Are helmets now compulsory?

dondare

Always Tyred wrote:

Always Tyred wrote:

I have never not been hit on the head by not wearing a helmet.

However, I have previously failed to avoid not being hit on the head by failing to not wear a helmet.

Do you mean that because you were wearing a helmet, you were hit on the head?
If so, did it save you from the injury that you would have not have received had you not been wearing a helmet?

dondare

iPete wrote:

dondare wrote:

iPete wrote:

zzzzZZZ not reading all of this but I'm that guy down the pub!

This morning I got things a little wrong and ploughed into the back of a lorry, a bit like Mark Webber at the weekend (except at slower speeds, I didn't go flying and I didn't even register on the other object).

Thanks to mr lid I laughed it off, bent my bike back together and continued on my journey, dent in my ego, not my head. If you choose to let statistics protect you, your choice.

& Last time I came off my mountain bike, I didn't hit my head, go figure, I've smacked my head on hard objects twice now on my roadie.

I don't know if it's risk compensation but it does seem to me that cyclists who wear helmets need them more than cyclists who don't.
How did you go into the back of a lorry?

A small miss timing, unexpected breaking at a green light and one shoulder safety check to many oh and its Monday morning. Would I have done the same without a lid? More than likely!

I hope you mean unexpected braking at the green light.

iPete

dondare wrote:

iPete wrote:

dondare wrote:

iPete wrote:

zzzzZZZ not reading all of this but I'm that guy down the pub!

This morning I got things a little wrong and ploughed into the back of a lorry, a bit like Mark Webber at the weekend (except at slower speeds, I didn't go flying and I didn't even register on the other object).

Thanks to mr lid I laughed it off, bent my bike back together and continued on my journey, dent in my ego, not my head. If you choose to let statistics protect you, your choice.

& Last time I came off my mountain bike, I didn't hit my head, go figure, I've smacked my head on hard objects twice now on my roadie.

I don't know if it's risk compensation but it does seem to me that cyclists who wear helmets need them more than cyclists who don't.
How did you go into the back of a lorry?

A small miss timing, unexpected breaking at a green light and one shoulder safety check to many oh and its Monday morning. Would I have done the same without a lid? More than likely!

I hope you mean unexpected braking at the green light.

Sadly there was some breaking, not my skull thankfully but to my poor bike but its nearly all straightened out now...

Pedant

KiwiMike

MTB vs road: MTB is very different in itself. Cycle-touring offroad really does requires an MTB - I rode 1,000km down the spine of NZ's South Island, offroad 50% of the time. I only recall wearing a helmet once, that was in a place called Naseby Forest, panniers off, hurtling around custom-built singletrack close among pinetrees. Chances of coming a cropper exponentially higher than whilst pootling along a fire-road with panniers on.

People advocating helmet use based on the fact that some aspects of cycling are risky don't extend the analogy to other pursuits. Why not wear one in your car - after all, F1 racers do. Or wear a helmet while walking up Ben Nevis - after all, mountainclimbers wear helmets.

Cycling encompasses a hugely varying spectrum of pursuits and participants. From world-cup DH racing to my nan coasting to church on Sunday at 8am.

Riddle me this, helmet champions:

a) The likelihood of being in an accident in the first place
b) That accident being likely to cause death or SHI
c) Likelihood that a helmet would have made a jot of difference

All 3 must align to justify wearing a lid. Thankfully you'd have to ride 8hrs a day, 365 days a year for around 3,000 years before statistically being likely to suffer a KSI cropper, and almost all of the time a helmet would not have stopped that HGV or TV celeb chef doing you in.

This is why in the 60's / 70's / 80's there was no epidemic of cycling deaths. Why our mums were fine with us disappearing for a day with our BMX mates. This is why when helmets became compulsory or prevalent, there was no noticeable decline in KSI.

Because CYCLING IS SAFE. Safer than being in a car. Just as if not safer than walking.

