There is a whole country of serious bike riders who don’t use bike helmets (the Netherlands). It turns out that if you design your biking infrastructure well enough, it isn’t really a problem.
Two hundred deaths a year and more than ten thousand injuries for bicyclists in the Netherlands... Not going to debate whether it’s a “problem”, only assert that the belief that helmets aren’t necessary is causing some unnecessary loss of life. A few of those people in the Netherlands know that even with their well designed infrastructure and slow biking speeds, as many as 80-90 Nederlanders are dying unnecessarily every year and would live if they’d only wear helmets...
Firstly, it's certainly not 80-90 of those 200, that's preposterous if you look at more detailed analyses of the results. About 70 of those 200 deaths are from irresponsible use of ebikes by old people!
Furthermore, bikes are the primary mode of transportation for most people I know here - elderly, young, weak, strong, you name it. The USA's main mode of transportation is cars (unnecessarily large ones!), which (aside from killing over 40,000 people a year directly) also kill the environment, the bodies of those inside, and a truly horrifying number of other people by proxy of countless wars waged over oil. If you count the 40,000 direct deaths alone, you get 129 deaths per 1M Americans per year and 11 deaths per 1M Dutch people per year. Take into account the other issues involved in driving and I'm sure that number will increase by (at absolute minimum) a factor of 10.
Helmets may make sense in America, where biking is a sport dominated by 30-55 year old men on $1000+ bikes wearing criminally tight pants, sunglasses, and aerodynamic helmets. But in the Netherlands they are a preposterous idea. Wearing helmets decreases bike use, which kills in far greater numbers.
> Ah, found the American [...] it’s certainly not 80-90 of those 200, that’s preposterous
Right, yes, I’m on the only American here, and only Americans believe that bike helmets make you safe.
I didn’t make the claim, it was made by SWOV of The Hague in the Netherlands, and republished by DutchNews. Since you’re there, maybe take this up with them? They did look at the detailed analysis, and they said helmets would save 85 Netherlanders per year, not me.
> The USA’s main mode of transportation is cars [...] killing over 40,000 people a year directly
Why did you turn this into a death competition? What does this have to do with cars? The discussion was over whether bike helmets make you safer or not.
I’m fully aware of how bad cars are. Your nationalistic slight aside, not all Americans want cars and the deaths that come with them. I can’t control that. But I can wear a helmet.
> Wearing helmets decreases bike use, which kills in far greater numbers.
That’s a strong claim. Please put a magnitude on it and some evidence and sources behind it.
Look, I'm not going to start the entire helmet debate here on HN, especially since you clearly have not done your research. But to specifically address your points:
1) SWOV has published multiple analyses of this issue. They explicitly noted that the analysis you're referring to was unusual in that it said up to 85 people would be saved per year by wearing helmets. Their other analyses, which use different modes of calculation, arrived at far lower numbers.
2) It's not "a death competition" (but don't worry, America is #1 regardless.) However, every mode of transportation has a cost in lives in many forms. Aside from direct deaths, there are also many indirect deaths from various modes of transportation. If you're going to criticize a possible safety problem in a mode of transportation, keep in mind the broader context. In the Netherlands, where trains are a critical part of the transportation infrastructure, there are more suicides by train than bike deaths (although both are around 200/yr.) You could argue for, perhaps, airport-train-style doors in front of platforms. But that too has an associated cost, and a benefit.
3) You need to consider the consequences of every action, no matter how obscure or strange they may possibly be. Anti-child labor laws sound like a good thing, right? Well, read up on the Child Labor Deterrence Act. Harkin simply introducing the act in Congress was enough to scare manufacturers around the world into action, firing their enormous sweatshops of children. Good, huh? Well, the children were at the sweatshops for a reason. Turns out that without the sweatshops, enormous numbers of children went into prostitution, theft, and rock crushing (which might not sound bad, but it guarantees the destruction of your lungs if you're not killed in a number of other ways.) Every action can have first order, second order, third order consequences...
Finally: 200 deaths a year is an extremely, extremely small number for a system with nearly 20 million users, operating carbon-free, smog-free, at extremely low cost (~20 eur/year.) And it manages to provide fresh air and exercise to all participants! There's basically nothing like it; it's a wonder of the modern world. Risking damaging this system by adding helmets... The payoff is tiny, the risk is enormous.
While I appreciate the response and attempt to address my question, all three of those links are from cyclehelmets.org, and the site is helmet skeptic. That’s not my opinion, it says right on the site that most of their material is anti-helmets. I find it incredibly biased, it tends to use emotional arguments and tries to magnify every scrap of anti-helmet evidence. I dislike how cyclehelmets.org attempts to draw causal lines from correlations at practically every opportunity. Just read your link and see how often they use words like “seem” and “suggest”, then try to imagine some of the many other possible explanations.
