Helmet Debate

In the Netherlands, bicycle paths often are mandatory - always when they run alongside fast roads. Cyclists simply are not allowed on such roads (oversized bicycles, like the old cargo bicycles tradesmen often used, excepted). Though, a dutch road bicyclist group was trying to get this changed. Other groups, e.g. general cyclists and pedestrians, back them, as they don't like fast pelotons coming past on paths either. I think the situation is different in Belgium. There they have some kind of exception for pelotons of roadies, to allow them on many roads, I vaguely recall.

However, there are still plenty of slow, country roads and very wide paths for roadies. Just as how in the UK you might have to endure 30 to 60 mins of awful cycling on roads with fast, scary, motor traffic to get to the nice quiet country roads, in the Netherlands the roadie might have to cycle 30 mins on bicycle paths, dodging slow granny cyclists, in order to get to the nice open country roads.

So the situation in the Netherlands is still *much* better than in the UK, even for a roadie. It's certainly much, much, much better for their children, wives, friends, etc. It's just tragically fascinating that there are still cyclists in the UK who prefer that cycling be confined to 1% odd of the abnormally confident, who would prefer that their children don some polysterene before being sent out into 30 to 40mph car traffic. Indeed, if they even allow their children to cycle much at all.

im a roadie. I dont want no bike path. What would I be called then?! Pathie? No. Bikes are for roads, hence the name road bike.

"What is needed is a campaign which convinces other road users that cyclists have a legitimate right to be on the roads and for other road users to modify their behaviour to ensure the safety of all road users."
The place to look is, from my experience, Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden. I know from experience that bike safety in these countries is all about getting the drivers to take responsability around cyclists.
In Sweden, for instance, there were times when I was astounded at the deferentiality of drivers towards cyclists. I gather that Netherlands can be even more so but have not riden there enough.
It is important for the whole question of bicycle safety to learn from these countries.
Sweden, interestingly, has tried to encourage helmet use but the word from the people is that all that has happened since helmets became more popular is that bike speeds have increased and hand signaling, a staple of Swedish bike safety, has decreased.
After 4 trips to Sweden in a decade, I have observed for the first time cyclists wearing flouro jackets, a clear sign that cycling is being dangerised, no doubt by the increasing use of helmets.

I don't force anyone to wear a helmet. Children who would rather not wear a helmet can still come to school without a helmet. Our club does a lot of work on road awareness and expanding cycling experiences, improving children's cycling skills and ability to take to the roads.

Incidentally, sustrans work in our school and support our club and they insist on the wearing of helmets too.

Segregation is pie-in-the-sky, especially in the current economic climate. What is needed is a campaign which convinces other road users that cyclists have a legitimate right to be on the roads and for other road users to modify their behaviour to ensure the safety of all road users.

Jon Burrage: So you think cycling should be for the 1% of the population that is the confident & fast MAMIL brigade, and fsck every one else?

FWIW, I'm sometimes a MAMIL who likes to be able to speed along the road. Sometimes I'm a cyclist in normal clothes, just pottering along. I'd like to be able to do the latter with my family, Sadly, that's rare cause my wife doesn't feel safe cycling here in the UK, because of the lack of segregation.

Also, it's depressing when you meet UK cyclists who are actually happy with the sad state of cycling in the UK. Sometimes I think I should move back to the Netherlands.

I fell off the sofa last week, cracked my head on a chair and gave myself concussion...

(I wear a helmet for racing, don't for pottering about town. I like freedom of choice.)

If people dont want to wear one so be it, it's their choice and in this country of ours there still is personal choice as an option, however, can i just add this one point:

The UCI made pro and semi pro's wear helmets. People have said that they travel at greater speeds so the helmet is required as if they come off it's going to cause greater injury due to the speed etc.

With that in mind if your travelling slower (which will be 99.9999999% of us) the helmet will offer greater protection as the blow to your bonce wont be as hard.

No doubt people will disagree.

Anyone can come off a bike with no help from a car, pedestrian, other road user etc. Yes, yes we all get the 'freedom' argument but I simply dont understand why you would choose not to have the possibility of an extra layer of protection between your brain and the concrete.

The argument of segregation scares me, why should we ride on cycle paths and proper cycle routes etc - they wont always go where we need and I quite like riding on the road as is my right. Get a good helmet, light enough to not know you are wearing it and enjoy the ride.

Helmets are not proven to help you yah de yah but I would still wear one and I would still emplore others to. Ive seen plenty of experienced cyclists come off while not wearing helmets and be quite badly hurt, likewise Ive seen kids come off while wearing helmets and the helmets have been cracked in two. If the helmet wasnt there it may not have caused death but it would have caused much greater discomfort to the child - please explain why that is better (due to freedom to choose)

ALIHISGREAT: The "serious injury" part of KSI is defined in the road safety report, available at the link I gave. It is given on page 233 as:

"Serious injury: An injury for which a person is detained in hospital as an “in-patient”, or any of the following injuries whether or not they are detained in hospital: fractures, concussion, internal injuries, crushings, burns (excluding friction burns), severe cuts, severe general shock requiring medical treatment and injuries causing death 30 or more days after the accident. An injured casualty is recorded as seriously or slightly injured by the police on the basis of information available within a short time of the accident. This generally will not reflect the results of a medical examination, but may be influenced according to whether the casualty is hospitalised or not. Hospitalisation procedures will vary regionally."

