3.3 inches in 4.4 feet is only 6.25% closer. That’s not a large difference. The press release also does not give any indication of standard deviation of the passing distance, so that small difference in passing distance might not even be statistically significant. I’ll still wear my helmet, even if cars do pass me with 6% less room.
How on earth is wearing a helmet “asking for trouble”? WTF? 
tesseract, congrats. And be ready for those occasional crying jags. I’m 20 weeks along right now and everything is perfectly fine - until it’s all of the sudden NOT. I got lost while driving a few weeks ago, and was calling my husband to ask for directions. He didn’t answer the phone and in the middle of leaving him a message, I just broke down and started SOBBING - loudly, dramatically, hysterically. There I was, driving around south San Francisco, crying my eyes out like a kindergartner lost at the mall.
I’m not anti-helmet, but whoever upthread said that a helmet keeps him or her cooler than not wearing one, I’d like some sort of proof or explanation. I have very thick hair, usually tied up in a ponytail and I can tell you that a helmet is bothersome for the ponytail and makes my head sweat even before starting to ride. How in hell is a helmet cooler than the wind through your hair? (the airholes are just that–holes in a thick, foam-insulated hat–it’s hotter than a bare head).
Bike helmet crushed, but head fine
“A white paneled delivery truck ran over a UW-Madison graduate student’s head on Division Street Friday afternoon and, except for a concussion, he wasn’t hurt.”
:eek:
I saw this guy on TV. I expect he’s quite an advocate for wearing helmets now.
Tell him about the guy from my congregation who went biking with his kids. The kids had helmets, but he didn’t. Someone ran a stop sign, and for a critical moment he and a car attempted to occupy the same position in space-time. He’s alive, but he spent the next 5 years learning to walk, talk, and dress himself again. He’s doing pretty well now - most days he can get himself in and out of a chair by himself, and I can even understand what he’s saying.
Then hand him his shiny new helmet.
Has anyone pointed out that this was for a Critical Mass? The ones here usually have bikers waayyy closer together than is normal or sane, so if one guy hits a bump or pothole and goes down, he’s taking at least a few more people down with him. If any street riders need helmets, its Critical Mass-ers.
I find them much cooler than wearing a baseball cap. The holes force the air to move all around your head and it is very cooling.
Even at slow speeds, a bike crash can do a good bit of damage. It is different than falling while jogging because you are rotating around an axis that puts you in danger in two ways that jogging wouldn’t. First, any forward speed that you had is translated into downward speed. Whereas falling while jogging will limit you pretty much to the speed of gravity, falling while biking while have an accelerated effect of adding the forward momentum to the speed of gravity. Secondly, your head is the highest point if you fall when jogging, but with biking that relationship becomes inversed. Add to that the weight of your body.
I had just started from a stop sign and just started going up a slight incline, so I was standing and pedaling, max speed 5 miles and hour. Unbeknownst to me, my pedal had a manufacturing defect, and it snapped right off. I pitch poled head first into the ground, and instinctively put my hands up to break my fall. I hit the ground with enough force to have an open compound fracture of the ulna and radia. Not the kind of damage you would see from a jogging fall. My head was fine.
Did you mean to write “Not wearing a helmet…”?
I was kind of wondering that when I wrote post #56. Even more so when I read Troy’s reply.
Yes! Shit. Well, now I don’t feel so bad about not understanding Rick’s reply.
Heh. You were too distracted by the Critical Mass portion of the post, I think.
According to these numbers, your odds of dying in a car in a given year are 19,216 to 1 while the odds of dying on a bike are 348,347 to 1. Odds of dying in your lifetime in a car are 247 to 1, which is pretty damn high if you ask me. And yet I hear people worry about bikes and pit bulls and terrorist attacks, but very few people seem to be afraid of their cars.
If we’re going to be a nation of paranoids, it seems like we should at least try to be paranoid about the stuff that’s actually dangerous.
Welcome to the club. 
No harm, no foul.
From your link
So if I am reading this correctly they have averaged the deaths from an activity over the entire population of the US. Since the population of people that ride in cars is very close to the population of the United States the 247:1 odds are fairly close.
However the population of the US is at least a couple of magnitudes higher than the portion of the population that rides bikes. That throws the 348,347 number into the realm of figures don’t lie, but liars can figure, or you can prove anything with statistics.
For example they give the odds on dying as a Animal rider or occupant of animal-drawn vehicle, as 3,226,998 to one. I don’t ride animals, therefore the chance of me dying while riding an animal is exactly zero. However among people that ride animals, the odds of dying as the result of this activity is less that 3.2 million to one.
Or am I reading this wrong?
Very interesting, all the comments. So glad to hear the overwhelming helmet support and it looks like y’all may have even changed a mind or two. Thanks for the congrats. :- ) To those who cautioned me against the “if he loved me, x,” yeah, I know that’s no good…it’s just how I felt…but I shall guard against it in future.
Troy, I don’t think it’s the same as the Critical Mass in SF (which I did once and never again…) where part of the point is to annoy motorists. I’ll report back later.
That’s like concluding that being a lion handler is a very safe occupational choice based on the number of lion-caused injuries in the general population. To make a legitimate assessment of the risks, you first need to normalize against the number of hours people spend in cars versus riding a bicycle, and/or exclude the significant majority of the population that doesn’t regularly ride a bike (at least as an adult). If you do that, I think you’ll find that the odds of being injured riding a bike are significantly more pronounced.
Stranger
I knew some militant cyclists in Oxford (UK) who were anti-helmet because they believed it gave cycling a dangerous image and provided an excuse for people not to take up cycling. One of them got a severe head injury after being hit by a car. He took months to recover and suffered long-term neurological damage. Once he was fit, he got back on his bicycle but has used a helmet ever since.
Martha - cycle helmet wearer since 1991
I used to have that attitude.
Then I wound up working alongside a woman who had suffered a severe brain injury with life-long disabling consequences from falling off her bicycle
I’ve had one concussion in my life, I don’t fancy another, even a minor one.
The prospect of wearing diapers and/or drooling into my soup for the rest of my days because I had a wipe-out on a road or trail and landed head-first simply does not appeal to me.
Which reminds me - the straps on my old helmet are dead, I need to start shopping for a new one for the upcoming riding season.
Because my six year old son, getting on his bike and having pedalled about 30 metres, fell off headfirst at that speed and suffered a broken nose, concussion, huge cuts and bruises all over his face and worst of all, a blowout fracture of his orbit, in which his eye muscle got trapped and he was seeing double for a month. We were making daily visits to a facial reconstruction surgeon for the first two weeks to make sure that the muscle wasn’t going to rot while trapped and cause permanent double vision. That would have required surgery. Even without that surgery, it cost us a fortune in treatment and I lost a month of work (I am paid for the work I do only) because it was too dangerous to let him go to daycare while his bone was broken and he was still seeing double. As it was he fell down the stairs every day virtually, and bashed his shoulder on doorways etc.
Now extrapolate that to a full grown heavy man, proportionally higher up on the bike and going that much faster…