Bike helmets, yea or nay?

In My Humble Opinion
101

First off, do you know the technical term for a mountain biker that doesn’t wear a helmet? We call them organ donors. :smiley:

A couple of other points About not needing one in low speed riding, the only helmet I have destroyed was done at <5 mph as I was preparing to stop on a trail. I had my left pedal down and was unclipping my right foot when my left pedal hit a sapling stump that had been cut off just a little to high. Bike stopped, I did not. My shoulder took the impact, and I slid forward (away from the bike, down the hill) till my helmet hit a rock outcropping. My helmet cracked. My head did not.
I made my daughter wear a helmet when she roller bladed. One day she hit a seed pod on the sidewalk, and went head first into a brick wall. The helmet broke in half. She sustained a cut lip.
Before wearing a helmet was cool the guy that owned the local bike shop was out trail riding. As the sun came up, he took off his jacket and tied it to his handlebars. Coming down a fire road, the jacket fell off the handlebars and got into the spokes of the front wheel. He did an endo. Head first into the fire road. He had a concussion, his cheek was broken, his eye torn from the socket (he told me the doctors said that they took a couple of teaspoons of dirt out of the socket :eek: ) and a broken jaw. He spent three weeks in intensive care. His fine motor skills were affected, and it was sad to see him trying to start a nut on a bolt afterwards. Would a helmet prevented all of his injuries? Probably not. Make that hell no. Would a helmet lessened the severity of the injuries? I would have to say yes. He also became a convert, and would put on a helmet just to test drive a repair in his parking lot.

I find the argument that helmets only work in low speed accidents to be disingenuous at best. The structure in your car, and you seat belt will fail if you drive your car into a solid object at 100+ MPH. Is this therefore a reason not to wear a seat belt? :rolleyes: Same with bike helmets. Of course there is a speed/ vector/ energy level that when exceeded will overcome the protection offered by a helmet. Unless you have a cite that says that all or even most bicycle accidents exceed those values, you are back to the your seat belt won’t save you in a 100 MPH crash argument.

First off, how would the skin on your forehead react to all the little pebbles, and dirt and crap that is laying on the road? Are you aware of how the nurses at the ER get all that shit out of your skin? They use a soap, a brush and scrub the living hell out of your skin until all the debris is washed away. I have seen this process reduce a very tough Marine to tears. :eek:
About the ridiculously expensive comment. Are you fucking kidding me? You are whining about spending $20 to save your own life? Back in the late 1950s / early 1960s when crash helmets were just starting to become accepted by racers and motorcyclists Bell ran a great ad. It said if you have a $10 dollar head, buy a $10 dollar helmet.
My bike helmets (I own several) are all well over $100 each. I know they all meet the same standard, but fit is much better (for me at least) on the more expensive helmets. Better fit = greater protection = more comfort.

Now a few words about helmet fit, and wearing one (I see helmets being worn wrong so much, I have to throw this in.
First off, a bike helmet is not a yarmulke. I don’t care if you are Jewish it does not get perched on the very back of your head, leaving your forehead untouched and therefore unprotected. See my comment above about my daughter and hitting the brick wall. If the helmet had been put on that day like a yarmulke, my daughter would either be dead or a drooling idiot. I see this incorrect placement of helmets most often in either young children and women. The young kids I understand, they don’t know any better. The adult women are the one that I don’t get. I guess they did not fire up that third brain cell, and they are thinking of the helmet as a fashion accessory. :rolleyes:
Next, your helmet needs to be snug on your head. When fastened pulling down on the front edge of your helmet should cause your head to tilt forward. Pulling back, should cause your head to tilt back. Side to side movement of the helmet should cause your head to shake no.
If your helmet moves and your head does not, it is not fitted properly, or the straps are way too loose. Every bike helmet I have ever seen comes with multiple sets of pads to custom fit the helmet. You need to work with those until the helmet is like an extension of your head. Only then can you be sure that it will remain in the correct place during a fall / crash. I should note that different brands of helmets fit different. In my own case Bell helmets fit me great, but Giro helmets hurt. Go to a bike shop and try on a bunch of different helmets.
Lastly, fasten the damn chin strap. leaving the chin strap off it pretty much a guarantee that your helmet won’t be in place when you are thrown off your bike.