See also pages 86 and 94 for discussion and comparison of different data-sets available. My understanding from the above is that the figures in the report use the police assessment - not categorisation from clinical data-sets.

paulfg42: I don't want to ban people from wearing helmets, if they really want to. However, I think people who, through some authority they have, force others to wear helmets then are damaging cycling participation rates, and hence are damaging the political impetus that would be needed for the *proven* cycling safety measures to be implemented - i.e. segregation through a comprehensive cycle path network. Hence such people are damaging both cycling safety in the long-term and public health overall. Those people may be doing so with the best of intentions, however my reading of the evidence makes me believe they are misguided - however sincere.

Honestly no offence intended with that, but that's my view.

As someone who works in the road sector and who sees a lot of data on crash statistics on a daily basis I'm convinced the pro-cycle helmet safety data is wafer thin. As a motorcyclist I'm glad to wear a helmet when riding my motorbike. But as a motorcyclist and qualified engineer, I also know the lightweigh plastic construction used in most shell-type bicycle helmets offers at best, minimal protection. I wear a road legal motorcycle MX lid when I'm racing my BMX and I know this does actually offer protection - got one for my son too. I ride on the road a lot and have locked a lot of road mile in 30+ years of serous cycling and for most of the cycle accidents I've seen (or close calls that I've had) a cycle helmet would offer little to no protection anyway. Crush injuries are the major cause of fatalities for cyclists and by a very, very long way - the DfT data is available.

As a Police officer i see quite a few nasty accidents involving cyclists, some with and some without helmets.

Speaking from a purely personal perspective i have never seen someone with a helmet suffer a bad head injury whereas those without have had some horrendous injuries.

Hear Hear.

Just make your own minds up.

But be sure to take all the evidence into account, for and against.

And do the right thing, whether it means your brains will be lying across the road or not, as long as it goes a little way in 'proving your point'.

Doctors told me that, given the speed of the impact, my other injuries and the damage to the helmet that I was lucky not to have suffered a very serious if not fatal head injury. I'm happy to trust their judgement.

All adults at the school bike club have to wear helmets too. You can argue all you like but there is an element of danger in cycling and schools would be crazy to permit children on trips out to cycle without a helmet. We also have to insist on seat belts on every bus trip on a commercial coach.

It seems some people who are anti-helmet would wish that no one wore a helmet, which is as daft a proposition as making helmets compulsory.

There are some obvious differences between pro and ordinary cycling, as I detailed.

Anyway, we have aggregate data over a large data set, from which to judge somewhat the risks in cycling on the roads (which covers a gamut of cyclist types, from those in ordinary clothes about town to those in lycra charging down A-roads as fast possible - potentially in competition on open public roads). From this we know:

Normalised to distance travelled, the risks of death or serious injury (KSI) are:

Pedestrian:
37 fatalities per billion miles
518 KSI per billion miles

Cyclist:
36 fatalities per billion miles
889 KSI per billion miles

Car occupants:
3 fatalities per billion miles
40 ksi per billion miles.

Motorcycle:
138 fatalities per billion miles
1775 KSI per billion miles

Based on distance travelled. Cycling doesn't significantly more dangerous than being a pedestrian. However, distance can be misleading. Different modes of transport have different speeds, can take place on different kinds of roads, and many journeys are not inter-changable with another mode of transport. A lot of road safety people seem to like to normalise to equivalent journeys, but I don't like this - it requires arbitrary guesses at what can and can not be considered comparable, and allows a great deal of selection bias to creep in. I prefer normalising to exposure time - it makes more sense to me to think about the risk of 1 hour of walking versus 1 hour of cycling. On that basis:

Pedestrian: assume 2 to 4mph average:
0.074 to 0.148 killed / million hours of exposure
1.036 to 2.072 KSI / Mhours of exposure

Cyclist: assume 9 to 18mph:
0.324 to 0.648 killed / Mhours of exposure
8.001 to 16.002 KSI / Mhours of exposure

car occupants: assume 30 to 60mph (DfT figures suggest average speeds are ~55mph):
0.090 to 0.180 killed / Mhours of exposure
1.200 to 2.400 KSI / Mhours of exposure

So, by this, cyclists are at a 4.37 times greater risk of death and 7.72 times greater risk of KSI than pedestrians, and 3.6 times fatality risk of car occupants, and 6.67 times greater KSI risk than car occupants. The speed estimates are likely too high for cyclists and close to spot on for car, so these are likely worst case, by a good amount. However, I can't find good data on population wide average speed.

