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Chris Boardman at the Get Britain Cycling InquiryChris Boardman: "Helmets not even in top 10 of things that keep cycling safe"
British Cycling policy advisor Chris Boardman says it’s time for the cycling community to put the debate about mandatory cycle helmets to bed and get across the message that helmet use is one of the least important cycling safety measures.
Even talking about making helmets mandatory “massively puts people off” cycling, Boardman said, and likened the culture of helmet use among keen cyclists to people wearing body armour because they have got used to being shot at.
Talking to road.cc at the London Bike Show, Boardman said, “I think the helmet issue is a massive red herring. It’s not even in the top 10 of things you need to do to keep cycling safe or more widely, save the most lives.”
You’re being shot at, put on body armour
Boardman returned to an analogy he has made before, and which even he admits is a bit melodramatic, though it gets the point across
“It’s a bit like saying ‘people are sniping at you going down this street, so put some body armour on,’” he said.
Government encouragement to wear helmets was therefore “a big campaign to get people to wear body armour, by the people who should be stopping the shooting.”
Widespread use of helmets, he said, sends the wrong message.
“Once you see somebody wearing body armour, even if there’s no shooting, you think ‘Christ I’m not going down there if they’re wearing body armour to go down that street.’ It scares people off.”
There’s a better solution to the problem of cycle safety, Boardman said. In the Netherlands, just 0.8 percent of cyclists wear helmets yet the Dutch have the lowest rate of cycling head injury, thanks to segregated cycling infrastructure. Thirty percent of journeys in the Netherlands are made by bike, he said, and 50 percent of children’s journey to school.
”The best way to deal with [the head injury issue] is what the Dutch have done,” he said. “Where you have the Highest rate of helmet use, you also have the highest rate of head injury: us and the US.”
Yet there’s also an almost-fanatical, knee-jerk devotion to helmet use among enthusiast and sporting cyclists.
Boardman said: “People who are wearing body armour get used to being shot at, when it’s the getting shot at that’s the problem.”
A distraction
Talking about helmets had become a time-consuming distraction, he said. “We’ve got to tackle the helmet debate head on because it’s so annoying,” he said. “It gets a disproportionate amount of coverage. When you have three minutes and someone asks ‘Do you wear a helmet’ you know the vast majority of your time when you could be talking about stuff that will make a difference, is gone.”
He said the focus on helmets had made cycling seem more dangerous than it really is.
“We’ve gone away from the facts,” he said. “We’ve gone to anecdotes. It’s like shark attacks - more people are killed building sandcastles than are killed by sharks. It’s just ludicrous that the facts aren’t matching up with the actions because the press focus, naturally, on the news stories, and [the notion that cycling is dangerous] becomes the norm, and it isn’t the norm.
“You can ride a thousand times round the planet for each cycling death. You are safer than gardening.”
Cycling’s image
Like many cycling advocates, Boardman wants to see cycling presented as a normal, everyday activity.
“I saw two people riding down the hill to my village. One person coming down the hill to go for the train in high-viz, helmet on.
“A few moments later another guy came down, in shirt sleeves, with a leather bag on his back, just riding his bike to the station.
“Which one of those makes me want to [ride]?”
John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.
He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.
Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.
John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.
He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.
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198 comments
I'm not saying we can't aspire to something 'Dutch', just that it would be foolish to stop wearing PPE until we have the infrastructure. Currently the UK's roads, particularly at rush hour, are very busy and not always safe.
Saying that more people should ditch the PPE to encourage cycling as a hassle free, accessible way to travel, BEFORE we've sorted out the infrastructure and culture is bonkers.
Like I say, I really think this has been taken out of context. Why would a helmet manufacturer, such as Boardman, be saying 'ditch the helmet'? Can I sue him once I've come off my bike having shelved my Boardman helmet?! Or should I sue now for selling me an 'unsafe' product?!
