'Compulsory cycle helmets' - bbc.co.uk article

mrbodly

Cyclists seem to be a very popular topic for the BBC at the mo.

Just spotted this article:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-12333783

gbsahne001

so that'll mean the demise of the Boris bike scheme then.

_Brun_

Fantastic. Not done this for a while have we?

hatbeard

Perhaps making cycle helmets compulsory will make people feel safer about taking up cycling?

what an absolute load of b*ll*cks. If someones worried about cycling they'd just put a helmet on anyways, how does legislation make it any 'safer' for anyone other than the person being forced to wear a helmet. it's not like making all cyclists wear helmets is going to stop accidents is it.

iPete

I'm not entering into a helmet debate but its at least an article with some positives towards cycling, with or without a helmet.

However, experts say the health benefits of cycling far outweigh the risks by a factor of around twenty to one.

gaz545

I've always heard that the scull requires more force to break than a helmet. does know of any stats of this?

greg66_tri_v2.0

gaz545 wrote:

I've always heard that the scull requires more force to break than a helmet. does know of any stats of this?

A scull:

A helmet:

Hard to say, really.

King Kong in the scull and Jaws in the helmet?

trtimothy

yeah I've heard that as well....but I've also heard that breaking a helmet and then breaking your skull is harder than just your skull.

TuckerUK

Cycling helmts? Has the ground got harder then, or maybe heads softer...

jonginge

What we need is some melons to drop from a great height to see what happens. Yeah!

greg66_tri_v2.0

JonGinge wrote:

What we need is some melons to drop from a great height to see what happens. Yeah!

Yeessss...

What I don't recommend is that you google images "melons", with safesearch off.

No sirree. No way, no how, no sir. Don't do it. At all.

Not even a little bit.

Kieran_Burns

trtimothy wrote:

yeah I've heard that as well....but I've also heard that breaking a helmet and then breaking your skull is harder than just your skull.

as far as breaking the skull, or impact damage is concerned, it's all to do with deceleration. The helmet is meant to mitigate the impact of the head on the ground by crumpling - this increases the time of impact and therefore lowers the G force of the deceleration

Modern helmets are compressed polystyrene inside a hard shell, there is not a lot of movement available here so how much deceleration do you think they're going to provide?

They are designed to withstand an impact equivalent to falling off a bike: very low speed impacts - certainly nothing like the ones experienced in vehicle collisions.

I wear one to have something to hang my camera off and to mitigate scraping on the ground, not to ever protect from a broken skull

CiB

It's started hasn't it. The steady drip-drip of compulsion; first off - 'no need for compulsory helmet-wearing', then 'no plans to introduce it', then 'Northern Ireland introduces a bill to implement it', then 'rest of UK should follow suit', then 'bang - no helmet? 50 quid mate'.

I don't care about the arguments for & against. If you want to wear one, great, and I hope you never have to be grateful for wearing one. But compulsion is a sledgehammer to a nut - just where is the avalanche of serious head injuries that would be prevented by everyone being forced into a helmet? Not scrapes & bumps, but serious injuries. Anecdotes not wanted thanks. It's population-sized statistical analysis that counts, not some bloke in a pub who knows he'd be dead if not for his helmet and can't wait to tell everyone.

On the same BBC page there's a link to a story of a boy dying in a rugby match. Presumably for this unusual occurrence the BMA and all the others who can't wait to legislate everything that we do out of existence, there will also be a call to ban rugby without full protective body gear. That's the logic of such a pointless piece of legislation - that no matter how small the risk there must be a law to force us all to do something that apparently most of us do anyway. And there'll be the 'if it saves just one life it's worth it' cry, from those who can't accept that life isn't about making everything as safe as possible, removing any and every potential risk in everyday activities. Someone somewhere can't wait to poke his nose in and legislate something else out of our lives - the freedom to pop down the shops, to cycle 20 miles along empty country lanes, to scoot to church on a Sunday morning, to decide to pick the kids up from school by bike instead of car, all this has to be deemed to be too dangerous to do without safety equipment, legislated by those who just can't or won't accept that cycling is safe.