BTW, did you notice what the 10-year Canada study concluded? “In general the rate of head injuries is declining, but this is not consistent across the country, nor is it attributable to legislation as some provinces with legislation experienced a decline while others did not.” So there is evidence that helmet laws did not cause the supposed changes in ridership.
Do you believe that having to use seat belts prevents people from driving cars? If not, why not? Do you think seat belts make drivers more aggressive? Do you believe that helmets prevent people from participating in other sports? I live near a lot of ski resorts, and nearly 100% of skiers here are voluntarily wearing helmets, and the number of skiers is rising every year. Same goes for bikes, there are no helmet laws where I live and yet most people wear them, and more people are riding than ever. I don’t buy for a second that helmets are so offputting it drives away half of all people, there are a million possible explanations for whatever data points they found in Alberta. For example, the injury rates presented are absolute numbers, not per-capita like they should be. More injuries is expected when there are more people, and between 2000 and 2006, Alberta got more people.
That's not entirely true; slow (< 30 km/h) cyclists using the bike as utility to get somewhere almost never wear a helmet here. Spandex wearing speed cyclists almost always do though.
True, but that casual use is huge. If helmets were required, bike use in the Netherlands would plummet to UK or even American levels. Is that healthier for society?
But if you are serious about biking, not just casually using a bike to get to work or school, a helmet isn’t really a big deal and probably much more useful.
I disagree. Its probably more about lower speeds associated with casual riders.
But, people, especially kids, are unpredictable. I once literally ran over a boy around 12 years old on a bike path in the US. He was riding with a younger sibling and his father riding head on at me. They were riding inline on the right side (their right), with the kid I ran over in front. Just seconds before we were going to ride past each other (I was also on my right side of the path), the kid swerved directly across me, and dumped his bike. I literally had no time to respond, and rode right over him. I was on my mountain bike at the time, and the bike just thought it was a bump.
Kid was fine, maybe a bit of road rash, dad was pissed at me. Something along the likes of "WTF are you doing riding recklessly and hitting my kid?". The real WTF was like "did you not see what I saw? You kid swerved in front of me and dumped his bike." Dad was so irate I got to the point quickly of: I'm done talking with about this, whats your insurance amd I'm going to call the police to sort this out (my bike had a little bit of damage like a dinged wheel and a bent pedal from it). To this day, dont know if he was running a scam or just had a moron for a son, but as soon as I threatened to bring the cops in, the dad dropped it and went on their way.
I had a Chinese driver's license for a while, and did a little driving there over about a month.
I had a simple rule when driving. At every moment in time, imagine the most asinine/ignorant thing every driver around you could possibly do. And that is what they will do.
But.
They will do it slowly. So when somebody just merges straight into you while you're in the straight lane, they'll just ease it over slow enough that you can react.
They'll cut directly across from the left lane to the right lane, ignoring the lights, to make the turn they feel like making. And run over a little old lady in the process, and scream at her body.
I was all like "I know the rules, I'll follow the rules", and I'd do batshit insane things like stop for pedestrians because they had the right of way. They'd look at me like I was a serial killer just waiting for my chance, usually until they noticed I wasn't from around there. Then they'd laugh at me and walk.
China has great rules of the road. Nobody follows them.
That is bad advice. It remains advisable to wear a helmet. What you are saying is roughly equivalent to, "If car infrastructure is sufficient, we will no longer need helmets." At best the need is reduced.
Does the fact that they don't mean that they shouldn't? Researchers at the University of Adelaide in Australia did a study and concluded that wearing helmets in cars would prevent many serious injuries: http://www.copenhagenize.com/2009/10/australian-helmet-scien...
That’s a straw man. Most motorists wear seat belts, because seat belts prevent the most common injuries (including head injury) in small to medium crashes. Helmets don’t protect motorists from common injuries, while they do protect bicyclists from common injuries.
Most of the Dutch cycle at 15 mph on upright bicycles. No wonder they don't need helmets. For bicycle sports or even fitness rides I would say the helmet helps a lot. I was lucky to wear one two times.
I'm Dutch, you're almost right. Most people won't even reach 15 mph. Speeds around 10 mph are more common.
Funny thing: wearing helmets is much more common in Germany. If you see adult cyclists wearing a helmets on upright bikes they'll speak German most of the time :)
Generally I wear a helmet if I'll be doing more than 15 mph, or riding through a city.
