Poll: Bicycle helmet usage

[MacTech]

Yes-ish
it depends…

let me explain, I have a 3 bike stable, and depending on where and when I’m riding will determine if a helmet is needed…

Bike one; an old rigid steel Fila Taos MTB converted to a roadgoing singlespeed, slicks instead of knobbies, and a Surly Singleator chain tensioner, this bike is ridden around town (Dover, NH) at work, when I go out to lunch, I typically hop on the bike, it’s about a mile or so round-trip to the furthest away place, top speed is around 15 MPH, average is 8… this bike I don’t wear a helmet on

Bike two; a Trek 4500 MTB, currently with slicks, one of my road-going bikes, for my easier recreational rides, on the back roads around the house, sometimes I swap out the slicks for knobbies and do some light offroading, top speed is around 20 MPH on road, average is 8, this bike I sometimes wear a helmet on, but it’s not mandatory

Bike three; a Giant FCR-3 flat-bar road bike with Shimano SPD flip-flop pedals (SPD cleats on one side, platforms on the other), this bike is my highest-performance bike, top speed is 28-30 MPH, average is 10-12 (on the pedal flats), and I’m typically on it for 5+ miles on average, this one I DO wear a helmet on, as I’m moving pretty quickly for a “Clydestale”…

the Giant sees the most road time, the Trek sees the least (I’m trying to get one of my work neighbors to buy it off me)

[outlierrn]

Well, I’m an ER nurse, so yeah I wear a helmet pretty much always. People come in to the ER and are suprised when I can tell them what they were wearing when they crashed, Me “you’re injuries are an open book.”

[Helen_s_Eidolon]

Yes and yes. I forgot my helmet once last summer (when I was biking to and from work every day - about 8 km) and I felt just WRONG all the way home.

[psycat90]

@SlowMindThinking

The only people I see not wearing helmets are transients.

This is true for me as well. Of the 10% or so of people I see without helmets or not obeying traffic rules, I’d say 8% of them are transients and/or day laborers.

[Rick]

Technical term for bicycle rider who does not wear a helmet? Organ Donor

@Sage Rat

I’ve lived in Japan for seven or so years now, and bicycling to the store or whatever is about the same as taking the car to the store would be in the US. In total summation of my experience:

1. There should be no need for a bicycle helmet.
2. If the US stopped forcing you to drive on the street instead of the sidewalk, there really would be no need to wear a bicycle helmet in the US.

Car hits Bicycler = One mangled bicycle rider
Bicycler hits Pedestrian = Some scrapes and bruises

Simply, it is a stupid system. And when you ride on the sidewalk every day, the odds you are going to hit a person drop to zero. I can stay upright (i.e. balanced) on my bicycle behind a thousand year old woman pacing along with her walker.

Sorry I can’t agree with this statement. Both my daughter and I have broken helmets in accidents, and had no head injuries.
In my daughter’s case she was rollerblading on the sidewalk and hit a seed pod that caused her to go head first into a brick wall. Broke her helmet in half. Total damage to my daughter? A small cut on the lip. I was never so happy in my life to spend money as I was when I replaced that helmet.
In my case I was mountain biking, and there was a small piece of wood sticking up that caught my pedal when it was fully down. I was going about 10MPH on a nice wide trail. I fell over and my head slid into a rock outcroping. The helmet cracked in half.
In both cases there was no cars around, and the helmets saved the rider from injury.
So to answer the OP damn right I wear a helmet. Every time I ride.

[Inigo_Montoya]

1. Do you wear a helmet while biking?** No **
2. All the time? Never

Exception is for motorcycles.

[kurahee]

@DMark

I know this is extremely politically incorrect but -

When I grew up as a kid in a relatively small town, no one had ever seen a bike helmet, let alone use one. In all the years I lived there, I never once heard of a kid having a serious head injury from a bike accident. Oh, there were the usual scrapes and a neighbor girl lost her two front teeth when she ran her bike into a curb but that was it.

So while I suppose the concept of wearing bike helmets is well-meaning, my own personal experience leads me to believe it is, for the most part, unnecessary unless you are reaching excessive speeds on mountain roads - something I think few children, or adults for that matter, ever reach.

I do not have children and have not ridden a bike in many years, so - no helmets here.

I came in here to type exactly that. Never have, never will. I wonder about the statistics on this. I’m sure bad stuff happens, but the helmet hysteria was something that I didn’t have to experience as a child. And I wrecked my bike on back country roads a few times. The big thing to do on a long summer day when I was a kid was to see if you could get your bicycle going over 40 mph (measured with my cool speedometer mounted on my handle bars!) on a hill near my house (back road, paved, that had a stop sign at the end of the hill and "T"d with another road. ) Now, I can tell you that after flying through that intersection trying (and failing) to make the left turn or stop and landing in the drainage ditch on the other side of the road scared me some… and knocked the wind out of me and gave me some good scars. But I survived. If a car was coming, helmet or no helmet I was dead. And without the helmet, I survived. And it didn’t stop me from trying to get above 40 mph again either.

