I have not seen one posting supporting not wearing a helmet as of yet, but there is currently about 10% of those polled who chose not to wear a helmet. Will any of the non-helmet supporters offer a post?

I meant it in a joking way, and I appologize if I offended anyone.

No issue - we ain't that sensitive if you want to know that truth. :-)

I was wearing mine until it got to be summer in Arizona (110-117 degrees) and it was frying my head. it was so hot and incomforttable I took it off. I enjoyed riding so much more without it I just have not put it back on. I may not ever. I see about a quarter of adult riders wearing one here.

I don't think this question is really much different than "should I wear a helmet at all" as it seems that the views are fairly polarized.

I suppose if its a slow ride on empty streets then yes, I'd ride helmetless. Some days at some speeds I like to think of my helmet as covering for my bandana. It probably isn't necessary, but looks considerably less dorky than my funny head wearing a bandana, and as much as I sweat, the bandana is necessary.

Would you buckle your seatbelt driving that distance?

There's your answer.

I have been riding without one lately.

Like you, I just leave the helmet on the bars of the bike, if someone really wants to break into a locked garage and take a helmet off an also locked bike. There's lots of other stuff in the garage that is worth more then the $40 the helmet would cost to replace. Of course with the helmet handy, it's easier to just wear it anyway.

Maybe a helmet doesn't make a differernce if a car whacks you. You can still take a good hit from falling over laugh-in style (heard of clipless?). You can fall over leaving the driveway - my daughter did, and got a helicopter ride to the hospital.

Not a good analogy. Seat belt use uncontroversially saves lives, as proved by empirical data. The same is NOT true for helmets. There is a genuine cause for debate, here.

That said, for a 6.5 mile commute, I would wear a helmet. I figure that the exposure time is high enough to become statistically significant at that point. For my one mile commute to campus and ~2-3 (maximum) miles of riding around between work and classes, I don't bother. Too much hassle for a non-risk, in my opinion.

A billion people in China do not wear a helmet. I'm guessing more than 10 million people in the Netherlands do not. The idea that all of these people are mentally challenged or do not ride alongside cars, trucks and other competing traffic is demonstrably wrong.

My helmet is stylin. :)
I wear mine for all rides. Plus, I tend to hit some decent speeds.
Don't really give a crap if anyone else besides my family is wearing a helmet or not.

OK...this is going to sound bad, but here goes...

I'm lucky that my father works in the same building as I, so when I first got the bug to bike, I started to ride 2-3 times a week to my parents house 8.5-9 miles one way and carpool with my dad the rest of the way. I do this for a couple weeks. Then it started, "When are you going to get a helmet?" Then I do the full 36 miles roundtrip once or twice a week in addition to carpooling a couple days..."When are you going to get a helmet?". So to shut them all up...I had a helmet :D on order from performance bike. It came today. I did about 5 nighttime miles with it tonite (I have lights too of course) but its "maiden voyage" will be tomorrow when I go the whole way to work...wearing the helmet of course.

But my common sense has kicked in before today. I equate helmet use to seat belt use. Seat belt use will not prevent all injuries from an accident...nor will it make you %100 safe in an accident nor prevent accidents. But...I've seen proof of the benefits of seat belt use...it CAN mean a difference of life or death or the difference between being a paraplegic needing full facial reconstructive surgery versus a few really bad cuts and bruises with a concussion. A bike helmet will not prevent all injuries from an accident...nor will it make you %100 safe in an accident nor prevent accidents, but it CAN mean a difference between needing brain surgery or simply a mild concussion...or 20 stiches in the head and a 1 day hospital stay versus a few bad cuts being patched up in the ER. Seat belts, in some rare cases, can cause more harm than good...bike helmets are the same.

The other thing is...I got a wife, and 2 kids...if wearing a helmet makes them at least feel a little bit more comfortable (which it will) about daddy riding his bike everywhere...then so be it...I got that going for me too. Okay, thats a lame excuse but its reality all the same.
Again...this is my 2 cents...do as you will...its your choice...and its about what you believe it right for you.

+1

More statistical debate than you ever wanted to know may be found on the Advocacy & Safety forum, where the topic even has merited a sticky thread.

Also +1 about making my family comfortable and setting a good example for my kids. Kids do have a provably higher chance of falling off and otherwise crashing. (Or so I've heard, and it's readily believable.)

Personally, the most useful I've found my helmet to be so far has been when I whack my head on the top of the low door frame putting my bike in the shed. Thankfully. :)

Sigh. See my post above - seat belts can NOT be equated to helmet use. The empirical data regarding death and injury rates unambiguously prove that wearing you seat belt is a very good idea. The same is NOT true for helmets, where the evidence intended to demonstrate that they reduce death and injury rates is sketchy at best, and absent at worst. In spite of this, they are perhaps one of the most overhyped safety products in history. By all means, if a helmet makes you FEEL safer, wear one, but you should be aware that this IS an open question, subject to fair debate (and, frankly, the burden of proof is on helmet advocates). The same is not true for seat belts.

