Most bicyclists wear helmets, but too many people on motorcycles do not… including my insurance agent. :rolleyes:
Personally, I don’t care what the “culture” is, even if people would openly point and laugh at my helmet. I make a living with my brain, as do most people. To not take the basic means to protect it is dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb.
We’re not in GD or GQ, but… cite?
ETA: Saw the citation, but it was in Spanglish or something… 
North-east of Italy. No one wears helmets ever. They do on scooters, in the south not even always that.
The real problem, IMO, is that very few people use lights at night either. This is illegal, but police aren’t remotely interested in enforcing the law.
Actually, people do use them when they are going for bike-rides in the hills. But not when they are using bikes for transport around city.
It’s Double Dutch, sorry! I think this website refers to a lot of the same research and explains many of the same positions.
To briefly explain that particular point: helmets don’t protect people all that well from accidents, and as they also discourage cycling it results in a net health loss. Helmets are designed to protect you if you fall off you bicycle onto the ground at a speed of 20km/hr. This isn’t what happens in most accidents. When people say “a helmet saved my life” this is usually from ignorance of what the helmet did. Studies looking at helmets that were involved in accidents show that they quite often did very little to protect the wearer. If you get hit by a car the helmet is unlikely to protect you. But getting hit by cars is how cyclists get hurt. An effective way of preventing that is not having cyclists wear helmets, but creating a safe environment for them.
On the other hand, in Australia cycling declined by 30% after the law mandating helmet use. People needing to go to A&E dropped by 16%, which already shows that the relative number of accidents actually went up. (Partially because you are left with more mountain bikers, but also possibly because research from the UK shows that cars pass cyclists wearing helmets closer, leading to more accidents.)
The overall decline in cycling, which is a healthy activity that is actually not terribly dangerous, means that you end up with a net health loss.
I’m in the most southern tip of the Netherlands, the tiny part that has actual hills, unlike the part polar bear refers to. When it gets hilly, the spandex biker types start wearing helmets. Sensible; if you’re cycling down a hill you can easily reach 40 miles an hour. Crash on the hard concrete without a helmet and you lose all your teeth.
Ordinary commuter cyclists don’t wear helmets here. Kids… maybe ten percent of them.
Mostly the bicyclists are the ones who wear bicycle helmets in my area. The people who wear bicycle helmets but don’t ride a bicycle are a little weird.
Glad to see our Dutch friends here providing real information as opposed to the Americans who mainly tend to repeat the dogma the helmet manufacturers spout. Thanks particularly for the link to www.cyclehelmets.org. It a great place to find links to all the actual science of helmet research.
Riding a bicycle is not a dangerous activity. Billions of people around the world ride bicycles without helmets every day. You are at far greater risk of death or serious injury while in a car than you are on a bicycle.
US traumatic brain injury deaths per year
The following table shows the average number of deaths per year over the period 1997 to 2007.
Activity Average TBI fatalities/year % of total
All causes 53014 100%
Motorists 7955 15%
Pedestrians 1825 3.4%
Motorcyclists 1361 2.6%
Cyclists 325 0.6%
Source: Coronado et al, 2011
The source data also shows that only 44.5% of US bicyclist fatalities involve head injuries (325/730).
Here’s a little quiz on bicycle safety, again with links to science: Perceptions of Bicycle Safety
Some of the European cycling associations are refusing to participate in races that require helmets. These are people who earn their living on bicycles.
Bicycle helmets have been called “perhaps the biggest sporting equipment scam ever perpetrated on the American public.” The evidence that they prevent or reduce injuries is split pretty much 50/50 – in other words, the evidence shows no correlation.
I could rant for hours. Maybe a few of you will actually take a look at some the evidence. Hospitals in other countries are not overflowing with bicycle basket-cases.
Riding a bicycle is just about as dangerous as walking.
The only evidence that strongly suggests helmets are effective, that I have ever seen, is from studies by helmet manufacturers.
ETA: just so I don’t encourage dangerous practices: helmets are probably effective for mountain biking, children and wobbly old people.
I think your romantic image of European cycling is based in the Netherlands, which is not greatly typical. Imagine your picture transferred to commuter cycling in London, for example. Where I now live, in Bristol, SW England, commuter cycling is fast, on very busy roads and nearly everyone is wearing helmets and hi-vis jackets. Not a basket of flowers in sight.
Not remotely my experience in London or Bristol where the commuting and weekend sporting cyclists all wear helmets as routine. Just shows you can’t talk in generalities even within one small country.
I think it is a difficult issue to quantify. The population of riders is so diverse that it is hard to make accurate analysis without breaking riders into subgroups. I think riding style has more to do with the safety of a rider more than anything else. There is a vast difference between the adrenaline junky rider and the average commuter and the casual weekend rider. The casual weekend rider might be much less likely to get hit, but will also be less likely to wear a helmet. The adrenaline junkie rider, racer type takes many more risks and goes at much higher speeds and is almost always going to wear a helmet. The latter group wears the helmet because they are a serious rider and are willing to spend more on equipment and are required to wear one for racing and group riding, so they are used to wearing a helmet. Most of the very avid riders I have known have gotten hit at least once and required medical attention. Most of of the casual riders and commuters I know have not gotten hit. And also, when taking into account the type of riding one does, if you are traveling at much higher speeds, the results of having or not having a helmet will be much different.
