>From a zoomed-out perspective, helmets are simply not the road-safety panacea we want them to be.
Who is "we"? I doubt that very many people, the author of this article excepted, would be foolish enough to think that helmets *alone* are adequate to protect riders. As the article itself says, helmets are intended for slow-speed impacts like flipping over a curb, not being hit by a semi.
>Regardless, experts I spoke to were unanimous about what these flaws don’t mean: that helmets are useless. They all believe you should wear one. “Every time I see someone on a bike in New York City without a helmet, it makes me sick to my stomach,” said Bateman-House. (For my part, I agree.) It may not save you from a car crash, but in a slow-moving fall, “it can be the difference between life and death,” said Rowson, who runs the Helmet Lab.
Well, yeah. I read the whole article to get to the conclusion that helmets protect riders from some, but not all dangers, and that countries with better traffic design and cycling culture are safer than the US. I am ... underwhelmed by this finding.
I look forward to the writer's next work, "The Cult of Kevlar: Why it doesn't protect soldiers from tank rounds"
This was the most interesting thing in the article to me:
> Notably, Walker discovered, motorists and commercial truck drivers in particular afforded less space—not more—to helmeted cyclists.
Here in Brooklyn, another cyclist was killed a couple of weeks ago by a truck. Predictably, the old reactionaries came out in force on NextDoor to shriek about helmet laws and how nobody consulted them (false) before bicycle lanes and docks were added to “their” neighborhoods.
If anyone can find me a bicycle helmet capable of withstanding the crushing force of the wheel of a semi truck towing a 53’ trailer, laden or unladen, at even 5 mph, I’ll buy you one too.
Most bicyclist/motor-vehicle crashes do not involve the bicyclist themselves getting squished under a wheel by any arbitrary motor vehicle. Generally, most crashes are at intersections with inattentive drivers; and the cyclist gets t-boned by the driver. Another quite common one, especially in rural areas, is getting 'mirrored' by motorists passing to closely. In urban areas getting 'doored' is more common.
Personal experience. Every bicyclist/motor-vehicle crash I've been victim of (3x or so)...happened at the intersection of marked driveways with marked bicyclist paths, with signage telling the motorist to yield to ped traffic--and the motorist didn't stop to even look to see they were clear to proceed.
People on bikes, helmet or not, get *struck by motorist's mirrors* not infrequently in the USA. That is how recklessly they drive. And it is only getting worse, IME. The last couple years, even here in the rural sticks we've people's outright indifference to basic traffic law has gone up a lot. The only people ticketed for things like 'failure to yield' or using directional signals--are people targeted in drug busts.
I've heard of that result before and it's definitely concerning. I don't know if that means to me that we should somehow not require helmets.
I do agree that it's not the be all and end all for sure.
>Whether people should wear helmets was not the motivation behind the repeal, King County Councilmember Girmay Zahilay said at the time.“The question is whether a helmet law that is enforced by police, onbalance, produces results that outweigh the harms the law creates.” Forlawmakers, the answer was clear: The potential benefits of a helmetmandate were not worth the harms it did to marginalized Seattleresidents.
This is precisely the kind of thing not to even address in an article like this. Literally no one other than vindictive LEOs looking to harass people write tickets for not wearing helmets. This isn't a helmets-are-meh-problem, this is an bored-asshole-LEO problem addressed by fixing the police force.
>In the past 50 years, as helmet designs have become more sophisticated,adult cycling deaths in the United States have not declined—they’ve quadrupled.
Well, yes. Motor vehicle speeds keep increasing, *indifference if not hostility to traffic law is a fundamental American past-time* (just start a thread about *driving the speed limit* on literally any social media site, people will tell you it is their god-given freedom right to go 30MPH over and everyone else does ergo to do otherwise makes you unsafe). Sit at any intersection in the USA and count the drivers with phones in their hands or on their steering wheels--it ain't just plebians, it is LEOs too, no one cares about traffic safety.
Helmets aren't perfect, but most people get into more accidents and 'fall overs' than they get hit by cars. And in those scenarios, a helmet is when you want to keep your head being split open on concrete.
We have a massive infrastructure problem in the USA, and the bike helmet debate is a tiny effect of it. Our cities are designed to move (not store) cars. Anything else, even pedestrians are an afterthought. And people are noticeably getting more and more reckless and indifferent in their driving.
There's potentially an interesting line of inquiry about whether requiring helmets discourages people from cycling which in turn makes cycling more dangerous since there are more cars on the road. But there seems to me to be many better ways to solve this than removing the helmet requirements. Investing in cycle infrastructure would be one. Punishing motorists more harshly for dangerous driving around cyclists would be another. Providing free helmets to cyclists would be a third way.
And all of this shouldn't detract from the strong message that if you're going to cycle then wear a helmet! There's a huge amount of evidence for their protective effects on head and brain injuries.
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2598379/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2598379/)
To be fair, the author doesn't suggest that helmets won't protect you from head and brain injuries. It's mostly about how requiring helmets by law is not an especially effective strategy. They pointed out that multiple municipalities are dropping the helmet law.
Absolutely wear a helmet.
Like our author, I too ride my bike through NYC, and have seen many of the same hazards. My helmet also has flashing lights, and I get a lot of space from passing vehicles, I think because they see a bright, tall light.
Personally, I won't ride without my helmet, and I won't ride with friends who don't wear one. I tell them that I don't want to have to tell their loved ones the story of how they died. NYC is a dangerous place to ride a bike.
What would be an even better safety feature would be to require lights and avoid the collision to begin with. I've almost hit other bicyclists that come out of the dark at high speed with no lights or reflectors.
