Okay. Thanks for the list. I'm gonna go puke now. But what I'm really curious about is how that 55% is split up.

You know, heart attacks I would think should be largely ruled out: If you die of a heart attack while cycling a head trauma wasn't a possibility so it's not important to this discussion.
But if you die from something related to impact, then yes it's certainly pertinent.


I always like to see how a statistic is split up in its entirety. It tells you more about the assumptions which were made while forming it.

And I kinda wanted the gruesome list you just posted :).

That may be true, but even manufacturers of full face motorcycle helmets make pretty modest claims about how much protection they offer in a 40 mph impact. It's possible the little bit of foam and plastic in a bike helmet saved his life, and it's possible it had no effect at all. If these helmets had a fraction of the magical protective capabilities that advocates claim they have he should have been able to get up, see to his other injuries and then pose cheerfully for a picture with his cracked helmet. Instead an impact to the head with the helmet on still produced a very serious head injury.

Helmets apparently cause as many fatalites as they prevent... maybe the same for injuries, but it is hard to tell. So... it is a very common misperception that they make us safe, that they are necessary, anyone who doesn't wear one is crazy, etc.

Why does it matter? This attitude reinforces the false perception that cycling is dangerous. Practically every person I talk to thinks I'm stark raving nuts to be riding a bicycle out on the street (helmet or no), because the pervading culture in the US is to drive the biggest SUV you can get so you will be high on the highway food chain... they want to make sure that in a collision their superior mass will be more likely to kill the other guy instead. They look at me and think I'm so vulnerable... anybody could just run right over me and I'd be dead. I must be insane.

Many people avoid doing things that they perceive are dangerous and prevent their kids from participating. Where I live there was recently a flyer sent out by the schools telling parents to not let their kids ride bikes! They can all just take the bus... much safer. It wasn't like anyone had even been hurt, much less killed! Paranoia seems a lot higher in this country than when I was a kid and I don't see it getting any better... and I think it is sad.

On average your odds of getting killed while riding a bike in the US are about 1 in 12,000,000 miles. Not bad odds IMO, but it is about 5 times more dangerous per mile than driving a car. In countries like the Netherlands where city traffic is dominated by cyclists (who happen to not wear helmets) the fatality rate is 4-6 times less than in the US, so about the same as it is driving a car here.

The first time I saw this series of photos I just loved it, because it shows a much more efficient, healthy, and enjoyable way to get around in a city than the crawling gridlock of vehicles and parking lots that is common in the US. I figured that most cyclist would agree, but I guess many don't.
http://www.ski-epic.com/amsterdam_bicycles/
http://copenhagengirlsonbikes.blogspot.com/

IMO it would be a very positive change if we could adopt a similar culture in the US. Cycling would be safer and a lot more people would participate, and the city environments would improve IMO. Just a better way to live.

So if I'm a troll for promoting the ideas that cycling is safe (but could be safer) and that helmets do not make us safer and are therefore unnecessary... then guilty as charged. I'd like to see more people out riding, and I'd like to see the towns configured to make it safer and more convenient to do so. I don't want to see more MHLs or other legislation that restricts the use of bicycles by the general population, for no good reason! Once these things are enacted they never seem to get repealed...

sorry for the gorey details. I forget not everyone has the stomach for that stuff I do. I wanted to be an EMT at one point, and have spent a large part of my life around hospitals. My mother is also an RN, so even when we dine together, a lot of the discussion is about patients and medical stuff. It's par for the course, and I get so used to it, that I forget not everyone is.

I also completely understand the desire to break everything down. Being an engineer, that sort of thing is in my nature, too. The more information you have, the better and clearer the whole picture becomes. Even a bit of omitted or missing data can skew an entire study, if that bit of data is important.

OK, the helmet's foam and plastic again absorbs some of the energy of the impact. Without that layer of protection there, he probably would have suffered bleeding into the brain, a crushed skull, or any number of other injuries that could have proven fatal. While we have no way to know what really would have happened without a helmet, I feel it's safe to say that whatever the helmet did absorb from the crash, is that much less his head had to take in damage.
If you wanted him to get up and dust off, he should have been wearing a full exo-skelital body armor suit, like some of the MTB guys wear in downhill. You know the ones, with the hard plastic skid plate armor on the fore and upper arms, a body shell, thighs and shins, HANS device-like whiplash brace, etc.