Like I said, I wear my helmet when I judge it wise, but I do not feel unsafe going without one most of the time.

I used to do that as a teenager because it's compulsory to wear a helmet where I live, and the school and my parents used to make me put it on when I left. As soon as I was out of sight it would be on the handlebars. The police also just used to tell you to put it on, instead of fining you or making you let your tires down.

It was still pretty dumb, but there was some logic behind it- and I was an invincible teenager at the time:)

I am actually surprised to see the number so high on the survey.

I wear my helmet, almost all the time.

How can I make my four year old and two year old girls wear one and then not wear one myself? I cannot even imagine what I look like wearing a helmet while riding in the park acroos the street from my house with a helmet.

I've got a good friend who's father took a spill on his bicycle and has been a vegetable for almost 10 years. If there's a .001% chance that I could avoind that with a helmet, why not wear it? You can't fix what the helmet protects once it's broken.

Besides, riding in and around NYC without a helmet is fairly ludicrous. All the riders I see on my commute wear helmets.

I guess to each their own but it would be such a shame to be hurt in a way that a helmet could have helped.

+1

Let's stick to comparing apples with apples here.

From my experience, most Chinese bicycles have non-working brakes and rarely have any gearing. If I assume that 1 billion people can't be wrong, maybe brakes are unnecessary as well? Sarcasm intended.

China's auto statistics are also interesting: China has much fewer cars on the road than America yet according to WHO statistics, has 8 times as many auto accidents and people dying from such accidents. So does that information have any relevance on the America auto environment? I think not because there are vast differences in driver skill, comfort, education, etc. between the two countries, let alone other factors.

I read somewhere that recent statistics show that riders without helmets accounted for 90+% of bike related deaths in New York City. I live in New York City. I know how crazy traffic can be on the roads. Given these observations, I therefore wear a helmet when I ride my bike.

But the thing is, there are places where drivers are used to cyclists, and probably bike themselves sometimes. In my city of 500,000 there just aren't that many cyclists. (2 decent sized LBS and one smaller). The drivers here are awful. I even find myself correcting old habits in my driving, now that I've been commuting for a month.

So I wear a helmet. Among people here who ride, it seems about 50/50.

I wear my helmet even if I'm going a few blocks; why? Because I can replace my helmet, but I can't replace my brain...at least not till they can succesfully do a brain transplant! But even a brain transplant would cost more then a helmet...in addition I have to deal with the personality conflict!

If you get thrown from your bike (and don't land under a car), your greatest risk for fatality is unquestionably from head trauma. Your brain is a heavy object within a closed space with extremely high blood flow, and giving it a good klonk (even without fracturing your skull) is a huge risk for life-threatening bleeds inside your skull (which compress your brain and thus end your life.) Other injuries are of course, potentially serious (lacerated livers, spleens, broken bones), but are generally more potentially salvageable with less debilitating consequences than an intracranial bleed. An unprotected fall onto the head from bike height onto pavement even at a stationary position can clearly cause enough impact to cause head injury. Googling the stats indicate that roughly 1 in 8 cyclists involved in crashes have brain injury. You should definitely wear a helmet when bicycling to avoid becoming one of these statistics.

It is true, that the vast majority of bicyclists may never ever experience a serious crash, and thus some of these bikers incorrectly reason that there is no safety benefit from wearing a helmet. If this type of statistical reasoning was valid, tobacco companies could very successfully claim that they have no responsibility in the increased incidence of lung cancer, since only a very small percentage of smokers (<5%, probably much lower) develop a smoking-induced lung cancer. However, if you turn the picture around and look at the unfortunate folks who get lung cancer, scientists have found that smoking accounts for 90% of these cases singlehandedly. (Stop smoking, and 90% of the fatal lung cancers will never happen.) Likewise, the safety benefit of helmets becomes immediately obvious when looking at bike/motorcycle collisions and comparing helmeted to nonhelmeted injuries. It's not subtle at all - wear a helmet when you bike.

I would never ride without a helmet because, many years before I started riding myself, my father - a bike commuter his entire life - was "doored." He flipped over the door, landed on his head. Without a helmet, he'd be dead or a vegetable. As it is, he has a barely visible scar over his eybrow where the helmet dug in on impact. I'll take a scar and bad hair over vegetation ANY DAY. Some things only have to happen once...

Ever been to the fixie forum?

Me either, but I bet they debate brakes there.


I don't know whose studies to believe -- the anti-helmet extremists who seem to have some philosophical axe to grind, or the pro-helmet studies that seem to be funded by Bell, etc.