<nails colours to mast> I actually do take issue with people wearing helmets for everyday cycling. It is not harmless. It sends out a highly visible message to everyone that cycling IS dangerous - why else do you need a flipping huge, expensive helmet? That alone discourages people from cycling, or letting their children cycle. It tells motorists that they need take less care around you, because, y'know, you are wearing a helmet. You're safe. You'll be OK if something goes wrong. Because of herd mentality it means the parents who don't insist their children wear them are seen as not caring about their kids. When in fact forcing children to wear helmets is teaching them to take silly risks - they think they will be OK because mum says I need to wear my helmet to be safe.

Nothing has done cycling more harm than helmets. Governments love them because they can then abdicate responsibility to the cyclist. The media almost always report that the dead cyclist "was not wearing a helmet" - cue tut-tutting and 'he brought it on himself' from the uninformed public. The fact that he suffered other massive injuries and would have died regardless is just too hard to convey and doesn't invoke any sense of moral judgment on the reader's behalf.

The helmet manufacturers should be heartily ashamed of themselves, as should bike shops profiting from the fear-mongering used to sell them. How screwed-up is the logic of a sales person saying "Here, buy this health-benefit inducing bike, but wear this or you will die".

Gaa. Nothing annoys me more than basic science and evidence being ignored. And anyone advocating helmets as A Good Thing for day-to-day cycling ignores all the evidence to the contrary.

Mike

itsbruce

gb2gw wrote:

When my bike slipped sideways on a patch of black ice late last year and I smacked the side of my head on the tarmac, the foam inside the lid cracked in several places but I suffered little more than a bit of a bout of concussion. The doc at A&E thought I'd possibly have suffered a fractured skull if it wasn't for the helmet. .

The doctor had a very poor understanding of physics. When a helmet cracks under an impact, it transfers almost all the energy onwards, providing very little protection at all. If it cracked, it failed; your head is still in one piece because the impact wasn't enough to fracture it.;

davmaggs

You seem to make the assumption that people wear lids to save them from death. Not correct for the people I know. Instead they are trying to limit damage and pain from knocks from the simple shunts and minor falls that commuting in London is very likely to cause.

My motorcycle worry a lot more about leaving a jawbone behind as they slide down the road than death too. They know that a lid doesn't save them from the Acme steam roller either.

biff55

^^ kiwimike +1
excellent.

amnezia

this helmet debate is getting old already, can we not get back to discussing why hyrbids are inferior to road bikes?

iPete

amnezia wrote:

this helmet debate is getting old already, can we not get back to discussing why hyrbids are inferior to road bikes?

More importantly, I've got this C2W voucher, what hybrid should I get..

UndercoverElephant

iPete wrote:

amnezia wrote:

this helmet debate is getting old already, can we not get back to discussing why hyrbids are inferior to road bikes?

More importantly, I've got this C2W voucher, what hybrid should I get..

And why has nobody answered my question about whether I should wear hi-viz pants under my bib-shorts.

itsbruce

Always Tyred wrote:

Is there any actual evidence that rotational brain injuries are more prevelant when wearing a helmet?
.

No; it's an informed concern that has been raised by some doctors and researchers, based on improved understanding of the mechanics of brain injury and the known characteristics of helmets. But then the evidence for the benefits of helmets is scarcely any better:

• They don't test them by subjecting real people, both with and without helmests, to crashes.
• Almost no good quality research to show the benefits of helmets has actually been done.

But I don't actually care if helmets make rotational injuries more or less likely, because of some other statistics:

1. The benefits of being a cyclist, helmet or not, greatly outweigh the risks.
2. 100% of people who are me, when asked, state that they don't like wearing helmets.

The second statistic there is a top quality one, with a margin of error of 0%. I would present my analysis of the incidence of head injuries suffered by me while not wearing a helmet, but setting up a double-blind trial has proved to be difficult (even with a hood on, I could tell it was me answering the questions) and more likely to cause an accident than riding without a helmet.

rjsterry

@KiwiMike: As you are such a strong advocate of science over anecdote, you should know that extrapolating personal behaviour from general studies of population-wide trends is pretty risky. A correlation is not the same as a causative link. Your argument seems to be enforced helmet-wearing didn't reduce the national KSI rate, therefore helmets for everyday cycling are useless or worse. A bit of a leap wouldn't you agree? As for the 'Nothing has done cycling more harm...", a touch hyperbolic to say the least. Some negative effects maybe, but everything has side effects.

@itsbruce, I could be wrong, but I'm not sure your physics is quite right there either.