I was an idiot as a kid. When I was 4, I rode my plastic “batmobile” down the hill next to our house. No shoes, no shirt, (no helmet) and a public street. I’d love to know how fast those solid plastic little wheels had me going. But it was a hell of a ride! (Of course, mom didn’t find it amusing at all, and when she caught up with me, I could have used that helmet for another part of my anatomy. But today that’s child abuse, so I won’t go there either. But in my opinion, I deserved it!)

I don’t have a problem with people who wear helmets or who want their kids to wear helmets. But I don’t like the laws.

[Finagle]

@Sage Rat

I’ve lived in Japan for seven or so years now, and bicycling to the store or whatever is about the same as taking the car to the store would be in the US. In total summation of my experience:

1. There should be no need for a bicycle helmet.
2. If the US stopped forcing you to drive on the street instead of the sidewalk, there really would be no need to wear a bicycle helmet in the US.

Car hits Bicycler = One mangled bicycle rider
Bicycler hits Pedestrian = Some scrapes and bruises

An interesting theory. Bizarre and unsupported, but interesting. According to this, 153,000 people get treated for bike-related head injuries in the US every year. So your first point seems, at the very least, debateable.

As for sidewalks – umm…what sidewalks? Very few of the streets I ride recreationally have sidewalks.

Now it’s very easy to find support on the internet for the theory that bike helmets don’t help much. (Seems to be one of those unwinnable religious debates, not unlike motorcycle helmets.) And it is rare for an experienced bike rider to fall. I’ve been wearing a helmet for years now and have never road tested it (for which I’m grateful). That said, it’s clearly a mistake to assume that eliminating cars from the equation is going to reduce the incidence of bike-related head injuries to near-zero. All it takes is a bit of sand in the road, a mechanical failure while going down a hill, or a pedestrian who isn’t paying attention.

Anyway:

 I wear a helmet.   Probably 95% of the time.

[Shayna]

Yes & Yes

[cowgirl]

Yep, I wear a helmet every day when I ride to work, and everywhere else I ride, for that matter.

Ever since that time I went flying on the pavement. I will never forget the clunk sound of my helmet hitting the road.

(I also will never forget the story of my friend whose helmet cracked right in half when he took a spill. He couldn’t remember what happened, but then he saw the two pieces of helmet and said “Whoah! Cool! What happened?” and they told him and five minutes later he picked up the two pieces of helmet again and said “Whoah! What happened?” … rinse and repeat … I think he’d have been much worse off if he was bare-headed)

I don’t wear it because I’m not confident in my cycling skills: I wear it because I have no faith in the drivers and pedestrians around me.

Oh, and sidewalks are not places for bicycles. Sidewalk riding makes it more dangerous for everyone: pedestrian, cyclist and driver. Do us all a favour and stay on the road.

[Khadaji]

I haven’t ridden in years. If I were to do so, I would use a helmet, all the time.

[Ponder_Stibbons]

To the Poll: Yes, and Yes.

@Sage Rat

I’ve lived in Japan for seven or so years now, and bicycling to the store or whatever is about the same as taking the car to the store would be in the US. In total summation of my experience:

1. There should be no need for a bicycle helmet.
2. If the US stopped forcing you to drive on the street instead of the sidewalk, there really would be no need to wear a bicycle helmet in the US.

Car hits Bicycler = One mangled bicycle rider
Bicycler hits Pedestrian = Some scrapes and bruises

Simply, it is a stupid system. And when you ride on the sidewalk every day, the odds you are going to hit a person drop to zero. I can stay upright (i.e. balanced) on my bicycle behind a thousand year old woman pacing along with her walker.

Simply, you are quite incorrect. Your system only really works if you’re going a few blocks. Maybe as far as a kilometer. And even then, if I was going such a short distance, I wouldn’t bother with a bicycle, I’d just walk.

See, a bicycle is great for going distances that are too far to walk, but don’t need a car. Many people in the US commute to work on bicycles, and the piddle-along-on-the-sidewalk method you prefer is just impractical for the distances involved. It is impossible to get up the speed you need to go the distance you have to go. “Forcing you to drive on the street”? Dude, that’s a hard-won right, not something bicyclists are “forced” to do.

I’m not a bicycle commuter, but instead bicycle for exercise. I drive out of town to get out of traffic three to four times a week and ride anywhere from thirty to sixty miles (50 to 100 km). Even if there were sidewalks all along the route (and there aren’t), I wouldn’t touch’em with a ten-foot pole. It is simply NOT EVEN REMOTELY POSSIBLE to ride a bicycle on a sidewalk for more than a very short distance.

[Nanoda]

Yes and yes. I’ve done so for at least the past 10 years (since helmets were that unflattering mushroom shape), and encourage anyone who doesn’t to do so. I try to ride with my friends at least twice a week, and would have said that most people I saw wore helmets, but a large number of helmet-less casual cyclists appear to have taken to the streets this past month, so I’d put it at more like 50%.

Of course, I also always wear biking gloves, and had front and back lights until I lost my red LED flasher someplace last month. Given also that my current bike just cost me $2200 before taxes, I suppose I fall in to your “professional” category. (No spandex!)

