Most Dutch people don’t wear a helmet when riding a bicycle. As e-bikes are becoming more popular, some older people are opting to wear a helmet since the speed is higher, but many still don’t.

It’s not uncommon to see a parent riding around with a kid attached to the bike and neither are wearing a helmet.

I think it is kind of a cultural thing as well as convenience. If you ride a bike to the station to catch a train, then you might need storage or to carry it with you.

Pricesely this, yes. And for the kids, an average trip to school takes like 5-10 minutes, hassling with three helmets (mine and of two kids) takes almost as long. And then I have to carry three helmets if I want to drop by to the supermarket after getting them to school.

The bicycle seats for kids are designed in such a way that the only real danger of a head being hit is in the frontal collision, or in a really forceful side one. The design of Dutch streets makes the chance of either happening small enough that the helmets are widely seen as not worth it.

I thought that Dutch parents put small kids on the front of their bicycle to absorb the blunt of impacts. Then you dispose of the small child and make another one.

Why is this downvoted? Please explain. It seems like a reasonable comment to me.

Also it's just not really a big danger. There's no epidemic of brain injury due to this.

Part of the reason is that because bike usage is so common and the infrastructure is very separate (bike lanes everywhere, no mixed traffic on eg roundabouts), and bikes almost always have right of way and are not to blame in an accident, that drivers are very aware of them. I noticed in countries like Ireland with much less bikes that bike lanes sometimes just end in the middle of a high speed roundabout. And most drivers there have no clue which is in part because until 10 years ago you could just buy a driver's license at the post office. It was a "learner's permit" but it was normal practice to just go and drive.

So yeah in Ireland I wouldn't even ride a bike with a helmet. In Holland I'm much safer even without one.

I don't remember the "Not Just Bikes" YouTube video, but he specifically discusses the relatively low rates of bicycle helmet wearing, especially amoungst urban riders. I agree with you: When there are serious bike injuries, it is usually due to a car or truck in mixed space. When only bikes riding less than 25km/h, the injuries are pretty minor.

This really isn’t a similar comparison, Dutch infrastructure is built to prioritize making cycling safe at every decision point.

Whereas you’d be someone with a death wish to be riding without a helmet in most places in the US.

This is an asia thing, not a Japan thing. Saw this in most of South East Asia.

Wat? That seems out of character. Class related?

Actually that seems very Japanese in a weird way - they might be trusting themselves and everyone else to follow rules precisely, thus avoiding all the accidents and obviating the need for seatbelts.

Is driving actually kind of easy in Japan for this reason? I’ve never had a car while there. It’s wild how different Japan and China are despite being neighbors. I can’t think of a European neighbor pair that is so different.

One is an island nation that's been fairly open, the other had waves of isolationism, famines, and only recently opened up their markets in the late 80s. Private car ownership was not on the table until probably 25 years ago.

But to play your game, Switzerland and Italy, especially southern Italy, are very different.

Your counterexample is not even close to being accurate. Italy and Switzerland have much more in common than China and Japan. Italian is even one of the official languages of Switzerland. Switzerland and Italy are both essentially federations of distinct provinces. Both are recognizably Western European. China and Japan are worlds apart, as are China and India.

My main point was that there's plenty of reasons for China and Japan to be different, especially when it comes to driving norms. Are you surprised as the other poster was about these differences between China and Japan?

And going back to the original intent: would you say driving in Zurich and driving in Naples are two distinct experiences?

When I visited, Austria-Hungary were very different. So were Germany-Poland. And let's not even talk about Finland-Russia.

I mean, Europe had an iron curtain for decades and that shows at the boundaries.

I can: Germany and (European) Russia. They are about the same distance as Tokyo to Shanghai. They have wildly different driving cultures! Also, China is the size of a continent. Did you drive in all the different regions? I doubt it. Do what region are you extrapolating from?

Ahh.. a bit too trusting to the point of individual risk in a high trust society.