WesternWay

itsbruce wrote:

1. The benefits of being a cyclist, helmet or not, greatly outweigh the risks.
2. 100% of people who are me, when asked, state that they don't like wearing helmets.

These are the key issues I think, though for me the latter is "I don't mind wearing a helmet too much, and in the absence of anything of anything stronger, my [b]guess[/b] is that a helmet will do more than good harm so I'll wear one.

I would be very against making them compulsory though[/i]

rjsterry

itsbruce wrote:

But then the evidence for the benefits of helmets is scarcely any better:

• They don't test them by subjecting real people, both with and without helmests, to crashes.
• Almost no good quality research to show the benefits of helmets has actually been done.

The small matter of the ethics of crashing people into trucks deliberately gets in the way. Unfortunately, people who have real crashes aren't wired up with sensors and the like. I suspect there never will be any conclusive evidence on helmet wearing (of any sort).

wgwarburton

rjsterry wrote:

... As for the 'Nothing has done cycling more harm...", a touch hyperbolic to say the least. Some negative effects maybe, but everything has side effects.

Can you think of a counter-example? Apart from the rise of the private motorcar (and I'm not sure that's a reasonable example to use) I can't think of anything, offhand, that's done cycling as a whole more harm...

I'll give it some thought but I'd be interested to hear other poeple's suggestions on the matter!!

Cheers,
W.

WesternWay

WGWarburton wrote:

rjsterry wrote:

... As for the 'Nothing has done cycling more harm...", a touch hyperbolic to say the least. Some negative effects maybe, but everything has side effects.

Can you think of a counter-example? Apart from the rise of the private motorcar (and I'm not sure that's a reasonable example to use) I can't think of anything, offhand, that's done cycling as a whole more harm...

I'll give it some thought but I'd be interested to hear other poeple's suggestions on the matter!!

Cheers,
W.

I think the demise of decent kids bikes has had a very negative impact too. Cheap and nasty bikes, very heavy bikes, bikes that don't last have all had an effect on how much children can cycle.

itsbruce

rjsterry wrote:

@itsbruce, I could be wrong, but I'm not sure your physics is quite right there either.

Just relaying the results of research. Small surface cracks are a natural part of the crumpling process but a large crack in the foam slab means that the impact was not dispersed. And since it wasn't dispersed, that means that almost all of it went straight through the helmet and into your head, in one place.

""cracks developing partly or fully through the thickness of the foam-slab renders it useless in crushing and absorbing impact forces""

UndercoverElephant

WesternWay wrote:

I think the demise of decent kids bikes has had a very negative impact too. Cheap and nasty bikes, very heavy bikes, bikes that don't last have all had an effect on how much children can cycle.

You never tried to lift a Raleigh Grifter, did you?

WesternWay

UndercoverElephant wrote:

WesternWay wrote:

I think the demise of decent kids bikes has had a very negative impact too. Cheap and nasty bikes, very heavy bikes, bikes that don't last have all had an effect on how much children can cycle.

You never tried to lift a Raleigh Grifter, did you?

I was never allowed a Grifter, I had a Budgie, and then a drop bar three speed Raleigh.

so no, I didn't :-(

mrc1

I dont care if people do or dont wear helmets. Its a personal choice at the end of the day and you not wearing one doesnt harm me.

My personal reasons for wearing one:

1. I have been hit by a car and went over the bonnet. I flipped in the air and literally landed on my helmet which absorbed a massive amount of the impact. Whether it saved my life or not is a moot point. Without a helmet it would have been my skull and scalp hitting the ground - that would have hurt a lot.

2. My girlfriend came off her bike and again hit her helmeted head on the ground hard. The helmet hit the ground rather than her cheek bone - again meaning no serious injuries.

3. The argument about helmets not absorbing a huge impact as well as older bmx ones isnt really relevant. Its like saying - The seatbelt in my car doesnt protect me as much as a proper six point harness, therefore i dont wear my seatbelt.

4. While i may not be as fast as these boys, I find that the slow mo around the 57 second mark makes a pretty strong case for wearing something to lessen the impacts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RNAYR3KPIg

wgwarburton

WesternWay wrote:

WGWarburton wrote:

rjsterry wrote:

... As for the 'Nothing has done cycling more harm...", a touch hyperbolic to say the least. Some negative effects maybe, but everything has side effects.

