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.
Helmets optional makes sense for jogging and bicycling below 10 MPH where the risks are equivalent. I wish I could remember where I read that number. I wouldn't have remembered it except from a reasonably rigorous source.
Above 20 MPH is another story. I've taken two spills at speed and was glad I was helmeted in both cases. With each fall I learned another safety rule. For example, don't pretend you have aero bars on when you don't.
My approach is that I wear a helmet if I'm pushing the limit of my ability - in terms of speed, distance, terrain (for me that's winter riding in ice and snow. If I did mountain biking I'd use a helmet then too).
For cycling as a form of utilitarian transport about town, during the ~8 months when ice isn't a concern, I don't generally bother with a helmet.
@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.
@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.
@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."
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.
@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.
As an emergency physician, you presumably treated people who had been walking, swimming, climbing a ladder, or playing soccer without helmets, who suffered cranial hemorrhage as well. But I expect that for at least some of those activities you don't advocate helmets.
The question for me isn't just by how much a helmet would reduce the risk of cranial injury, but also how high it was to begin with.
The few studies I've been able to find that actually address the base rate of risk, leave me comfortable riding a bike for daily transport without a helmet.
From what I found, head trauma rate per hour of cycling seems to be a bit higher than walking, but the difference is less than the difference in speeds - meaning the rate per kilometer is a bit lower than that for walking.
I'd never discourage someone from wearing a helmet, but I'm OK accepting such a risk without PPE.
@enobacon I guess it’s a sign of the times that we now have substantial numbers of people questioning vaccines and wearing a bike helmet. Next up is hand washing I suppose.
Infrastructure, by all means, but when I pancaked a bike on a section of paved bike trail on some not-so-dry leaves at 25+ mph, I shattered my right collarbone, but my helmet saved me from at least a concussion. Complaining about “the gubmint” suggesting helmets are useful is just asinine to me.
@enobacon also whilst helmets may help alleviate, most injuries ain't head-first crashes but being driven over by assholes, getting doored by neglective persons or falling over something...
A helmet doesn't protect against lacerations on the extremities thaf ain't the head!
An idea worth spreading:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07o-TASvIxY
@enobacon It's worth noting that public health and individual health are not necessarily the same thing. I was making this point during the Mask Wars in 2020. The folks getting all persnickety about wearing the best masks were trying to improve individual health, which is fine. But the best outcome for public health getting the most possible people to wear any mask at all, and persnicketiness hinders this.
Of course that all became irrelevant when nearly everyone decided COVID was 'just a flu'.
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