That sounds bad, however remember these are tiny risks multiplied by a low number, so the resulting risk is still *tiny*! E.g. in order to suffer a KSI, even using the worst 16 KSI/Mhour figure, you would have to cycle 30 thousand hours to have a 50% chance of KSI, which is about 90 years of cycling for a high-mileage cyclist (6000 miles per year, every year for 90 years). This high-mileage, fast cyclist would have a 10% chance of KSI after about 18 years of cycling (6000 miles every year). Similarly, the fatality risk is 2314 years (6000 miles per year) to have a 50% chance of death, 462 years to get to a 10% chance, 46 years for a 1% chance.

So, cycling is 4 to 7 times more dangerous than being a pedestrian or a car driver - and I'm trying to be deliberately pessimistic in my assumptions. However, 4 to 7 times a *tiny* risk is *still* a **tiny** risk. You'd have to consistently put in a lot of miles, over a long period of time, before these risks would become uncomfortable in terms of KSI. And even then, I suspect the adverse consequences of trauma wouldn't affect your life for long, while the health benefits of a life full of cycling would add more than enough extra years to compensate!

For fatalities, the risks are incredibly low - even if you spent an entire life on the saddle on the road, it's still highly improbable that you would end up dead!

And of course, this is for the UK (2010), which - though fairly safe - is not the safest for the cycling. Subjectively, the experience from the Netherlands is in order to improve safety you have to make the *environment* safe (segregation) and encourage participation (which has political benefits). Helmets do not help with the latter.

Data source: http://www.dft.gov.uk/statistics/releases/road-accidents-and-safety-annu...

Why is everyone contradicting themselves, just because Pro Cyclists go faster, doesn't mean they have more accidents.

If it's ok for then to wear helmets, why don't you.

I think this argument should be postponed.

I agree that pro-cyclists are travelling at higher speeds in an environment that is more dangerous. My point was that the perception of cycling as requiring safety equipment is propagated by the images of Mark Cavendish or Bradley Wiggins wearing a helmet.

However, in a more 'dangerous' environment where accidents are more likely, and happen at higher speeds, and where accidents can be more serious the fact that helmet use is enforced to protect riders surely has some bearing on normal riders travelling at lower speeds. Surely helmets can only be more effective for everyday cycling?

Racing is different from ordinary road cycling. A peloton of pro-racers will cruise along at a speed that an average, ordinary cyclist couldn't even hope to reach if they tried to *sprint*. Next, cycling in a peloton or tight in line and at speed, has extra risks which are not present in ordinary cycling. Finally, when you're racing, you have a strong motivation to ignore risks and charge on - while in ordinary cycling there's no reason to take on unnecessary risk.

So pro-racing *could* be different from ordinary road-cycling, in terms of risks and benefits of helmets. Indeed, it would be very interesting to do an analysis of accidents in professional bicycle racing on closed-roads to see what effect helmets had - as it's a far more controlled environment than ordinary road cycling is. E.g. has the rate of serious head injuries and death decreased significantly since the introduction of helmets? Do pro-cyclists suffer much less concussion these days?

Ordinary cycling is very different from pro-cycling though.

double post.
This website is still the slowest about

"Helmets are uncool, but so are things like Bouyancy aids for sailing and watersports, HiViz for horse riding, hard hats for rock climbing, masks for sanding.."
All similar in principle
I don't wear a helmet climbing unless it's a mountain crag with lots of ledges and loose rock or somewhere where I feel someone else may lob a rock over. I don't wear a BA paddling in a canadian but did on white water where rocks are about. I don't wear high viz except commuting on my m/c in busy traffic. These things are, thank god, not yet compulsory or standard.
The chap who said he had been cyclng for 40 years does have a point. If that lorry wants you he will get you but experience helps you know when to pull over and when to get in the way.
Its up to the individual and to say otherwise in the big deal here..

If wearing anything wasn't dagerous, it wouldn't be called a Brain Bucket.

Probably the only reason the pros have to wear helmets is to satisfy the demands of the manufacturers, and if it brings money in, what do they care?

Helmets are uncool, but so are things like Bouyancy aids for sailing and watersports, HiViz for horse riding, hard hats for rock climbing, masks for sanding...

Loads of things are 'uncool' but I reckon it's way cooler to be Alive and Uncool than Dead and Cool.

Oh, and it's not like when you wear a helmet you take more risks than when you don't, that's just stoopid.

Surely wearing a helmet might reduce injury?
Im 52 and i feel 'naked' if i dont wear my tinlid for my rides - yet i use a MB for my workin' weekly commute to my place of work yet find it harder to wear a lid!!
Why?? Abuse from my workmates? I dunno
All i can say is although i feel safer wearing a lid i can appreciate it wont safe your skull being crushed!!
Funny how most reports i read about cycling fatalities usually state if the cyclist was/wasn't wearing a helmet
Whatever floats your boat - doesn't make you a worse/better rider than me if you do/don't wear a lid IMO
I just FEEL SAFER wearing one!!
Be safe