Even if this were true, wouldn't this come down to the common sense of the helmet user?

Not that there's anything wrong with that. This is BF.

I don't know if the helmet had much or any positive effect, but anybody who has followed and participated in cycle racing for years knows that crashes at 40 mph are extremely common. This is a slow speed for the finishing sprint or any modestly downhill section. Racers would usually jump back on their bikes and finish the race after a crash at that speed. I've seen this hundreds of times in local as well as pro races. Until 2003 European pros didn't wear helmets. The only fatality I heard of since the late 80s when I starting following the sport, was Fabio Casartelli who slammed head first into concrete pole at 50+mph. In that situation a helmet would not have helped.

I've seen no data to really, concisively support this, and personal experience has shown me that a helmet has, or could have, saved my face when I went over the handlebars in a wreck. Fatalities, maybe a negligable difference. Cause a death with a helmet? eh, no. Injuries however, I feel the helmet does help reduce. This isn't my main reson for responding though, and this has already been covered numerous times in this thread, so I'll really leave this part be for now.

big SUV.. I call mine a "support vehicle" haha"I need a new wheel! get over here!" OK, seriously though, I agree this perception is wide-spread in the US. I do have a Grand Cherokee with AWD, but I also live in Northern Michigan, where we have about 8 months/year of Winter, and at present about 4 feet of snow. They refuse to plow most times here, claiming budgetary issues, so being in a rural area on an unpaved dead end road, we're left to fend for ourselves, which means with my medical needs, a way to drive over or through the snow.
I also have a 700HP '66 Charger, in which I slow down, and give wide berth to any cyclist I happen to see. I take riders very seriously, since we have nowhere BUT the highways here to ride a road bike. This area is nothing but interstates.

That's just plain sad. In what sort of environment do you live? Rural, Suburbia, or Inner City?

This is a familiar argument, as I have a similar one often with Europeans about US cars and transit habits vs. Euro ones. What you need to keep in mind is land mass, population density, and population center distances. The Netherlands, and the vast majority of their population could be stuffed into one of our US states. As such, the US has vastly different transportation needs compared to most of the EU. We don't have the option of a single mass transit system to cover all of the US, or even all of one state, nor is cycling a way to get around town for many, such as myself, where the closest town is 20 miles away on a major interstate.

If you mean cycling taken more seriously, and done by many more people I wish it were so, too. However, the average overweight American barely gets out from in front of a computer screen or off the couch long enough to look at a bike, let alone ride one. It saddens me when I go out in public anymore because I so rarely, honestly, every see a person of healthy body weight. Everyone is carrying at least 20 extra pounds around here. Maybe it's the cold weather. Who knows? It's sad when it even applies to a 10 year old though.

Essentially incorrect. Crashes @ much lower speeds are very common in cycling, and in most instances a helmet will mitigate head injuries, often preventing death. My crash in Germany that cold cocked me was @ about 23mph.

The greater Ruidoso NM area has about 12,000 people... so a smallish town.

Of course many US residents pretty much need a car of some sort. But there are also plenty of cities and small towns where getting around by bicycle would be very viable, if it were not made so inconvenient, and it were not perceived as being dangerous. There is a bit of a chicken-egg critical mass issue to get it started, though.

Also, on the subject of cars, I also like the idea of electric powered velomobile style cars for city travel. These could weigh ~200 lbs and have a range of at least 30 miles using cheap batteries... or double that with Li-ion. Very simple and inexpensive if mass-produced. Something like this could co-exist quite well with cyclists.

I only have one question about helmets now - "Should a person put on a helmet to protect them from brain damage from reading threads like this - and does it do any good?"

Carry on...

Of course many crashes occur at lower speeds... I was only pointing out that the 40mph that Saul Raisan was going when he crashed was not unusual. Also, it is a fact that racing cyclists have been involved in many thousands of crashes without helmets and the rates of death are very low. I've only been able to find stats on the Tour de France, in which 2 cyclists have died in it's 100+ year history. If anyone has info on other races, and hopefully stats on the entire sport, I'd love to see them.