Can you think of a counter-example? Apart from the rise of the private motorcar (and I'm not sure that's a reasonable example to use) I can't think of anything, offhand, that's done cycling as a whole more harm...

I'll give it some thought but I'd be interested to hear other poeple's suggestions on the matter!!

Cheers,
W.

I think the demise of decent kids bikes has had a very negative impact too. Cheap and nasty bikes, very heavy bikes, bikes that don't last have all had an effect on how much children can cycle.

Many, many children now have access to bikes than did before, though- it was absolutely normal for kids not to have bikes in the recent past, 'cos their parent's couldn't afford them. That's much less the case these days with the rise in living standards, cheap offshore manufacturing etc.

Cheers,
W.

KiwiMike

rjsterry wrote:

@KiwiMike: As you are such a strong advocate of science over anecdote, you should know that extrapolating personal behaviour from general studies of population-wide trends is pretty risky. A correlation is not the same as a causative link. Your argument seems to be enforced helmet-wearing didn't reduce the national KSI rate, therefore helmets for everyday cycling are useless or worse. A bit of a leap wouldn't you agree?

No, not at all. You need an adequate sample size/duration to draw a valid conclusion from. I call 3m people over 20 year adequate. NZ has proved unequivocally that helmets_don't_work. Any incidents where you could explicitly prove that a difference was made by wearing one (virtually impossible to do) would fall into the margin of error. If you could come up with a sufficient number of like incidents, they would become statistically significant and the overall picture would be different. But it ain't.

Pro-helmet people have no problem wearing seatbelts. Yet I know someone who would have died in an accident had they been wearing a seatbelt. My mother's MkII Cortina (bench seat) was hit driver's side-on by a lorry - she was pushed over to the passenger side, the lorry's bumper was where her left arm would have been had she been belted in. My elder sister then used that logic as a teenager as reason not to wear a seatbelt, and in a viciously ironic twist was then thrown from a different Cortina that broke up - and suffered pretty bad injuries. There are always individual occurrences that seem to counter population-level statistics, like the smoker who lives to 100. Pro-helmet advocates are picking and choosing what to regard as scientific fact and what to ignore. They accept the wisdom of seatbelts and not smoking, but ignore repeated world-wide helmet statistics that clearly point to their being of no merit.

rjsterry wrote:

As for the 'Nothing has done cycling more harm...", a touch hyperbolic to say the least. Some negative effects maybe, but everything has side effects.

Well, I can't think of anything that has, overnight, discouraged circa 15-20% of a given population from cycling. Repeatedly around the world this has been the case where helmets have become mandatory. Helmet laws fight against all the good cycling news like the 20:1 health benefit ratio, reduced cost, reduced carbon emissions, lower stress, nicer communities, saved lives from car use, etc etc.

But as always, helmet threads end with people agreeing to disagree. I've yet to see anyone convinced to change their views based on argument from either side.

Righto, who's for a Jumping Red Lights thread? ;-)

<ducks, runs away, unsubscribes>



Mike

rjsterry

I'm not sure it's just kids bikes. Supermarket BSOs in general have had a pretty negative effect I'd say. @UE Or a Raleigh Chopper? Out of interest WGW, what was your reason for disqualifying greater car ownership? Speaking to peopole of my parents' generation, I'd say the vast increase in road traffic was a major factor in their impression that roads were 'less safe' (they probably aren't, but it the perception that people go on, not the hard fact, as we've been discussing).

@itsbruce: Fair enough. Got any references for that (I'm genuinely interested).

rjsterry

KiwiMike wrote:

rjsterry wrote:

@KiwiMike: As you are such a strong advocate of science over anecdote, you should know that extrapolating personal behaviour from general studies of population-wide trends is pretty risky. A correlation is not the same as a causative link. Your argument seems to be enforced helmet-wearing didn't reduce the national KSI rate, therefore helmets for everyday cycling are useless or worse. A bit of a leap wouldn't you agree?