Answer - he's not saying that, but so many here have an anti helmet agenda that they're prepared to believe that this backs up their choice.
Cognitive bias. There are plenty of cases where helmets have not saved cyclists from death or head injury. Should they (the survivors) sue because they were told that helmets work? In fact you will find that helmet manufacturers are very careful not to claim that helmets will save you.
In the case where you decided on advice to not wear a foam hat you would have to prove a helmet would have saved you, which is impossible, of course.
The most convincing studies are whole population studies, as in a country where the law has produced a large increase in wearing. As I have repeatedly written, there is no state where a law has produced a change in cyclist head injury rates.
I respect Boardman for his truth telling. I am not so keen on his selling helmets. Perhaps he thinks that as helmets are mandatory in competition he is justified in selling them, whether or not they work.
Compare him with Cracknell, who endorses helmets on the back of his accident (wearing a helmet) and gets money from a manufacturer.
Nobody here has an anti-helmet agenda. I have never heard anyone say helmets should be banned. There are many people with an anti-choice agenda however who think that because they do something the law should require everyone else to do the same. This is what irritates people; the HHH (helmet/high viz/holier than thou) brigade who frequently boast about how many accidents they have had with their 'helmet saved my life' stories and therefore rather undermine their claimed authority to lecture on safe cycling, seeking to impose their choices on others. There is not no helmet debate, there is a helmet compulsion debate; People are pro compulsion or pro choice , not pro or anti helmet.
Read it one more time, he is not saying that we would be safer if we all wore helmets, he is saying that even in countries where helmet use is very low there is less head injury than in the UK because motorists do not go around hitting us.
He is not confusing cause and effect, maybe you are just putting your bias on the article.
Off-road, especially stuff like forest runs etc I wear a skid-lid - figure I might whack my head off an overhang or a slow fall onto rocks or stumps. Makes sense.
On-road the biggest hazard if one is a competent cyclist is ing hit by motorised traffic. A skid-lid will do little at the speeds/energies imparted in a bad collision. Yet research shows drivers are more careful around non-helmet wearing cyclists.
On that basis I don't wear a helmet that often on road. That's my choice and I'd prefer it to continue to be my choice - mandatory helmet-wearing is just an easy fix for politicians who don't want to pay for making the roads safer/separating traffic and instead wish to shift the blame for safety onto the cyclist . Rather unfair imo.
I can't resist piling in, so I apologise in advance.
I wish there were a central source of the research into the efficacy of bike helmets in .... oh hold on. What do we think they do for us?
If we dont want to get damaged when out cycling, just like any other risk analysis there are two components :
1) likelihood of the event happening, and
2) seriousness when it does.
So looking at 1) does a helmet mean it is more or less likely we'll have an accident? There's a bit of partial research i'm aware of (feel free to cite more) that suggests you're very slightly more likely. But I would be happy to claim without citing anything that the majority of influences on our likelihood of having an accident are more highly influenced by factors out of our control - such as : drivers, infrastructure, oil on the road, etc etc.
and 2) well, if you bash your head on a kerb/rock in particular ways, then yes there can be benefits to be had wearing a helmet. However, do the majority of incidents involve this? That is something for which I have no data, and if you don't have a serious accident, it certainly isn't recorded anywhere. Of that proportion of accidents where you hit your helmet (in my experience of crashing in various ways, 0%, but that is anecdotal) what proportion would be affected by wearing a helmet in such a way as to significantly change the outcome? I'm not aware that there is any strong data to draw on to answer that question either.
Added to that, as has been mentioned lots of times, helmets are not meant to protect you against everything head related. If you hit a wall, you could break your neck wearing a helmet or not. Likewise, above a certain speed, it wont help (i.e. an 80kph dismount into a wall).
So it seems to me that we are basically speculating on the efficacy of helmets at a population level, because we don't have any strong data to go on.