Helmets surely mitigate *some* crash injuries, but if they didn't also have some negative effects on other injuries (or some other mysterious factor) then we should see positive effect in overall injury rates or death rates... and we don't.

tell me about it.
they put in a bike path/walking path along the side of US10 in town here, and the dumbsh**s put CURBS in at every drive way and street, which equates to every 30-50 feet. This makes the path useless for anything but pedestrians.
No bicycles, strollers, scooters, wheelchairs, power chairs, etc. Nothing that can't hop a curb with zero effort.
I wouldn't even bother on a MTB, since you'd never get to over 5MPH before the next friggin curb.
I'm still pondering writing a very nasty letter to the paper about this issue.

yet they are spending literally millions to put in a G-D skate park in town, for all of the little skate rat drop-outs to have a place to hang out and sniff paint.

I'm wearing mine right now.. but I have no statistical data to substantiate this.

This is so "apparent" that nothing actually indicates that this is the case.

I don't think that anybody here has the perception that helmets make "us safe" (ie, "free from harm"). Nothing can actually make us "safe".
I don't think anybody in this thread has advocated MHLs. I'd hazard to guess that most avid cyclists would not advocate such laws and that the strongest support for these laws are from people who don't bicycle or bicycle infrequently. Thus, arguing against MHLs is arguing against a point no one here has made.

Part of the problem is that the "event" that is being measured is rather rare. It looks like most of the data relates injury rates to overall percentages of helmet usage. This would dilute the effect (if any) of helmets reducing injury. What should be done is to look at injuries paired with helmet use/non-use (but it is probably very hard to do this). It's possible (speculating) that helmets provide a small benefit (like 5-10%) and that the data is not sensitive enough to detect such a small difference.

========================

Anyway, as much as some of the "anti helmet advocates" suggest that the "helmet MHL advocates" misuse faulty data and deceptive statistics, it appears that "anti helmet advocates" are no better (and may be worse).

Also, too many of the "anti helmet advocates" lump cyclists here (who think that helmets are a good idea) with people (mostly non-cyclists) who support MHLs and who (oddly) think that things can keep them "free from harm". These two populations are not the same.

I must commend GlassWolf and rruff (among others) for maintaining a very civil discussion.
At other times/threads this has unfortunately not been the case here at BF.

P.S. In the interest of full disclosure I'll admit I am a helmet wearer and continue to belive in them, although all my worst training/racing accidents occured with no helmet or just leather hairnet on. Last accident - 2years ago knocked me out cold by the side of the road/shattered the foam helmet I was wearing.

For that you need an armadillo helmet, also blocks even the best brainwave scanners!

(that probably sounds really dumb if you haven't seen the right movie)

for what it's worth, a foam helmet is designed to split that way as it absorbs the energy of the impact. It did it's job as designed. This is similar to a crumple zone on a newer car. Once it's dropped or wrecked, you replace it.

also, thank you for the compliment.

A scanner darkly? haha

A good movie but no, Dukes of Hazzard.

You'll need one of these
http://boingboing.net/images/foilfez.jpg

In case anyone is interested in racing fatality stats, I found this page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of..._during_a_race

It would be good to know how many total racer-miles this represents, but for the Tour de France we can make a reasonable guess. There have been two riders killed in crashes. Figuring 150 riders, 2,000 miles, and 100 races, divided by 2 fatalities, gives us ~15 million miles per fatality. Which is a little better than the number I got for general cycling in the US (12 million). Note that famous blood-baths like Paris-Roubaix have never had a fatality... guys crashing on cobblestones for 100 years... without helmets.

Note that these guys crash a lot, and often at high speeds. In fact it wouldn't surprise me if your odds were less than 50/50 for getting through an entire Tour without crashing, and for single year at Paris-Roubaix it's likely no better. They also did not start wearing helmets until 2003. From 2003-2006, there have been 5 deaths... a higher rate than at any other time in history. Of course this is a small sample, and maybe in future years it will look better... but it is still disturbing that an *increase* in fatalities coincided with the enactment of helmet rules.

However you look at it, bicycle racing is and always has been a pretty safe sport.

They offer "some" protection and isn't that enough? (I don't agree that it offered no protection at all - too many examples of how that isnt true in so many instances) And why isn't "enough" something that should end the argument?

Back around in circles you go. None of your links are from reliable sources, nor would any medical professional back you.

Yet, YOU'VE been a major contributor. Therefore, based on your post, one can only incur damage by reading this thread unless they read your posts/views only? :rolleyes:

Then please tell me what is unreliable about the data, or at least provide some of your own that tells a different story.