2 observations I noticed about European bike riders. Italy
1. your average daily 3speed Joe using the bicycle as a means of transportation to get from point A to point B don't wear helmets. This is your group that is really not your recreational cyclist but more of a means of transportation cyclist. The speeds traveled by these cyclists were quite leisure and could include anyone from the local priest to someone's grandma going to the market.
2. all serious cyclists, meaning they either had on cycling apparell(jersey/ shorts/ shoes) and rode some form of road bike all wore helmets. This isn't just a team or semi pro rider but your average recreational cyclist who seemed to ride more than just to get from point A to point B. These guys rode pretty fast and some descending skills as well as climbing skills and did not look all that in shape although some did look quite fit.

no point here, just an observation

Statistics are useful only up to the point when skull hits the concrete. Passengers in cars have a steel cage and (sometimes) airbags, pedestrians are not speeding at 30 k per hour with cars inches from them. Helmets might do little more than let your head bounce before the concrete grips, but I'd rather bounce once or twice, thanks very much.

Yes black and white advocacy sucks, I don't want to see that. I don't want to see local police enforcing helmet laws.

I also don't want to have to support the kid, now an adult, from next door who drools and can't work because he fell off the sidewalk on his BMX 20 years ago and banged his head.

well, that makes sense. now subtract the percentage that aren't wearing seatbelts. sans belts all bets are off.

and how many of those .26 dead cyclists die from head injuries with and without helmets. after all you are splitting up the automobile stats but not the bikes'?

Not to mention that a number of folks I know have landed on their heads while flying off a bike. In every case helmeted and the helmet was destroyed, heads saved. So regardless of the stats of cars vs bikes, one could say that empirically, helmets improve bike safety.

it *seems* like head impact might be more common in biking crashes than in car crashes. If you compare odds of crashing at all vs. rate of crashes with injuries for both cars and bikes, I would not be surprised to find that more bike crashes result in injuries overall than cars' crashes.

Of course with both there are many instances where injuries are minor and not reported. There are so many things that are easy to prove if you use statistics in a simplistic fashion, or in wayas that don't really provide numbers that are relevant to the question.

I had a roomate that was a statisical analysis nerd who always said "statistics don't lie." its true indeed but they can also tell the wrong thruth and make it sound like "science."

I believe the percentage of cyclists who die from head injuries is something like 75%. I don't know the breakdown of auto-related fatalities regarding seatbelts.

How many stories do you hear where the person says something about how the helmet split and saved their life? Or maybe the helmet broke and they got a nasty concussion but think how much worse it would have been! And so on and so on.

The fact is, there's no evidence that the injury would have been any worse had they not been wearing a helmet. You cannot study something that never happened. In fact people are still having nasty head injuries even wearing bike helmets. I believe this is for lots of different reasons, not the least of which is the fact that helmets are designed for low speed impact which many collisions are not.

When controlled for population decline, no place that has implemented compulsory helmet use has ever been able to show any decrease in injury or death even as the rate of helmet use increases dramatically.

This failure to demonstrate efficacy and the inevitable dramatic decrease in ridership is why the British Medical Association has declared its opposition to mandatory helmet use.

"The fact is, there's no evidence that the injury would have been any worse had they not been wearing a helmet. You cannot study something that never happened. In fact people are still having nasty head injuries even wearing bike helmets. I believe this is for lots of different reasons, not the least of which is the fact that helmets are designed for low speed impact which many collisions are not."

Bike at 30 mph (or some other speed), hit something head on, flip over your handle bars, land directly on your head. Do this without a helmet. Record your injuries. Now do the exact same thing under the exact same speed and conditions while wearing a helmet. Record your injuries. If your injuries are worse without the helmet, then helmets do improve safey. If your injuries are worse with a helmet then helmets do not improve safety.

That is a true scientific test, with everything controlled (the same) except the variable (helmet) that you are testing. My guess is that landing the same way each time, the helmet will decrease injuries 100% of the time. Of course this does not mean the will prevent all injuries, but no helmet manufacturer, and no one in here is saying they will.