What we can be clear about is that if you don't have an accident in the first place you don't need to tie yourself in mental knots about the effectiveness of helmets. And, for most commuters, that is out of their control and comes back to all the other things Mr Boardman is referring to.
I've never thought in terms of wearing helmets scaring people off, but I can sort of imagine it. In which case, better infrastructure rather than helmet legislation surely moves up the list as a solution to the question of how we get more people on bikes and out of cars, and how less of them (especially the new, uncertain and unskilled ones) end up experiencing some form of painful and unpleasant incident. Wearing a helmet and being knocked off by a car will still put people off cycling. Cycling and not being knocked off will not.
(For the avoidance of doubt, I do wear a helmet most of the time. I know it wont make any positive or negative difference 99.99% of the time. )
I'm 100% against compulsion : the idea that 'if it saves one life its worth it' doesn't, to me, work at a population level. I see it as a question of the best use of resources - to improve infrastructure / driving standards / etc etc to stop accidents happening, or to spend that money on enforcing prosecutions against cyclists for not wearing a helmet, thereby making it more likely that they are involved in an accident in the first place. In fact, both of those approaches can save lives - which is the most efficient? The first one requires a bigger spend, so it needs to produce much bigger results. And how do we even measure these things? I bet its relatively simple to calculate the average miles per fatality per car journey because you can tell from fuel sales roughly how many miles are driven. How do you tell how many miles are cycled?
But to tie it in to the bigger picture - which one will encourage more people to cycle, and make us all a healthier, happier nation?
Thank you for your attention. Please flame away.
Edster, you do a lot of speculation. If you want to inform yourself about what evidence there is, take a look at http://www.cyclehelmets.org/
This site looks at all the studies they can find, and discusses them. Though their conclusion is clear, it does list pro and anti evidence.
Figures for miles cycled are typically taken from government statistics as are deaths. The method of collection is given. The method does not change so any errors will be consistent.
For fairness I would refer you to http://www.bhit.org/ but perhaps the comparison is unfair.
thanks for that... I will
Edit : I just did. fascinating. That particular site seems to have also been interested in exactly the questions I was asking myself.
Thank you for looking. I sometimes feel that I am banging my head on a brick wall asking people to look at the evidence: few are open minded enough, most want to confirm their prior conclusion. But occasionally someone does follow the science, and changes their mind.
http://www.cyclehelmets.org/
Excellent website.
http://www.cyclehelmets.org/1261.html
Interesting that Dutch cyclists with head injuries are more likely to be wearing helmets.
I'll carry on wearing a helmet when racing (no choice anyway) and when training, but maybe I'll be less obsessive about wearing a helmet when using my bike for transport.
I'd echo the comments that a mandatory helmet law would save more lives if mandatory for motorists and pedestrians and people drinking heavily.
Great post. Especially separating the two involved probabilities both of which might be affected by the population treatment.
Anyhow, I reckon it's obesity and shit weather that puts people off cycling, not the dangers, real or perceived.
Lets look at compulsory salads and banning gay marriage (which incurs God's wrath resulting in the floods as punishment, UKIP told me so) before we get bogged-down in polystyrene pisspots.
I forgot to add, i'm totally against mandatory helmet use for no other reason than it wouldn't work.
You are dead right. In countries where helmets have been mandated the wearing rate has typically increased from thirty odd percent to well over ninety per cent. In none of them has there been any reduction in cyclist head injury rate.
Here is a graph of the effects of the law in NZ.
http://rdrf.org.uk/2013/12/17/the-effects-of-new-zealands-cycle-helmet-law/
I'm playing devils advocate here so bear with me....
In the past people have quoted surgeons dr's saying they are good to wear because of xyz....its shot down by forum users as they are not engineers, brain / trauma experts etc etc.
Now,
You have CB hear who has virtually no knowledge of brain trauma etc etc (as far as i'm aware) saying the exact opposite and suddenly we have a multitude of forum users saying "well done, exactly right".