Colophon So what if the EU standards are inferior? The interweb is a great thing. You can order a US spec (Snell standard) helmet and have it shipped

102

Cuncator There were very similar stats in Canada when they implemented mandatory bicycle helmet laws in the Canadian provinces of BC and… NS (?).

In the case of BC, the dip was very noticeable. It was also very temporary and mostly a product of people procrastinating and being too lazy to go buy a helmet for the first bicycle season after the law was implemented.

The numbers gradually went back up.

You’re misunderstanding the purpose of a helmet. It’s not so much to protect your skull from getting cracked, it’s to protect your brain from sloshing against the inside of your cranium. Minor impacts such as bonking your head on the curb if you fall over at a complete stop can cause a dangerous concussion. And they DO redirect forces quite well. When my girlfriend split her helmet, she looked at it and thought, “That same force could have been travelling through my skull”.

But the force didn’t travel through her skull, it shattered her helmet instead. You are overestimating the strength of your skull, and underestimating the strength of the helmets.

The helmets have to meet standards that protect a crash test dummy for a 2 meter drop, head first, onto a metal anvil. When you ask “What’s harder, your skull or a 1” piece of foam?" (You neglected to mention the shell and the reinforcement materials inside.) My instinct is to think, “Well, I’d like both protecting my brain, if that option is available.”

103

Can I reiterate this? I was at a big box store and a guy was buying a low end bike. He also got a helmet. The box said “universal fit” and all sorts of cable ties had the helmet securely in place in the box. He hadn’t tried it on. Your helmet must fit well, so spend an entire afternoon trying different models from different brands, and get a bike shop employee to help you customize the fit. A “one size fits all” helmet will fit you, but not necessarily fit well.

Some have rings that go all the way around that you can adjust to fit precisely, other helmets only allow you to adjust front to back. Some have foam inserts for tweaking, others don’t. I also found that most Giro helmets hurt my head. Something about most Giro designs doesn’t sit right at the top of my cranium and it feels like there is a pebble in my hat. It took me two days and 5 bike shops trying different helmets. The one I picked ended up being a large “youth” helmet that actually fits my adult head really well. It’s a Giro helmet, of all things. It cost me about $80.

104

:rolleyes: indeed. Nobody except you–and then only for the purpose of erecting a gasoline-drenched strawman–has claimed that a helmet will protect you in all circumstances. The essential gist of your argument, so far as it makes any sense at all, is that if a helmet can’t protect you from being launched into a wall at highway speeds, there’s no value in wearing one whatsoever. Oh, except that it ma “stop you getting a nasty bump on the head”, and injury which, as indicated by previous anecdota and citations, is still well worth avoiding. And again, you conflate wearing a helmet with being oblivious; certainly, there are bicyclists who do not pay attention to the environment around them or ride in a manner that is oblivious to their own safety and the flow of traffic. It’s also virtually certain that some of these people wear a helmet. It does not logically or emperically follow, however, that all of those in the latter group are a complete subset of the former.

You don’t want to wear a helmet? Your choice. But stop it with the patent rationalizations on how a “thin layer of foam” does nothing to protect you; as it has been explained by many posters, the purpose of the foam isn’t to act as an invulnerable case but to absorb the energy of the impact by deforming plastically and fracturing. It’s an obtuse and ignorant argument.

Stranger

105

I cycle a lot, and about the only time I don’t wear a helmet is when all of the following conditions are met: it has to be an off-road trail that’s wide, smooth, with a level or gradual grade, with no rocks or large roots in the trail surface, and with negligible bicycle or pedestrian traffic, when I’m not feeling like going very fast.

For me, that pretty much narrows it down to parts of the C&O Towpath well beyond the D.C. area, and a couple of rural rail-trails that I know, if it’s a weekday, or really early on a weekend morning.

Which means I’ve ridden without a helmet exactly twice in the current millennium. It feels nice to ride without a helmet, but if there’s more than negligible risk involved, I’ve only got the one brain, and I’d like to keep it intact, thanks.

106

This helmet law argument is a red herring. The OP asked about wearing them, not whether there should be a law requiring them. (I tend to oppose such laws on libertarian grounds. If an adult doesn’t want to wear one, as I said before, they can knock themselves out.) What does whether or not someone should wear a helmet have to do with whether or not a law reduces the number of bike riders?