Attempting to say that helmets are not improving safety because your are more likely to be injured in a car or while walking does not cut it. The variables are different. While in a car you have a metal box (the frame of the car) protecting you, as well as (usually) airbags, seatbelts, and other safety devices. While walking sure you can trip and fall, but a fall from standing height while walking is not the same as falling off a bike at any speed. The fact is that using these examples to say helmets do not reduce injury is comparing apples to oranges. The dynamics of each type of injury are completely different.

Attempting to say, as some have, though not necessarily here, that wearing a helmet is less safe because people wearing helmets feel more invincible, and therefore ride more dangerously, is also innacurate. The manner in which people ride does nothing to the helmets effectiveness. It is not the helmet that makes these riders less safe, as the helmet will protect no matter how they ride (or fall). It is in fact their attitude and feeling of invincibility that increases their chance of accident that makes them less safe.

Not trying to pick arguements with anyone, just pointing out what i percieve as inacuracies in some of what has been said, both in this forum, and in my discussions wil other people about helmets.

As a side note, i find this helmet/no helmet discussion startlingly similar to discussions about seat belt use in cars, where people often use some similar arguments, such as "people think they can drive more agressively with a seat belt on" or "if im in a wreck i dont want to be trapped inside the car by the seatbelt" or "in high speed colissions the seat belt can cause injuries to internal organs". Still i have never seen anyone without a seatbelt walk away from a rollover (to use one example) completely uninjured. Every rollover i have seen where someone was wearing a seatbelt they walked away, literally, without a scrape.Sorry that thats slightly off topic. Just thought the similarities were. interesting.

Your arguments are sound and well-considered. I think the comparison that is being made here to car crashes is a moot one.

It is like comparing shark attack injuries between scuba divers and scuba divers in protective cages. A car is, in essence, a protective cage.

To flog this buried horse a little more, maybe it would make sense to compare bike injuries - helmet and sans helmet - to motorcycle injuries before and after helmet laws were enacted-or compare the states where there are no helmet laws. This may have changed since I last snuck across our shared border.

I don't have these stats, but they might be interesting. We could also try to get the crew at Mythbusters to do a helmet test to see what would survive.

Unfortunately this issue relies too much on common sense. Common sense dictates that a barrier between one's head and an immovable object is safer than no barrier. There is little empiracal science to validate this and there are way too many variables - speed, type of impact, pointy or blunt impact object, friction coefficient of contact area, etc. etc.

I tend to side with the old Hippocrates notion - first do no harm. A helmet has not been proven to do any harm, so why not wear one on the off chance that it actually may minimize the severity of an injury.

Next topic for discussion. Angels and why are there so few bicycles in holy scriptures.

Apart from the obvious sarcasm with which this was intended, your point doesn't fly. Bike helmets are meant to withstand an impact of about 14 mph, not 30. You assume that there's some sort of constant reduction (a -14 mph modifier if you want to nerd it up) but that isn't necessarily true nor does it necessarily mean anything. If I slam headfirst into the ground at 16 mph, that's still pretty damn fast and probably fast enough to incur any injury you'd like to name including death.

If helmets are so effective at that speed, explain to me why Torrin Arnold who was knocked from his bicycle at 30 mph is now legally blind despite having worn a helmet.

Whether the helmet "reduces" injuries 100% of the time is not so simple. Even if it's true, which I'm not saying it necessarily is, by how much does it reduce the injury? Does it make a really nasty concussion just a mostly really nasty concussion. On the other hand, if I ram into a wall at 60 mph with a helmet, will it reduce my injuries? 120 mph? 600 mph? Clearly there's some cutoff after which it will not have any impact on injury rate. What is that number? Do you have the engineering background to name it? I don't.

Now you're just confused.

What was stated is that head injuries are more likely to kill a person in an automobile than a bicyclist. If it's so important that cyclists wear helmets than it should be equally important for motorists.

And nobody has claimed this either. What we have said is that there are other activities that are at least as dangerous, even when looking just at head injuries, as cycling. Yet nobody is advocating a helmet campaign for those activities.

You say a motor vehicle has lots of safety systems in place and that's true. Are the head injuries concentrated among motorists not wearing seatbelts and without airbags? Quite probably.

On the other hand, are the head injuries concentrated among cyclists riding the wrong way down the street, unlit after dark, passing on the right of right turning vehicles, etc? Also quite probably.

