November 21, 2014
by Bikeyface
Headcase
The other day I was relaxing at a cafe when I found myself eavesdropping.
Why did he feel the need to speak to the bicyclist and why did he assume the cyclist was somehow ignorant? Would this guy similarly attack other people doing things that he viewed as poor judgement? Or is it just bicyclists?
I’m sick of the helmet hype. It’s time to hype up infrastructure until “cycle track” is in everyone’s vocabulary. I dream of the day this guy will ask the city what’s up with the street design that makes cyclists feel like they need to wear helmets.
If you think there’s a good chance of getting hit by a car, it’s not a helmet that you need. You need to not ride your bike there. A car will crush your soft body with or without a helmet.
Thank you for this!! I wear a helmet religiously, but it’s only because I can’t control the CARS constantly around me. Wouldn’t have to if I didn’t have to ride with them
I usually wear a helmet, but when we lived in Berlin last year for 3 1/2 months, we rode without and loved it. I recently watched this TED talk (I’m sure many of you have already seen it): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07o-TASvIxY. It’s an interesting assessment of the whole helmet thing. Basically, I feel like you should have a choice, and I don’t need anyone lecturing me.
I was actually harassed on the trails by another rider for not wearing a helmet. He was actually standing at an intersection in such a way that he almost completely blocked my path — I thought of yelling at him back that he shouldn’t be a road hazard, but I only had time to yell back that it was my business before he was in the dust. It’s really ridiculous especially because people like this are criticizing you for one moment in time. I know some cyclists never wear helmets, but I’m sure many more typically wear a helmet but forgo it once in a while for whatever reason. To treat them like they’re somehow ignorant of head protection is ridiculous and intrusive.
However, I really disagree with the comment about bike infrastructure, however poor or nonexistent, being the reason we wear helmets. I feel pretty certain that if I’m hit by a car, the helmet probably isn’t going to do me much good. But if I slip on the ice or blow a tire, I’m going to be damn glad there’s a helmet between my head and the pavement. We can put a lot of blame on poor infrastructure, but needing to wear a helmet is part of operating a bike, not a function of infrastructure quality.
These days I usually reply with “Did you take the lane on your way here? Do you even know what “take the lane” means? That’s way more important to your safety than wearing a helmet.” Not that I don’t totally agree with you on the need for separated infrastructure — but since right now we have none where I live…
I wear a helmet on long road rides, because I don’t trust drivers not to hit me. Sure, the impact may kill me, it may maim the parts not protected by the helmet, but maybe I will at least survive with my mind intact. I wear a helmet when mountain biking because I could fall into a tree or on a rock. I wear a helmet during winter rides because I have fallen on the ice, and because it’s warmer to cover my noggin. I will often NOT wear a helmet on a bike path in the summer, because my chance of a fall is much lower and there are no cars. I prefer to assess the risks and make my own decisions about whether it’s appropriate to wear a helmet, and not be told by someone else that I MUST wear a helmet. But kids? Need to wear a helmet. They are more fragile and less experienced.
Way more people fall on multiple use trails…
Riding with a helmet is, to me, the same as wearing a hard hat on a construction site: it’s required personal protective gear. If anyone is seen without a hard hat on a job site such a person will be told about it.
Regarding – November 21, 2014 12:16 pm, “For those who say they can do what they want I ask who pays for your hospitalization and long term care …..?”
Perhaps you should ask that question of people who get no exercise. The health benefits of biking, far outweigh the risks of biking without a helmet. In the Netherlands, they oppose helmet promotion because they want no one to be detered from cycling. The benefits are just too great.
Rebecca, I did not wear a helmet for 2 weeks on a bike trip in the Netherlands. Infrastructure makes a huge difference; the risks during a daily commute in the Amsterdam are negligible. In contrast to the Netherlands, Denmark promotes helmets. Do you wear a seat belt? The risk of brain injury as opposed to death unbelted in a car is much higher. And guess who pays for the care – we do.
Yes, I always wear a seat belt. So do the Dutch.