Either you dont want to believe that helmets are any good or some people are sheep and want to follow the leader ????
As a complete coincidence today an incident came in whereby a council worker, without looking, grabbed a spade and hoisted it over his shoulder and turned around from the side of the wagon. The blade of the spade caught a cyclist across his forehead as he passed by and would have done quite a nasty injury had he not had a helmet on. Lucky lad
A superb example of what CB is saying.....
What action was taken about the Council worker?
Was he reprimanded for his stupidity, failure to "exercise a duty of care" what steps are being taken to prevent him doing the same again?
.. and of course lets look at a different scenario....
As a complete coincidence today an incident came in whereby a council worker, without looking, grabbed a spade and hoisted it over his shoulder and turned around from the side of the wagon. The blade of the spade caught a pedestrian across his forehead as he passed by and caused a nasty injury..... silly pedestrian should have known better and worn a helmet
Stumps,
Some things are facts. They are true regardless of who says them, they are true regardless of who argues against them. We don't always have time to evaluate what is and what is not fact from first principles and ground truth, in all cases. So, very often we take the authority of people making a claim into consideration when evaluating something. Normal thing to do.
Doctors and surgeons are authority figures, not without good reason. They're relatively well educated in a certain field, and they have an appreciation of science - though, many don't have a full appreciation. That authority however comes from having studied knowledge acquired from, largely, scientifically evaluated results.
So when doctors and surgeons say "I've seen many cyclists in my hospital, and I am sure helmets save lives" or - worse - someone on a forum says "I went to the hospital and my doctor said my helmet saved me", other people may be inclined to believe this is meaningful. However, it isn't. It fails some obvious scientific and statistical criteria. It's an anecdote. It's not been systematically analysed to control for biases, in the environment, the people, etc.. Doctors are subject to biases like any other humans - including scientists, hence why you need to control for these things! We need rigorous, scientific analysis precisely because long experience has taught us how often we can be led badly astray by our feelings.
A doctor reporting their anecdotal view is far from a scientific fact. When a doctor reports these things and claims certainty, they are straying far from science. They really should know better, but they're also human. Just because they're an authority figure, it doesn't make their anecdotal views any more true.
On the other hand, when someone reports an easily verifiable fact, you don't need to care who they are. You can just verify that fact for yourself. It doesn't matter who Chris Boardman is, or what his education is, because you can look up the official statistics for yourself. You can verify his claim about helmet use in the NL just by visiting the country, hell, or just by looking on Youtube.
That the Netherlands has very low helmet use, with very high rates of cycling (particularly ordinary, non-sport cycling), while the US and UK have the opposite; and that the Netherlands has much lower rates of death and injury are uncontroversial facts. You don't need to take it on trust from Boardman.
Indeed, it's precisely *when* someone claims something and expects you to take it on trust because of the position/status/education of the person making the claim, that you should be suspicious!
Oh and look how much time everyone is wasting discussing helmets again, how many letters to papers, tv, MPs, MEPs, ASMs etc etc etc could have been written demanding improved cycle provision, proper cycle routes, a change in the law demanding presumed liability etc etc.
But no lets blame cyclists for being stupid, for not wearing full body armour and helmets. It is not the poor drivers fault that the stupid cyclist happened to be riding in the road, it is not the drivers fault he had to overtake on a blind bend, It is not the drivers fault he had an important phone call to take, it is not the drivers fault he had had a couple of pints.....
No it is the stupid cyclists fault that he had the stupidity to ride on the road and get hit!!!!!!
I'm not disagreeing but would a non-cyclist politician type look at this list of costly demands and think "well, these cyclists want all this from us, but can't even be arsed to spend £30 on a helmet? Naah, fuck 'em"
What happens is that the politician is faced with demands to make cycling safer, looks at the need to spend money and to do something about drivers' tendency to kill and realises that a helmet law would be much cheaper.
"Something must be done.