There is a fear campaign about cycling that says it's sooo dangerous (it's less dangerous than other activities that we do everyday without thinking about it) and can be made substantially safer by wearing a helmet. There is no large scale evidence that demonstrates that dramatically increased rates of helmet use have actually had a positive benefit. That is what we're saying.

On the other hand, I have seen no evidence that shows that they increase risk of injury and it seems quite possible that one will save my grey matter. So I wear mine anyhow.

But don't think that the person who isn't wearing a helmet is a complete idiot, because you may not understand the situation as well as you think you do.

Risk compensation is a real and undeniable fact. Every single rider who says they would never ride their bike without a helmet is engaged in risk compensation. They are explicitly saying that they are undertaking an activity or doing it in a fashion (in traffic, for example) that they wouldn't if they didn't have the sense of protection that a helmet provides.

The question is merely to what degree it occurs.

Unfortunately, they can't be compared at all. Motorcycle helmets are designed to a completely different standard and motorcycle riders have different types of accidents.

It would be like considering injury rates between groups of race car drivers operating with and without a 5-point harness and trying to extrapolate that to model ordinary motorist risk rates with and without standard seatbelts.

Ding! I think we have a winner!

absolutely! quantitative risk assessment is something i've studied and all of these attempts to advocate for or against helmet use based on poorly-conceived statistical comparisons is tiresome to me. most of what bostontrevor, vivophobic and heebro have said is true enough, but you are all talking about slightly different things. if you want to use statistics to answer a question it has to be an intelligent question, not "is wearing a helmet gonna make me safer?"



just put the goddammit thing on and go for a ride goddammit.

Guys! We've had a civil discussion about helmets! Holy Sh*t!

Anyway, I would like (civilly) to see a link or bibliography of some of the studies that bostontrevor mentions. Why?

#1) Because the drastic increase in bike quality over the last 30 years has meant that a far less fit/skilled population is now able to do things, on a bike, that can hurt them. This is independent of helmet use -- i.e., risk factors associated with cycling have gone up. For example, everyone with a $600 road bike can climb a 9% grade -- though they may not have the skills to descend at 35 or 40 mph, especially if it's technical. Similarly, it's far easier to get a modern bike up to 24 or 25 mph than, say, a heavy 70s French bike. These increase the severity of injury during a crash independent of population

#2) I'm a dork and I'd like to see the regressions used.

Finally, I'd like to point out that the fact that helmets are designed for 14 mph crashes is not a valid argument against helmet use -- in fact, it's an argument for tougher requirements for helmets.

When I ride fix I always wear my helmet. And when i ride my mtb in the streets 98% of the time. Its probably a mental thing since I am not as comfortable riding fixed.

I have a Giro Havoc and it is huge on top of my head. Can anyone recommend a low profile helmet that wont look like you are wearing a bowl on your head. I tried the Atmos but i really dont want to spend $200 on another helmet

I bought a helmet to wear, not decorate my hat rack.

I always wear my helmet as I seem to heinously crash at least twice a year.

after joining this forum and hearing a few horror stories i've started wearing my helmet practically all the time... however sometimes i get drunk and forget, but that's ok because drunks hardly ever get injured.

If you're trying to find a helmet, the best thing to do is go to a bike store with a friend and a mirror and try all of them on. My GF just bought a Giro that's pretty small and fits her head well. It was also one of the cheapest ones. It seemed like each model was made not only for a certain riding style and price range but also for a certain head size and shape.

And there's no reason to pay $200 to cover your head in styrofoam.

Just like there is no reason to pay $400 for a set of cranks when Shimano 105s will do the trick? The Atmos fits me better (I have a giant head), it has more vents, sits lighter and has an arguably stronger skeleton (it has an integrated set of carbon sheets that keep the helmet from splitting that the is unique)then the other helmets in the line. It *is* a better helmet on several levels, but the diff between no helmet and a $40 helmet is the important one, much more significant than the diff between a $40 and a $180 (how much the atmos costs). My logic in buying one was that I rode with a p.o.s. bell helmet that didn't fit right for 11 years before I replaced it with this one so I figured I'd get one that fits really well this time.