I wear a helmet every time I ride not because helmets work in a wreck but because if you don’t wear one your family doesn’t get diddly if you get hit and die from massive blunt force trauma to the torso. And I also say that as a guy that survived getting hit by a truck doing 60 MPH, I survived because I have very dense bones and can crush the roof of a pickup truck with my head, not because I was wearing a helmet. A bicycle helmet is designed to prevent skull fracture in a 20 km/hr (12.5 MPH) impact with a curb, or about the speed your head would reach if you were unable to unclip at a stop sign and fell over and hit the curb. By 20 MPH the impact absorption is completely used up and all the helmet is good for is preventing cosmetic damage to the covered part of your head, which by the by does not include your face, which had to be sewn back together after my wreck.
Bingo!
The other week I headed off late to an apt. at work. No helmet. Co-workers, others commented that I needed to get my helmet. Had to head back to where my helmet was to make some other rounds. By then it had started to rain. So I got my helmet and rode 1 handed in the rain whilst holding my umbrella. Zero comments about the danger of that.
Just call me Mr. Poppins
In my city there is a bylaw about how cyclists must wear helmets. Which makes every person feel EXTRA entitled to share their views about how I’m breaking the law if I bike 1.5km to the farmers market on a cycle track. It’s amazing to me how much people feel like they can just comment, out loud, on my life.
Although as a fat woman who exercises, bikes, and eats in public it shouldn’t be a suprise anymore when people comment on my body or decisions, it is still surprising every time.
To the “safety equipment” and “I’ve seen” crowd, here’s one thing you have not seen (in this country) — someone riding a bike share bike, with or without a helmet, killed in a crash. 23 million trips, zero fatalities. Car safety stats would predict two fatalities in that many trips, and a 65% chance at least one of those auto deaths involved a severe head injury.
So are we talking risk and safety here, or just innumerate tribal norms? It takes a finely tuned risk tolerance to declare that bicycles are so unsafe as to certainly require a helmet, yet cars are so safe that it’s silly to even suggest it (per-trip risks are within a factor of two overall, thus it is no surprise that a safe subpopulation of cyclists is safer than cars in general).
And motorcycles are something else entirely. 25x the per-trip fatality risk, relative to bicycles.
Y’all who have opinions on this, you DO try to follow research and news on risk, don’t you?
I. Will make a small disagreement with you about the motorcycle death rate. It’s a complex issue. My thought is that the vast majority of motorcyclmany wayses are “toys” rather than transportation. And they ate not ridden regularly in the same way that commuter bicycles or commuter cyclists operate. I spoke to a guy I who spoke lovingly about his Harley. ..I put 500 miles on her this year. …uh..I have a 250cc yamaha scooter that was driven 10,000 miles. It’s kinda like when my health allowed more bicycling. I rode a bicycle every day nearly. Then you get the people who ride on the trails once a month.
I ride a motor scooter for transportation and work because I have had all the driving I can stand. Over 1 million miles of professional driving. In some ways a small scooter has the advantage
Mark, it’s just the nationwide stats — they count all the trips in all the modes (using census data, I think), and all the reported crashes with fatalities and injuries, and do the math. I have no doubt that there are much safer motorcycle riders, in the same way that bike share users are much safer bicycle riders (at least 4x safer than the cycling average). But the stats say that overall the per-trip risk ratios, car:bike:motorbike, are 1:2:50. One of these things is not like the others — but we have some upstream commenter remarking on the head injuries she’s seen from motorcycle accidents, therefore cyclists should wear helmets. (Why is bike share so safe? My guess is it is a combo of a selected population in an urban area riding bikes with running lights that are not geared for the highest speeds.)
And we can’t *all* be above average. Someone is having those fatal crashes.
“You’re not wearing a helmet!!!”
“Very observant of you, my new friend… I’m not wearing depends either… And neither is your problem… Have a great day!!!”
It’s allways people who don’t bike that’s talk about that I MUST wear a helmet (I’m 49 and still bike every day). If I stop at red lights, use bicycle lights also on daytime and use my arms and look drivers in the eyes nothing will happen. 80% of all bicycle accidents (in Sweden) are single accidents and then it’s not the head that is the issue. It’s your wrist or your shoulder thats got to give you pain. I have german quality tires from Scwabble wich is better then helmet. No single accident for me – ever.
