Agreed GusNSpot. Too many distractions. Not good.
Irrespective of the helmet discussion people ignore teh reality that people who regularly commute by bicycle have a 40-percent reduction in mortality compared to people who do not bicycle.
1 in every 4 deaths is due to heart disease, this dwarfs the 1-in-36 risk for all accidents.
I know this won’t convince the bike haters and those who fantasize about and take pleasure in the death of others.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=17281346&postcount=101
But helmet vs. no-helmet really is down in the weeds as far as relative risk does. That said I am a year round bike commuter and wear a helmet every time I ride.
And maybe a citation that doesn’t rely so heavily on a single 28 year-old study would be more relevant. I like the helmet design shown in the picture - haven’t seen a bike helmet like that in over 20 years.
Miles don’t matter. How many hours ridden is more relevant. I could do fifteen miles on a bike in a bit less than the time I could do a hundred in a car. Legally, anyway.
The statistic from Turble’s post says 2.6%, not 2.8%, and that is for motorbikes. Motorbike are not safe, they are cool. The figure for push bikes is less than 1%.
Speaking of motorbikes, I used to ride one. I’d always wear a helmet, not so much because of safety or because it’s legally required, but because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to see. Once you get above about forty your need to protect your head against sensory overload more than crashes. Especially in the rain, you can see through a wet visor but raindrops at seventy miles an hour hurt.
London is very far away. Around here the commuters have a cycle path along a disused railway line from the residential part of town to the industrial estate, and the surrounding countryside is full of unfrequented routes.
Tennessee reporting in.
“All bicycle operators under 16 years of age must wear a bicycle helmet on any highway, street, or sidewalk.”
That’s pretty much what we have here. Of course, given the mountains (OK… you Rocky Mtn folk can stop snickering about calling the Appalachians ‘mountains’), around here most of the time the only time I encounter bikers is while they are walking their bikes up a slope.
I grew up in Georgia in the 60s. I don’t even know where I could have bought a helmet back then. We rode like little maniacs and not a single one of us died or was even seriously damaged. We used to wear football helmets with goggles for our eyes and joust on bikes. We jumped over 12-15 foot (3.6 - 4.5 meters) deep gullies using flimsy plywood ramps. We were idiots, obviously, but successful idiots nevertheless.
If we had helmets available at the time and they looked ‘cool’ we would almost certainly have worn them. If the helmet had a Green Lantern sigil on it, I would probably have worn it all the time to the consternation of my parents.
History of the bicycle helmet.
Something that hasn’t been mentioned is that the modern helmet not only provides terrific ventilation but also protection from the direct rays of the sun which is significant in hot weather. Some models will have systems that will absorb and/or channel sweat away from the eyes.
Also interesting because my experience in the same area of London you used to live in
(heh, I know a few other people who’ve moved from London to Bristol) is that some do, some don’t. Sports cyclists do, commuters on their way to the City or whatever do, but they don’t make up all cyclists you see on the street here. Maybe half of the people I see cycling along of an afternoon won’t be wearing a helmet. Teenagers, never.
This is a less extraordinary claim, in my view. If you hate helmets, still bike, I guess. It’s still healthier than not biking.
I guess I notice in the Chicago burbs, too, what others have noticed - road bikes and hybrids see a lot more helmet use than ‘classic’ bikes and beaters.
Sorry, that’s not how I came to the 2.8% figure. Counting only those brain injuries/fatalities caused by means of transportation (11,466 total), the 325 that occurred while riding bicycles account for 2.834% of all transportation-caused brain injuries/deaths.
Compare that to the daily riding figures of the US and Missouri (the one sample I found) cited earlier - far fewer than 1% of the transportation miles are generated by bicyclists, but 2.8% of deaths by brain injuries (again, resulting from transportation-caused accidents) are suffered by bicyclists. Any claim that the two activities (biking and driving/riding in a car) are equally safe is not supported by the evidence supported by me and Turble.
Even if you use the revised metric of # hours used/day, it is hard to imagine bicyclists amounting to 2.8% of all transportation time accumulated per day.
Table 11 on page 78 of the PDF I linked to shows that
.1% of Americans ride 3 of 4 days
.2% ride 1 in 2 days
The above %'s are cumulative so we have .3% of the population responsible for 2.8% of the transportation time? Is this reasonable? Not in the areas I’ve been to in the US, and I travel quite a bit. (Sorry to end on an unsupported claim, but I clicked “save” too soon. Also, don’t want to go through the work. 
)
(http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/nchrp/nchrp_rpt_552.pdf)