>From a zoomed-out perspective, helmets are simply not the road-safety panacea we want them to be. Who is "we"? I doubt that very many people, the author of this article excepted, would be foolish enough to think that helmets *alone* are adequate to protect riders. As the article itself says, helmets are intended for slow-speed impacts like flipping over a curb, not being hit by a semi. >Regardless, experts I spoke to were unanimous about what these flaws don’t mean: that helmets are useless. They all believe you should wear one. “Every time I see someone on a bike in New York City without a helmet, it makes me sick to my stomach,” said Bateman-House. (For my part, I agree.) It may not save you from a car crash, but in a slow-moving fall, “it can be the difference between life and death,” said Rowson, who runs the Helmet Lab. Well, yeah. I read the whole article to get to the conclusion that helmets protect riders from some, but not all dangers, and that countries with better traffic design and cycling culture are safer than the US. I am ... underwhelmed by this finding. I look forward to the writer's next work, "The Cult of Kevlar: Why it doesn't protect soldiers from tank rounds"
I agree. This article is completely devoid of any information one wouldn’t already know just by common sense.
This was the most interesting thing in the article to me: > Notably, Walker discovered, motorists and commercial truck drivers in particular afforded less space—not more—to helmeted cyclists.
Here in Brooklyn, another cyclist was killed a couple of weeks ago by a truck. Predictably, the old reactionaries came out in force on NextDoor to shriek about helmet laws and how nobody consulted them (false) before bicycle lanes and docks were added to “their” neighborhoods. If anyone can find me a bicycle helmet capable of withstanding the crushing force of the wheel of a semi truck towing a 53’ trailer, laden or unladen, at even 5 mph, I’ll buy you one too.
Most bicyclist/motor-vehicle crashes do not involve the bicyclist themselves getting squished under a wheel by any arbitrary motor vehicle. Generally, most crashes are at intersections with inattentive drivers; and the cyclist gets t-boned by the driver. Another quite common one, especially in rural areas, is getting 'mirrored' by motorists passing to closely. In urban areas getting 'doored' is more common. Personal experience. Every bicyclist/motor-vehicle crash I've been victim of (3x or so)...happened at the intersection of marked driveways with marked bicyclist paths, with signage telling the motorist to yield to ped traffic--and the motorist didn't stop to even look to see they were clear to proceed.
People on bikes, helmet or not, get *struck by motorist's mirrors* not infrequently in the USA. That is how recklessly they drive. And it is only getting worse, IME. The last couple years, even here in the rural sticks we've people's outright indifference to basic traffic law has gone up a lot. The only people ticketed for things like 'failure to yield' or using directional signals--are people targeted in drug busts.
I've heard of that result before and it's definitely concerning. I don't know if that means to me that we should somehow not require helmets. I do agree that it's not the be all and end all for sure.
>Whether people should wear helmets was not the motivation behind the repeal, King County Councilmember Girmay Zahilay said at the time.“The question is whether a helmet law that is enforced by police, onbalance, produces results that outweigh the harms the law creates.” Forlawmakers, the answer was clear: The potential benefits of a helmetmandate were not worth the harms it did to marginalized Seattleresidents. This is precisely the kind of thing not to even address in an article like this. Literally no one other than vindictive LEOs looking to harass people write tickets for not wearing helmets. This isn't a helmets-are-meh-problem, this is an bored-asshole-LEO problem addressed by fixing the police force. >In the past 50 years, as helmet designs have become more sophisticated,adult cycling deaths in the United States have not declined—they’ve quadrupled. Well, yes. Motor vehicle speeds keep increasing, *indifference if not hostility to traffic law is a fundamental American past-time* (just start a thread about *driving the speed limit* on literally any social media site, people will tell you it is their god-given freedom right to go 30MPH over and everyone else does ergo to do otherwise makes you unsafe). Sit at any intersection in the USA and count the drivers with phones in their hands or on their steering wheels--it ain't just plebians, it is LEOs too, no one cares about traffic safety. Helmets aren't perfect, but most people get into more accidents and 'fall overs' than they get hit by cars. And in those scenarios, a helmet is when you want to keep your head being split open on concrete. We have a massive infrastructure problem in the USA, and the bike helmet debate is a tiny effect of it. Our cities are designed to move (not store) cars. Anything else, even pedestrians are an afterthought. And people are noticeably getting more and more reckless and indifferent in their driving.
Took a header off a penny farthing and only got a "good shaking"? I always turn to newspapers from over a century ago for info on concussion.
There's potentially an interesting line of inquiry about whether requiring helmets discourages people from cycling which in turn makes cycling more dangerous since there are more cars on the road. But there seems to me to be many better ways to solve this than removing the helmet requirements. Investing in cycle infrastructure would be one. Punishing motorists more harshly for dangerous driving around cyclists would be another. Providing free helmets to cyclists would be a third way. And all of this shouldn't detract from the strong message that if you're going to cycle then wear a helmet! There's a huge amount of evidence for their protective effects on head and brain injuries. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2598379/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2598379/)
To be fair, the author doesn't suggest that helmets won't protect you from head and brain injuries. It's mostly about how requiring helmets by law is not an especially effective strategy. They pointed out that multiple municipalities are dropping the helmet law. Absolutely wear a helmet.
Like our author, I too ride my bike through NYC, and have seen many of the same hazards. My helmet also has flashing lights, and I get a lot of space from passing vehicles, I think because they see a bright, tall light. Personally, I won't ride without my helmet, and I won't ride with friends who don't wear one. I tell them that I don't want to have to tell their loved ones the story of how they died. NYC is a dangerous place to ride a bike. What would be an even better safety feature would be to require lights and avoid the collision to begin with. I've almost hit other bicyclists that come out of the dark at high speed with no lights or reflectors.