I’m not that worried about cars, other than when they’re passing me on the left. The one time I’ve ‘needed’ my helmet (though not enough to replace it) was crossing a pedestrian bridge over a freeway after the midnight shift at the gas station. A perfectly uncomplicated ramp + corner, but that day I swiped the side for no reason and would have spent some quality time lying on the ground saying ‘ow’ if I hadn’t been wearing it.

[Hampshire]

While I don’t doubt that bicycle head injuries do occur, it just seems strange that gowing up in the burbs in the late 70’s early 80’s with literally tons of kids and tons of bikes and no helmets, I never saw or heard of any head injuries.
Many, many, many cases of split open knees, split elbows, raspberried palms, gashed shins, and a few chipped teeth. But never a single occurance of a head injury.
And this was the era in which we would build the old cinder block/wood board ramp and ride as fast as we could to launch off it. I’ve witnessed many a poor landings with the bike and kid in a heap but never hit their noggin.
I even personally launched off a ramp on my Schwinn Scrambler (with bannana seat) only to have the front tire come off the fork in mid air and send me into a horrid crash requiring stitches. But for some reason I never hit my head.

Now there were plenty of kid related incidents that did result in head injuries (mainly concusions) but never on a bike. Usually falling out of a tree, getting kicked in the head, smaking skull into the monkey bars, etc.

[oboelady]

Yes, and yes.
Road rider here. Bicycle to work 4 to 5 days a week for the last 12 years, plus training rides on weekends - won’t leave home without a helmet.
I only have one head - I’m going to protect it. I could break an arm, leg, collarbone, etc, and still function. Not true of brain damage.

I can almost understand someone that won’t be going over 5 miles an hour for a short distance not wearing a helmet, but how many bicyclists fall into that category?

On the weekend training rides (20 to 40 riders, 50 to 70 miles, 20+ mph average), I would say 99% of the people wear helmets. The exceptions are almost exclusively males in their early 20’s.
In my experience, then, most of the serious bike riders wear helmets. If people that spend a lot of time on a bike think it’s a good idea, there’s probably something to it.

[Gala_Matrix_Fire]

Next question: do you wear helmet correctly? If not, why bother wearing it at all?

I’m conflicted on the question of wearing a bike helmet. First off, the helmet I bought is inexpensive and wearing it correctly means being uncomfortable. Yet, I learned in the Army that if you don’t wear your helmet the way it was intended, there ain’t no point in wearing it. So no wearing a little kerchief underneath, and no leaving the straps loose, and no wearing it back a little bit on your head. Comfy now?

I used to ride a bike to school for a few years and never had any kind of accident. I knew just one person who had ever had an accident, and she did not experience any injury to her head (other than her teeth). And we all rode on big city streets.

I don’t believe that riding a bike is particularly more dangerous than walking along a sidewalk, and I don’t wear a helmet for that.

On the other hand, I don’t want to have to relearn how to talk and walk and those other things that come along with a head injury.

So mostly I just don’t ride my bike at all, which is a damn shame.

[Infovore]

Yes, I wear a helmet when I ride my bikes, and yes, I wear it all the time (on road, off road, and even on quick jaunts around the block).

I never wore one as a kid (nobody did in our area), but nowadays I feel weird and self-conscious without it. I even have a nice light full-face helmet to wear when mountain biking, because I’m rather fond of my teeth and would prefer to keep them if I get klutzy and do a header over the bars. Even though I’m a beginning mountain biker and don’t really ride much on trails where that sort of thing is likely.

'Course, helmets are a lot cooler looking nowadays then they were when I was a kid in the '70s. Back then, I called bike helmets “mushroomheads” because that was pretty much what they made you look like if you wore one.

[Gordon_Urquhart]

Up until about 10 years ago, I didn’t wear a helmet at all while riding my bike. Then, due to some sort of distraction – it was probably a pretty lady – I very nearly ran off the bike path on which I was riding and down a steep embankment with lots of granite rocks the size of volleyballs (except not perfectly round and certainly not as soft).

The fact that I could well have come to serious harm if I’d fallen down that embankment convinced me to start wearing a helmet (correctly), and I’ve done so ever since – even on half-block rides to test tire pressure. Sure, there are times when a helmet won’t do squat to save your head – but I’ll take my chances.

I agree with other posters – a wide majority of the people who are obviously serious cyclists and regular commuters wear helmets, and probably for good reason.

[mhendo]

I don’t actually have a bike right now, but i’m thinking of investing in a used bike for exercise and transport. If and when i do this, my first accessory will be a helmet, and i’ll wear it every time i ride.

While it might be true that accidents are rare, and that actually hitting your head is even rarer, it only has to happen once for some terrible consequences to result. That fact, for me, far outweighs any inconvenience involved in wearing a helmet.

When i travel, i’ll sometimes rent a bike as a way to see the city, in places like New York or Vancouver or San Francisco. Most rental places offer helmets free as part of the rental, but the attendants often seem quite surprised that i want one, and most tourists seem to decline the helmet option.

[bup]

Yes, always.

If I were just biking to the corner store I’d probably skip it sometimes, but the kids are watching…