The statistic you gave above does not answer the question of relative safety of bicycle riding any more than it answers relative use of bicycles for trasportation, it is virtually meaningless as evidence for your argument. Not to say that there isn’t better evidence for your views, but why use that?
I bet the number of brain injury deaths from running headlong into brick walls is even less than the number of brain injury deaths from cycling, but I still think it’s a dangerous activity - more dangerous than riding in a car.
You see what the problem is with just throwing the total number of deaths up there and saying that’s a good metric of danger is, don’t you?
Is there a study that shows the number of brain injuries per mile of activity?
I.e., sure the raw #'s show that being a pedestrian is “more dangerous” than bicycling, but on a per-mile basis? In the US, we drive approx. 3 trillion miles per year, so that for every 377 million of miles of driving, there is one death from head injury. Assuming one is no more dangerous than the other, that means that US citizens bike 122,525,000,000 miles every year, or 400 miles per person.
I also note that 122 billion is 4% of 3 trillion. Call me insane, but I have a hard time believing that 4% of the traffic on US roads are bicyclists. In the Netherlands, sure. But not in the US.
And saying “hey, only 44% of fatal bike accidents involve head injuries” doesn’t really strengthen the overall argument. It’s like saying “only 44% of cancers are caused by cigarettes, so smoke up!”
Regardless, I don’t think the raw figures are the way to look at this. Break it down into per-miles, and you might have something to argue with. Otherwise, all it does is show how little the US bikes compared to the other activities.
In other words, an activity that most Americans do everyday causes more aggregate injuries than something that most Americans pull out of storage May 22, then give up on June 6 every year. Got it.
And many professional poker players who make millions every year refuse to play without their lucky X. Pigeons spontaneously learn to believe that they will get food if they turn clockwise 3 times first. It doesn’t mean that they’re right.
You might be right that injuries are rare. But I don’t think I’ve ever needed my seatbelt, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t wear it.
But are French cyclistes required by law to have a basket on front with a baguette sticking out?
That was in response to the guy in post #2 in this thread: “I read one time that falls from bicycles is the leading cause of head injury.”
It simply isn’t true. Cycling accidents account for only 0.6 of traumatic brain injury deaths. Note also that only 44.5% of cycling deaths ‘involve’ head injuries; many of those who died may have had head injuries but they would have died from their other injuries anyway.
As for “just throwing the total number of deaths up there” – the links I provided don’t do that. The little quiz (http://www.bicyclinglife.com/SafetySkills/SafetyQuiz.htm) is not a lot of reading and it does have links to the sources of their statistics.
Riding a bicycle is not a dangerous activity. It may hard to swallow, but you have mislead if you think otherwise.
Your quiz doesn’t address helmets at all, in any question.
You have to read all the way to question #3 : "But don’t people fall off their bikes, hit their heads and die? Isn’t that why you’re told to never ride without a helmet? "
An excerpt from the answer:
Note also that DoT used to have the often made claim on their website that helmets reduce brain injuries by 85%. They quietly removed that statement a while back … because it simply isn’t true.
This is science, not advertising. Nobody gets rich telling people not to wear helmets.
I just realized that if you take the transportation data alone from Turble’s post, you find that head injuries from bicycles are about 2.8% of all head injuries caused by transportation incidents.
Also, it is safe to say that much less than 1% of the miles traveled on US roads are done by cyclists (see below.)
Missouri
Missouri Bicycle Commuting* Percentage, 1990-2010
State:
2010: 0.26%
2009: 0.25%
2008: 0.17%
2007: 0.16%
2006: 0.18%
2005: 0.19%
2000: 0.15%
1990: 0.13%
Kansas City:
2010: 0.33%
2009: 0.28%
2008: 0.18%
2007: 0.27%
2006: 0.06%
2005: 0.02%
2000: 0.12%
St. Louis:
2010: 0.92%
2009: 0.68%
2008: 0.72%
2007: 0.48%
2006: 0.74%
2000: 0.35%
The above %'s are the percentages of adults who commute to work by bike.
*“Commuting” is defined as people who bike to work and back. This doesn’t include pleasure trips, exercise, etc.
http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/nchrp/nchrp_rpt_552.pdf (PDF)
Note that this does NOT say that 1% of all transportation miles generated in the US is done so by bicycles, just that 1% of people who commute use bicycles to do so. I’m positive the total number of miles generated by biking commuters is far less than 1%.
2.8% of the people in the above statistic die from head injuries sustained while riding a bicycle, but fewer than 1% of the miles “driven” are done so by bikes.
I would find it very difficult to claim that biking is “as safe” as these other modes of transportation when the % of people dying from head injuries is far greater than all forms of transportation. Even in the State which proclaims that it bikes more than most other States only has 1/4 of 1% of its adults commuting to work on a bike on a given day.
1.5 deaths per 100 million miles in an auto.
1 death per 15 milion miles in a bike.
If you wear your seatbelt, but not your helmet, you’re not playing the odds. You’re not using math or science. You’re just taking a position that is not backed up by the (yes, scant) data.
You were saying?