The problem with helmets is the following – too many anti-helmet and pro-helmet people think they are 100% right. The truth is somewhere in the middle: there are times riding a helmet is appropriate and there are time NOT wearing a helmet is just fine – and the only person that knows that is the bike rider.
Helmet use depends on so many things: rider experience, age, culture, road conditions, if you are riding in a group or not, time of day, temperature, terrain, country you reside in, whether you have had a past injury or not, are there cycle tracks, the type of bike they are riding…..and that’s just for starters.
I have been accused from both sides in my work of showing too many people wearing helmets or too many not wearing helmets – and believe it or not IN THE SAME VIDEO!!!!
So people need to let riders determine their needs. If they are wearing a helmet GREAT! If they are not wearing a helmet GREAT! I just wish I could put that in a fun comic strip to share!! 🙂
There are people who wear helmets, all the time or sometimes, depending upon what they will be doing on a bike. They see helmets as a personal choice. There are helmet-zealots who are frightened to see people riding without helmets and speak up anytime they see a helmet-less cyclist. There are people who never wear helmets, who are verbally attacked for not wearing a helmet. I have never heard anyone verbally attack a person FOR wearing a helmet. I have never heard an anti-helmet person, just people who speak up to helmet-zealots. No one questions or attacks a person who is wearing a helmet. I have been yelled at for not wearing a helmet by people driving by in their car. I have been told by one “friend” that I made him physically ill, seeing me riding without a helmet. I have had to endure long tirades for not wearing a helmet. I am forced to defend myself. That does not make me anti-helmet. I am shunned by some for choosing to not wear a helmet.
I understand why some people in the US wear helmets, not out of a fear of being injured, but because they do not want to be attacked for not wearing a helmet nor do they want to attract attention to themselves, or feel that their lack of helmet will detract from cycling advocacy that they are doing. I don’t blame them.
Just for the record – I always wear a seat belt when I am in a car. I don’t wear knee pads, though I am thinking of it to save my knees and pants from being cut when I am walking and trip. 🙂 Oh and I faithfully wore a helmet for twenty years.
It’s a US/Australian (and to a degree British) thing: continental Europeans just aren’t fussed by it. In the Netherlands no one except for a few American expats ever bothers with the things, while here in France they’re highly unusual except on the heads of weekend sport cyclists who are required to wear them under FCI rules. (and yet the incidence of head-injuries-as-sole-or-main-cause-of-death accidents is vanishingly low: one Dutch cycling activist recently calculated that in Holland you’d need to cycle 10km per day for the next 8,000 years to receive a head injury of any kind, let alone a disabling one).
Americans do seem to be obsessed with helmets for some strange reason: any Guardian cycling blog that so much as mentions them will soon be crawling with US posters telling everyone that they fall off at least twice every month, their head striking the tarmac with such force that it leaves a dent in it, and if it wasn’t for helmets every cyclist in the USA would now be sitting gorked-out in wheelchairs with their relatives spooning mashed bananas into their dribbling mouths; and why don’t you guys in Europe all wear them? Are you crazy? I put this down to a strong missionary tendency innate in Americans, a country once founded by religious sectaries.
Myself, I greatly favour the Dutch cycle helmet. This consists of a substantial concrete kerb, about 80 x 150cm, between yourself and anything likely to do you any harm.
I also think that in Australia, on purely epidemiological grounds, it would be far more worthwhile to mandate cyclists wearing sun-hats, given that country’s high incidence of skin cancers.
Schwalbe Marathon Winter is the best bicycle tyre 🙂
LOVE THIS! Thank you for speaking truth about need for infrastructure being more important.
To Dr2chase>>.
Thanks for your thoughtful response. The reason I think I might cross the “rudeness” line when it comes to a cyclist not using lights has less to do with the potential danger they may cause to others due to “no lights” and more to do with how it would affect my life if I crushed them because I did not see them. I have spent my life as a cyclist and have worked in the industry for well over 40 years. For all of that time I have had a dire fear of injuring a cyclist with my car. We have a local Cop on a bike where I live that zips around town with no lights. Whenever I see him I come out from under my politeness shell and holler “where’s your light?” We have a law to that affect in MA. there is no helmet law (thank goodness, I might add).