107

Yeah this is pretty much the since my seat belt in my car would not save my ass if I hit a solid object at 100+ MPH then why should I bother to wear one argument.
:rolleyes:

108

You’re almost right. The most a helmet can do is save you from a bruise in the head. IANAD, but I believe the medical term for this is concussion. The skull stops, the brain does not. The brain bruises against the inside of the skull. The function of the helmet is to collapse upon impact, absorbing enough energy to slow down the sudden deceleration of the skull and giving the brain a chance to catch up with the skull before it bruises irreparably. Granted, after that, the helmet’s not good for much. But I can, and have, replaced helmets.

109

Colophon, with your apparent detailed understanding of collisions and head trauma, you should market a wrought iron helmet. If it’s harder, it’s better, right? :slight_smile:

Maybe your new helmets should be made out of diamonds…?

110

Well then we agree. My gripe is with people who say that you must wear a helmet whenever you even think about getting on a bike.

111

Hey, I didn’t claim to do the study. I am only reporting what the figures tell me. And the figures tell me that 80 joules being dissipated by a helmet cracking in half is not very significant when an 18-wheeler cuts you off at a traffic light.

If you have a gripe with the data, direct it at www.cyclehelmets.org .

112

Nycuk! Nyuck! Nyuck!

I wear a helmet and I don’t ride like a lunatic. My fiancee wears a helmet commuting two hours by bike every day in rush hour, and she isn’t oblivious. All my friends wear helmets, they ride safe too. The kids in my neighbourhood seem aware of traffic (mandatory helmets here for minors). That’s a really stupid assertion. Everyone I know who wears a helmets does so specifically because they are aware of the dangers of cycling.

Darwin Award candidates wo think the Magic Hat will save them are of the same ilk as the yahoos who say “Put your beer down and shoot. I’ve got my bullet proof vest on!” You’ll find people like that everywhere. In general, people who don safety gear are the ones who are conscientous about safety and tend to be more prudent.

113

Ooops. I think I was one of the regular riders that the OP mentioned should pipe in.

I commute a little over 50 miles a week. I wear a BMX/skate style helmet, I guess for some of the same reasons Colophon mentioned. Those other helmets just don’t look like they’d do much. And the shape of them just doesn’t look very conducive to sliding along the pavement without catching.

Much like SuperNelson, my last crash was due to hardware failure. My pedal popped out of the crank because of a manufacturing defect. I had just been at a stop, and was standing and peddling up a hill, so I wasn’t going very fast.

I ended up with an open compound fracture of the ulna and radius. To tell you the truth, it happened so fast that I don’t know if my head hit. The helmet didn’t look like it. But it just goes to show you, it can happen anytime.

Awareness is by far the best protection you can take with you while bicycling. Second is a helmet. The third is one of those novelty inflatable sumo wrestler suits, but that makes it difficult to ride. Fourth is a condom. Scientists still don’t know why.

114

Well, in Oxford there’s a substantial undergraduate population on bicycles. Many of whom are hotties in little cotton summer dresses. They don’t look like dorks. :wink:

115

Scientists know now. It was in Nature last week. The combination of the spandex and bulging leg muscles makes you an irresistible force of sexiness. That’s why you gotta wear the condom.

116

I agree with you completely, except the part where you ever ride without a helmet, under any conditions.

117

I ride my bike into the office as often as the weather allows, and I always wear a helmet. Safety aside, one of the reasons is that I shave my head, so sunburn is always a concern- scalpburns really hurt.

118

Someone should print out these bike safety statistics and put them on the wall at a few underground music shops.

I see about a million indie rocker/hipster kids with messenger bags on vintage road bikes every day, and about 0% of them are ever wearing a helmet.

119

Maybe because there’s not a lot of functional vintage helmets?

Almost forgot: My helmet’s where I keep my rear view mirror. Way better than spidey sense. At least I’ll see you coming to tell me I look like a dork.

120

Helmet or not, I’m of the opinion that the best thing you can do to increase your chances of escaping a crash without injury is to learn how to fall off your bike.

Sounds weird, but ditching your bike in a few low-speed grassy encounters will learn you how to disengage yourself from the bike and land in a controlled way. You have a choice when a crash happens- where to land, what trajectory to take, how to hit the ground. You don’t have much time, but you have some time.

I wear a helmet for kind of a Pascal’s Wager reason. If helmets work, I want to be wearing one. If they don’t, I’m only out fifty bucks.