Bleedin nazis.
<rant/>

Kieran_Burns

Just for record CiB +1

Ummm and the NI assembly has only voted to put it to committee to investigate further NOT to introduce it.

I read through the transcript of the debate and I suggest people do as well - it makes for very interesting reading. The counter arguments were eloquently put and it seems that emotion rather than logic carried the vote (by 1 vote please note)

mrbodly

The decision to wear or not wear should be down to the individual. The choice you make either way will have no impact on anyone else's safety whatsoever.

I choose to wear a helmet.

ride_whenever

For the record I think a scull is harder to break than a helmet, for a start you can repair sculls...

Helmet compulsion is a PITA, complete waste of time and a classic example of listening to so-called experts who haven't the foggiest. The BMA are great at some things, but for stuff where they clearly haven't looked at any data whatsoever and simply assumed that it makes things safer....

On another note, I HATE being asked if I was wearing a helmet when admitted to hospital. WTF has that got to do with anything, I came in needing stitches to put my knee back together not deal with a head injury.

On yet another note, how do the hard-shell helmets work with passing the standards? They seem to have significantly less polystyrene in them, so how do they achieve the required deceleration? Could the same thing be done with D3O as that would be much more fun than a cycling helmet?

The Rookie

Personally I'm in favour of making helmets compulsary, in much the same way s seatbelts and motorbike helmets are, I see it as a sensible way to reduce a risk factor that is both proportional and not penal, but tht is just my view.

All the evidence suggests that helmet use reduces the risk of death or serious injury to cyclists involved in an accident, it will of course not remove all risk of injury, and in some cases it will not help at all, much like seatbelts, however as it does not appear to increase any risk (caveat that neck injury risk has been shown to be slightly increased when heavier helmets were the norm) then wearing them seems sensible.

Simon

CiB

KB - I did read it through and it was interesting to see the number of speakers who opposed its passage through to the next stage (which is what I tried to imply in my bit before). Interesting too was that a lot of the opposition was based around the reality & practicality of enforcement, not the necessity or otherwise of such a law.

Sadly I can't see it not becoming law in NI - it requires too many parties to publicly admit that there is a risk and that risk is worth loading onto a 3rd party - a cyclist. No matter how benign the intentions of those who oppose the law, I rather suspect that the "won't someone think of the children' brigade will win the day. And once they have it there, and Jersey has a similar law, how long before the mainland has it too, to 'prevent confusion' - that beloved phrase of the semi-aware.

Finally - I keep seeing Canada used as a justifcation for compulsion on the basis that cycle use didn't drop perceptibly ost-compulsion. Is it me or was that the law that was introduced but never actually enforced? I'll get me Google out and have a check.

notsoblue

I find it tragically hilarious that there are comments on that article from people demanding that cyclists should also have to pay road tax.

drawblood

How about if you injure your head with a helmet you get NHS treatment for free and without a helmet, you pay??

Kieran_Burns

The Beginner wrote:

Personally I'm in favour of making helmets compulsary, in much the same way s seatbelts and motorbike helmets are, I see it as a sensible way to reduce a risk factor that is both proportional and not penal, but tht is just my view.

All the evidence suggests that helmet use reduces the risk of death or serious injury to cyclists involved in an accident, it will of course not remove all risk of injury, and in some cases it will not help at all, much like seatbelts, however as it does not appear to increase any risk (caveat that neck injury risk has been shown to be slightly increased when heavier helmets were the norm) then wearing them seems sensible.

Simon

Your logic being: it can't do any harm to make people wear them, so we should force them to wear them?

Run that piece of abdication of personal responsibility past me again?

greg66_tri_v2.0

CiB wrote:

On the same BBC page there's a link to a story of a boy dying in a rugby match. Presumably for this unusual occurrence the BMA and all the others who can't wait to legislate everything that we do out of existence, there will also be a call to ban rugby without full protective body gear.

I think - but am not 100% - the boat has sailed on that one a bit already, in that scrums are not contested at schoolboy level these days. If that is true, God knows how you're supposed to learn all of a sudden how to scrummage when you get to senior levels.

And you can see that RU and RL players all wear some form of shoulder/upper body protection these days.