This is something.
Lets do it."
Does not matter that laws have never worked, except to reduce cycling.
PPE is always the last step of the risk assessment process.
The risk is not falling off the bike. the risk is being hit by a car or a truck. Deal with the problem, helmets aren't much good against a 40T truck anyway!!!
If your racing then helmets might reduce the risk and make some sense( not a great deal as design spec is crap) but riding to the shops, treating bikes as urban transport!
Do we demand pedestrians wear helmets? Do we demand drivers wear overalls and helmets? both would save lives!
How about helmets in the bath, dangerous places, lots of slips, lots of A&E admissions!
What if you are the parent of a child that has fallen over , or the first person on the scene that has to give first aid? Would you rather deal with a mild concussion and some broken bones, a crushed skull or a corpse?
Equal justification for making the Thudguard infant helmet compulsory
Equal justification for the compulsory use of pedestrian helmets
I assume that all those using emotive bullying will be supporting both the Thudguard and pedestrian helmets
After all the following applies to both children and pedestrians
Or are we back to the "only cyclists suffer head injuries...... pedestrian and child head injuries are somehow less painful, less traumatic and not worth preventing
for the pro helmet brigade, question would you rather get hit by a car or not hit by a car.
Now once we sort the car problem we can start discussing whether there is any point to helmets, BUT NOT BEFORE!!!!
Equally, would I prefer to fall of my motorcycle in full leathers, body armour, spine protector and high-end Arai lid, or fall off my motorbike in t shirt and shorts? The answer, obviously is that I'd prefer to NOT fall off, but while I acknowledge that regardless of what I wear I may still end up as a long red streak with a meaty blob at the end of it, at least the PPE may improve my chances a bit if I fuck up, hit a patch of diesel, have some form of mechancal failure, or any other random occurrence that may happen.
I can and do apply the same rationale to my bicycle helmets.
Shall we scrap speed limits until we sort out bad drivers?
You are free to wear whatever you wish, on bike or motorbike. Just don't try to force or scare me into doing what you do.
By the way, would you ride your motorbike differently in t shirt and shorts, rather than in full gear?
I suspect you would be more careful.
All these arguments on helmets just show what CB is getting on about! Hours spent obsessing on this subject when we need to debate the real reasons why cycling is still a minority transport mode in this country. Let's discuss negative media coverage, crap cycle ways, lack of government funding, cultural attachment to tin boxes etc etc.
As CB says, a huge smelly red herring.
PS I always wear a helmet but can't say it make me feel safe
I was pissed and cycling down Oxford Street pretty fast. Hit a pothole, flew very hard over the handlebars, off the road onto the pavement, missing a railing by centimetres. If I had been wearing a helmet, it would have caught the railing and viciously whipped my head back and round, causing untold injury. Does this form a reasonable argument for making it illegal to wear a helmet?
I freakin love Chris Boardman
Helmets do help in some situations, as I've come to experience. If they would not look so dorky, people would use them more often.
Won't help much when you get run over by a lorry, though, no matter how the helmet looks... and poor planning will make even small cities unsafe. I live in a place with about 60 000 people. Right now a roundabout is being built for a cool 40 to 50 million euros or so... but the roundabout only goes around a nearby suburban area and does not extend around the main town, all heavy traffic still will go right through it. The whole thing seems like a useless exercise in politics.
This from Finland, so a bit off-topic. Still, the problems are pretty much universal.
Describe a typical cyclist. A racer, head down and piling on the pressure? An audaxer? A city gent on a Brompton? Mrs. Miggins on the way to the pie shop? A young and trendy Kensington mum on a Dutch bike? Someone taking a five minute trip on a Boris bike? A mountain biker on singletrack?
Why on earth would anyone assume that all these cases have similar risk profiles and should use similar protective equipment? Does anyone other than The Stig use a full face helmet, fireproof suit and five-point harness when driving to the shops?
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