No, not at all. You need an adequate sample size/duration to draw a valid conclusion from. I call 3m people over 20 year adequate. NZ has proved unequivocally that helmets_don't_work. Any incidents where you could explicitly prove that a difference was made by wearing one (virtually impossible to do) would fall into the margin of error. If you could come up with a sufficient number of like incidents, they would become statistically significant and the overall picture would be different. But it ain't.

Pro-helmet people have no problem wearing seatbelts. Yet I know someone who would have died in an accident had they been wearing a seatbelt. My mother's MkII Cortina (bench seat) was hit driver's side-on by a lorry - she was pushed over to the passenger side, the lorry's bumper was where her left arm would have been had she been belted in. My elder sister then used that logic as a teenager as reason not to wear a seatbelt, and in a viciously ironic twist was then thrown from a different Cortina that broke up - and suffered pretty bad injuries. There are always individual occurrences that seem to counter population-level statistics, like the smoker who lives to 100. Pro-helmet advocates are picking and choosing what to regard as scientific fact and what to ignore. They accept the wisdom of seatbelts and not smoking, but ignore repeated world-wide helmet statistics that clearly point to their being of no merit.

rjsterry wrote:

As for the 'Nothing has done cycling more harm...", a touch hyperbolic to say the least. Some negative effects maybe, but everything has side effects.

Well, I can't think of anything that has, overnight, discouraged circa 15-20% of a given population from cycling. Repeatedly around the world this has been the case where helmets have become mandatory. Helmet laws fight against all the good cycling news like the 20:1 health benefit ratio, reduced cost, reduced carbon emissions, lower stress, nicer communities, saved lives from car use, etc etc.

But as always, helmet threads end with people agreeing to disagree. I've yet to see anyone convinced to change their views based on argument from either side.

Righto, who's for a Jumping Red Lights thread? ;-)

<ducks, runs away, unsubscribes>



Mike

Come back, we're only on page 11! I'd agree with you on compulsory helmet wearing - on a national scale, they don't make enough of a difference, but the national statistics will include a whole lot of factors that don't apply to me - my 'risk profile' will be quite different from a typical average risk profile suggested by the statistics. Lastly, even if I am in the margin of error, it'll still hurt if I bang my head.

always_tyred

itsbruce wrote:

gb2gw wrote:

When my bike slipped sideways on a patch of black ice late last year and I smacked the side of my head on the tarmac, the foam inside the lid cracked in several places but I suffered little more than a bit of a bout of concussion. The doc at A&E thought I'd possibly have suffered a fractured skull if it wasn't for the helmet. .

The doctor had a very poor understanding of physics. When a helmet cracks under an impact, it transfers almost all the energy onwards, providing very little protection at all. If it cracked, it failed; your head is still in one piece because the impact wasn't enough to fracture it.;

God, where do we find these people. All it tells you is that the helmet eventually fractured - it says nothing about how energy was transferred up to that point. So it is consistent both with the helmet functioning as intended and with the helmet fracturing prematurely.

always_tyred

KiwiMike wrote:

Pro-helmet people have no problem wearing seatbelts. Yet I know someone who would have died in an accident had they been wearing a seatbelt. Pro-helmet advocates are picking and choosing what to regard as scientific fact and what to ignore. They accept the wisdom of seatbelts and not smoking, but ignore repeated world-wide helmet statistics that clearly point to their being of no merit.
Well, I can't think of anything that has, overnight, discouraged circa 15-20% of a given population from cycling.Mike

Are you arguing against helmet use, or compulsory helmet use?

Are you arguing that road cycling is so risky that there is no sense in wearing a piece of expanded polystyrene, or that road cycling is so safe as to render it pointless?

Don't wear a helmet, see if I care.

Oh, and by the way, it doesn't help your case to equate seatbelt use to helmet use. To point to scenarios wherein seatbelts are detrimental (for example, in that movie where that bloke drove of a bridge) is like saying that a highly effective drug is not beneficial becauise 1 in 1000000 people have an allergic reaction to it. But thatnks for putting your views into perspective for us.

Underscore

Always Tyred wrote:

Is there any actual evidence of risk compensation?

Is there any actual evidence that rotational brain injuries are more prevelant when wearing a helmet?

Just asking, given that people seem to be placing a lot of stock in the notions.