The body gear thing becomes a vicious circle: look at American football. They need protection now to protect themselves from the hits they get from the other side's protective helmets.


But I think you're right when you say "it's started". It's not difficult to reel of a list of such things that were once optional: seatbelts in the front of cars, seatbelts in the rear of cars, motorcycle helmets, daytime running lights for motor cycles, daytime running lights for new cars (due in this or next year, IIRC), dum-de-dumdy-dum. It will happen. It's just a matter of when.

ride_whenever

drawblood wrote:

How about if you injure your head with a helmet you get NHS treatment for free and without a helmet, you pay??

And whilst we're at it why don't we stop treating anyone who has done anything to contribute to their condition prompting hospitalisation? Drunks, druggies, stupid people...

In fact why bother treating anything at all, you'd totally be able to justify it. Would certainly solve the debt problem if we privatised healthcare entirely.

/rage

tailwindhome

It's not still yesterday, it is?


@ CIB It is now law in NI, with a 3 year kinda breaking in period


ETA That may not be accurate

Kieran_Burns

TailWindHome wrote:

It's not still yesterday, it is?


@ CIB It is now law in NI, with a 3 year kinda breaking in period

TWH - this is not true. Read the articles:

http://road.cc/content/news/30354-north ... -law-today for example

Members of the Northern Ireland Assembly have backed by two votes a private member's bill that is seeking to make it compulsory to wear bike helmets in the province. Although the bill does need to go through further stages of the legislative process, the result of yesterday's vote means that it has negotiated a sigificant obstacle.

tailwindhome

Ironically I was too busy having a knee jerk reaction to read the detail.

ndru

The Beginner wrote:

Personally I'm in favour of making helmets compulsary, in much the same way s seatbelts and motorbike helmets are, I see it as a sensible way to reduce a risk factor that is both proportional and not penal, but tht is just my view.

All the evidence suggests that helmet use reduces the risk of death or serious injury to cyclists involved in an accident, it will of course not remove all risk of injury, and in some cases it will not help at all, much like seatbelts, however as it does not appear to increase any risk (caveat that neck injury risk has been shown to be slightly increased when heavier helmets were the norm) then wearing them seems sensible.

Simon

I understand your view - how does non-compulsion stop you from wearing a helmet? Why - if it's your opinion - should it be forced on other people? How is it that there's a push towards protecting vulnerable road users by using safety gear and at the same time there's a tendency to make cars more dangerous to peds and cyclists during a collision?
What do you think minimizes risk more - a seatbelt or a spike in the driving wheel? Which makes people more careful and focused?
If a car drives into you and causes injury it's not your fault but the drivers, how is it then that you have to protect yourself from other's carlessness.

walkingbootweather

Kieran_Burns wrote:

The Beginner wrote:

Personally I'm in favour of making helmets compulsary, in much the same way s seatbelts and motorbike helmets are, I see it as a sensible way to reduce a risk factor that is both proportional and not penal, but tht is just my view.

All the evidence suggests that helmet use reduces the risk of death or serious injury to cyclists involved in an accident, it will of course not remove all risk of injury, and in some cases it will not help at all, much like seatbelts, however as it does not appear to increase any risk (caveat that neck injury risk has been shown to be slightly increased when heavier helmets were the norm) then wearing them seems sensible.

Simon

Your logic being: it can't do any harm to make people wear them, so we should force them to wear them?

Run that piece of abdication of personal responsibility past me again?

Wearing helmets may reduce the incidence of cycle related injuries.

Banning short skirts may reduce the incidence of rape.

Compulsory burquas are the way to go I reckon.

For the avoidance of doubt I usually wear a helmet when cycling and rarely wear a short skirt whether I’m cycling or not.

whyamihere

I hope that if it is brought over to the mainland, it's not enforced very strongly. Otherwise, I'll be permanently skint from paying fines...

rjsterry

Perversely, I think I'd stop wearing mine if such a law were introduced.

Kieran_Burns

It's a dumb idea anyway - how the hell is it going to be enforced? They can't stop people using the phone while driving and nearer home they can't stop RLJing and cycling on the pavement.

Dumb, unenforceable and pointless