimistic thing you could ever say to anybody.

Unless your idea of cycling is long hours spent on the side of a busy road with idiotic drivers, its not something so dangerous where you are risking your life everytime you get out there.

As long as you make a conscious attempt to be aware of your surrounding and have adequate skill to avoid potential obstacles, you shouldn't have anything to worry about.

If you Io worry, just play it safe and either change where you bike, or.how often, etc. You don't need to stop altogether.

I certainly wouldnt...

"Maybe stop riding" could be sound advice. But I think the rest is the most ridiculously pessimistic thing you could ever say to anybody.

Unless your idea of cycling is long hours spent on the side of a busy road with idiotic drivers, its not something so dangerous where you are risking your life everytime you get out there.

As long as you make a conscious attempt to be aware of your surrounding and have adequate skill to avoid potential obstacles, you shouldn't have anything to worry about.

If you Io worry, just play it safe and either change where you bike, or.how often, etc. You don't need to stop altogether.

I certainly wouldnt...

Having your intentions known to your family and legal papers in order is what every adult should have. It has nothing to do with being a cyclist.

I ride roads and try to avoid the busy ones, but sometimes you can't.

Looking back through the last few posts, thought I would offer actual facts to offset the above misstatements.

First, if you do have insurance, and you "run up a large bill," your premiums in fact do NOT rise afterwards. Whether you buy your insurance individually, or get it through your employer, your costs will not change. Anyone who has ever made a health insurance claim would know this. Because insurance pools large groups of people, any one person's claim will have only a tiny impact on the future premiums for each person - that's just how insurance works.

Second, regarding the claim that "if you don't have insurance then the tax payers pay for it," well, sort of, but not exactly, and not fully. Less than 20% of hospitals in the US are government-owned, so they may receive subsidies; of the remaining hospitals, most are non-profit (meaning they would simply absorb the loss) and about 20% are for-profit (meaning they would be able to deduct the unpaid bills before calculating the income on which they pay taxes, which means their tax bills would fall by less than the unpaid bills -- but still, that is a form of tax subsidy, albeit partial).

So, what are we left with? If you have insurance and run up a big hospital bill, others (in your insurance pool) will bear almost the entire cost. If you don't have insurance, and don't pay your bill, in certain circumstances the government may subsidize the hospital out of tax dollars - not always, and often not dollar-per-dollar.

So, yes, your actions "do have an impact on others," but it's not quite so simple. The only people who aren't imposing healthcare costs on others are those who pay-as-they-go; all others, whether insured, or uninsured and defaulting on their bills, are imposing costs on others.

To be clear: I have had health insurance every day of my adult life, and I always wear a helmet when riding. So, please don't make any more of these unfounded insinuations. But when posting about factual issues, we should all strive to post actual facts and not fictions.

So someone other than yourself pays for it.

My point is if you do "risky" things then you should be responsible for when things go south.

"actual facts" is a murky term these days, thanks to the state of politics and the cable media. (not picking sides).

The only way you can claim to be fully responsible when your risky behavior goes south is if you are uninsured and pay all of your own medical bills out-of-pocket. With any kind of insurance, whether private or through government (e.g., Medicare), some or most of the cost will be borne by others. That is not murky; it is how health insurance works, as any adult who has EVER made a claim should be able to understand. (Think back: have you ever made a health insurance claim? Did your premiums go up as a result? It's a rhetorical question, because the answer is always "no." So, who absorbed the cost?)

And by the way, if you think any of my stated facts are incorrect, then please check them out and correct me if I'm wrong. But if you are too lazy to do that, then you have no grounds to question what I have written. Too many people use these computers to spew opinions, too few use them to actually learn things.

The problem with your analogies is the vastly different probability, which was the point that I unsuccessfully tried to get across.

It's so unlikely to have a bike accident and a traumatic brain injury that it's a trivial concern, like your toaster electrocuting you. Then in the case a bike accident does occur, you are more likely to have a traumatic injury not involving your brain - by your reasoning, you should feel bad that the person got on his bike in the first place.

https://photos.offerup.com/8LsY5TO1_...814143047d.jpg

BTW, I just read a label that wearing a helmet can cause cancer... according to the state of California, so maybe you're right.

Glenn, do you grasp that no one (that I've noticed) in this thread has advocated against helmet use?

And can you grasp that a product liability disclaimer is not about probability of injury, which is what wphamilton wrote about?

You are ignoring the points that some of us are making, and instead treating us as if we are against helmet use. It's so frustrating that I feel like banging my head against the wall -- but I would first put on my helmet, of course.

Instead, I think I will bow out of the discussion.

Why so serious? He was being sardonic about the liability disclaimers, which I take to be at least partly acknowledging the points. And objectively Glenn was sort of drawn in to the arguments after little more than expressing empathy.

You may be right about his response to your post. But Glenn was not expressing any empathy. He was expressing a desire to tell others what to do. And then he went on to post a bunch of things that are factually incorrect, which tends to trigger me. So much information is at our fingertips and yet so many people refuse to find facts before spouting off.