According to wikipedia, there has been some research into both Risk Compensation and Rotational Injury due to wearing a bicycle helmet. However, it would seem like the amount of study has not been a significant as that investigating helmet effectiveness in general.

However, I think that the point is not whether, and to what extent, these aspects are the actual reason why helmet use does not seem to be obviously correlated with reduced head injuries but rather that they are merely two possible reasons why the "common sense" view that helmets must make you safer does not seem to be born out in current studies.

_

Underscore

dondare wrote:

I don't know if it's risk compensation but it does seem to me that cyclists who wear helmets need them more than cyclists who don't.

Actually one study apparently found that there was a correlation between helmet use and not just a reduction in head injuries but also with a reduction in bodily injuries too. This was put down to those choosing to wear helmets either being more competent or more safety-concious cyclists. Once the figures were normalised for lower limb injuries, the correlation between helmet use and reduced head injuries disappeared...

_

mr_poll

KiwiMike wrote:

rjsterry wrote:

@KiwiMike: As you are such a strong advocate of science over anecdote, you should know that extrapolating personal behaviour from general studies of population-wide trends is pretty risky. A correlation is not the same as a causative link. Your argument seems to be enforced helmet-wearing didn't reduce the national KSI rate, therefore helmets for everyday cycling are useless or worse. A bit of a leap wouldn't you agree?

No, not at all. You need an adequate sample size/duration to draw a valid conclusion from. I call 3m people over 20 year adequate. NZ has proved unequivocally that helmets_don't_work. Any incidents where you could explicitly prove that a difference was made by wearing one (virtually impossible to do) would fall into the margin of error. If you could come up with a sufficient number of like incidents, they would become statistically significant and the overall picture would be different. But it ain't.

Mike

Hmmm think we all need to get our scientific arguments sorted here - Mike is quite right you do need an adequate sample size to draw a valid conclusion. Its like me and my mate both 34 dont like marmite therefore all 34 old white males in the Uk dont like marmite (to be honest no one should its the devils food but thats a different thread where no one will agree but pages of debate will ensue).
However Mike you also need to understand that to make the point you are that you have to factor in (or out) other extraneous variables. For instance if as you say over 20 years the number of incidents resulting in non fatalities has not decreased this may have nothing to do with helmets - variables which may have masked a decrease (indicating a positive impact of helmets) would be an increase in population - more ppl more riders on the road / an increase in riding - more riders / decrease in cost of bikes - more bikes more riders / perception in government that helmets work therefore decrease in spend on safe zones and paths for cyclists - more riders on roads increase chance of accident with motor vehicle. I could go on and to be honest you can argue the other way which make figures staying the same even worse for the pro helmet lobby.
With any research the devil is in the detail, taking a headline doesnt do it justice - see MMR scare in UK for proof of that.

KiwiMike

Always Tyred wrote:

Are you arguing against helmet use, or compulsory helmet use?

Compulsion, absolutely. Discretionary use for day to day cycling, yes, but acknowledging that it's an individual's right to choose.

Always Tyred wrote:

Are you arguing that road cycling is so risky that there is no sense in wearing a piece of expanded polystyrene, or that road cycling is so safe as to render it pointless?

<leftfield...whap!> er, the latter. As is clearly backed up by all the evidence, assuming you don't bother wearing one in the bath/car as well.

Always Tyred wrote:

Oh, and by the way, it doesn't help your case to equate seatbelt use to helmet use. To point to scenarios wherein seatbelts are detrimental (for example, in that movie where that bloke drove of a bridge) is like saying that a highly effective drug is not beneficial becauise 1 in 1000000 people have an allergic reaction to it. But thatnks for putting your views into perspective for us.

Wow, that's one huge missed point there. The seatbelt analogy is for folk who argue you must wear a helmet because my mate fell off his bike and woulda died - ignoring the population-level stats that say they make zip difference overall. Population-level seatbelt stats prove they are A Good Thing. Yet I have a relative would would have died had she been wearing one. Your argument to wear a helmet because of your mate is as valid as my argument not to wear a seatbelt 'cos of my mum. i.e. not at all.

(Gaa! sucked back into the unreality vortex that is the tail-end of helmet threads. Must....resist...will to live...draining...)