Mastodawn

😀🚲Jun 19, 2023

Never let your government get away with claiming that #bikeHelmets are "the first rule of bike safety".

Rule number one is infrastructure, and the 2nd is air+brakes+chain mechanical soundness of the bike, upright geometry of the bike, traffic awareness, ride with fingers on your brake levers and having practiced emergency stops, twenty is plenty... Helmets are for stunts or a footnote to "don't fall on your head" rule that applies to walking moreso than biking.

Kriky Jun 19, 2023

@enobacon being an emergency doctor I saw and treated too many people riding a bicycle without helmet suffering cranial hemorrhages to approve your statement.
I enjoy riding my bike and it has to be in a good shape- no question about that. I ride more than 400 miles a month and I never, never ride without a helmet and I am not a stuntman. I'm a commuter. I like my brain and I want it to be safe.
Just wear a helmet, it really makes sense.

@kriky not in cars though? What doesn't make sense, is governments using anecdotes and biased samples like yours to absolve themselves of the responsibility for infrastructure. That kind of helmet encouragement and/or mandate also fails to protect people from sedentary diseases or the respiratory impacts of traffic emissions.

Kriky Jun 19, 2023

@enobacon where I live, there is no helmet mandate for cyclists. But there is a seatbelt mandate for car drivers. The kinetics in case of an accident is very different.

You're free to ride your bicycle without a helmet. It's just a stupid decision, that's my point. You're right, that there is plenty to do for the safety of cyclists but denying the fact, that helmets safe lives won't make your point more credible.

😀🚲Jun 19, 2023

@kriky it's not a well-proven fact that helmets prevent more harm than they cause, even in terms of my personal decision to wear one, and ER studies or anecdotes don't change that. They do severely muddy the debate about public health policy though.

Kriky Jun 19, 2023

@enobacon science denial?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0001457518301301

😀🚲Jun 19, 2023

@kriky first sentence of the abstract ends "among crash involved cyclists." 🙃

Kriky Jun 19, 2023

@enobacon yeah, it's a meta-analysis, so let's just read the first sentence.

😀🚲Jun 19, 2023

@kriky I've already been through enough of that article years ago, and it's not "science denial" for me to point out that it is very much not a scientific study of the health effects of helmet-oriented messaging vs placing stuff in the street to discourage speeding cars.

Kriky Jun 19, 2023

@enobacon your point was "it's not a well-proven fact that helmets prevent more harm than they cause" and that's wrong (or science denial).

Why do you insist on doing just one thing? Vision zero does include a lot of small or large interventions to enhance the safety of cyclists. So, let's decelerate cars AND wear a helmet.

😀🚲Jun 20, 2023

@kriky you're basically proving my original point that too many people focus too much on helmets to the exclusion of actually effective policy.

Kriky Jun 20, 2023

@enobacon you prefer to compare apples and oranges. In my eyes a fruitless discussion.

😀🚲Jun 20, 2023

@kriky the tests with watermelons are fun and fruity, but maybe the practical use is safely carrying produce home from the grocery store

Stephan Eggermont Jun 21, 2023

@kriky @enobacon the conclusion is not supported by the studies. It is just bad science, in need of retraction

Kriky Jun 21, 2023

@StOnSoftware just like dozens of other studies which don't support your point of view?

Probably one of the latest:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-35728-x

"The empirical evidence based on the real-world hospital and police data as well as biomechanical studies confirms that wearing a helmet while cycling is beneficial, regardless of age and crash severity, in collisions with others or not."

Effectiveness of bicycle helmets and injury prevention: a systematic review of meta-analyses - Scientific Reports

To mitigate the risk of injuries, many countries recommend bicycle helmets. The current paper seeks to examine the effectiveness of bicycle helmets by performing a systematic review focusing on meta-analyses. First, the current paper explores the findings of studies that employ meta-analyses using bicycle crash data. Second, the results are discussed considering the findings from research analyzing bicycle helmet effectiveness in a laboratory using simulation, and then are complemented with key methodological papers that address cycling and the overall factors contributing to the injury severity. The examined literature confirms that wearing a helmet while cycling is beneficial, regardless of age, crash severity, or crash type. The relative benefit is found to be higher in high-risk situations and when cycling on shared roads and particularly preventing severe head injuries. The results from the studies performed in laboratories also suggest that the shape and size of the head itself play a role in the protective effects of helmets. However, concerns regarding the equitability of the test conditions were found as all reviewed studies used a fifty-percentile male head and body forms. Lastly, the paper discusses the literature findings in a broader societal context.

Nature

Stephan Eggermont Jun 22, 2023

@kriky garbage in, garbage out. Repeating bad science does not improve it. Nor does making a meta-analysis of it.

Kriky Jun 22, 2023

@StOnSoftware science denial in a nutshell. If it doesn't support my opinion, it has to be bad science.

Stephan Eggermont Jun 22, 2023

@kriky no, just understanding what conclusions an experiment setup supports. And noticing that the researchers don’t speak up about the limitations to the work that they have done.

Kriky Jun 22, 2023

@StOnSoftware they do, read the study. And you're free to provide evidence which supports your point of view. If not, you're just presenting an uninformed opinion.

Stephan Eggermont Jun 22, 2023

@kriky not adressing the points mentioned on e.g. https://www.cyclehelmets.org/0.html and https://how-sen.com/journal/2014/2/bike-helmets nearly ten years later makes it bad science.

Cycle helmets: an international resource

Cycle helmets: an international resource

Kriky Jun 23, 2023

@StOnSoftware your "sources" aren't peer reviewed or published in a scientific way.

The group of hobby scientists have a political agenda to oppose a helmet mandate in Australia which makes it highly dubious.

The second reference starts with wrong assumptions: he quotes a study from 1978 (?) and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001457505001363 concluding that pedestrians are more at risk of a brain injury than cyclists using the TOTAL number which is nonsense.
If you want to discuss, you should refer to valid data.

Stephan Eggermont Jun 23, 2023

@kriky no I don’t. I only have to point out that the researchers make claims that are not supported by their observations. The claims show that the researchers are clueless about safety engineering. In my own field we’ve seen the same thing happening with claims on type systems. Measuring what is easy to measure and ignoring the bias that that creates. I acknowledge it is difficult to avoid that, and to eliminate effects caused by historic developments (inc. SUVs and eBike usage)

Kriky Jun 23, 2023

@StOnSoftware if you don't see the need to refer to valid data, or to show, which claim you think isn't well proofed. If you even refrain from seeing the actual flaws in the "sources" you provide, you are just uttering your opinion. Thanks for this. But no basis for a discussion.

Stephan Eggermont Jun 23, 2023

@kriky I agree there are systematic flaws in those too. But I don’t need more data if the approach is wrong

Stephan Eggermont Jun 21, 2023

@kriky @enobacon but it is not at all a stupid decision. The risk is far lower than me hurting my head in the shower, or when driving a car. The cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands is perfectly fine, and for my daily biking there is zero advantage to wearing one.