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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 thought so.
"The Union Cycliste Internationale, the governing body for international cycle sport, made cycle helmets mandatory on May 5 2003 although helmet use had been increasing voluntarily since the 1990s. However, there have been more fatalities to cyclists in races since implementation of the helmet rule than in any recent decade (Wiki, 1).
Decade 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010-11
Deaths 6 9 2 8 4 4 5 3 10 2"
http://www.cyclehelmets.org/1213.html
Really?
Where is your evidence of this "fact"?
were you a nine-year-old girl cycling to school at that point? or a granny on her way to the shops?
probably not, i'm going to take a punt and guess that you're a fairly fit adult male and you were on a road bike of some description. apologies if i've missed the mark there.
the voices that cry, 'look at me i could have died' are predominantly from that demographic. and this really isn't about them. at all. those people will cycle anyway, and are used to taking the precautions they deem necessary. the people who are missing from bikes in the UK are kids, and grannies, and 'normal' people who'd like to cycle but can't because they feel the conditions are too dangerous, which is completely understandable. no amount of helmet complusion is going to get them cycling. It'll cut their numbers even further.
it is, like chris says, a massive red herring. it won't make for safe cycling for normal people. because those people won't cycle if cycling is deemed sufficiently dangerous for a helmet to be mandated. isn't that obvious? it is to me.
A few years ago I had a bad crash and broke my back. I spent 6 weeks in motionless bed rest waiting for the bones in my back to heal. Without fail, everyone who visited me said "it's a good job you had your helmet on".
No you wouldn't. I expect like a lot of people that claim this, you had a crash of some sort, your helmet took an impact and split or cracked and you put two and two together and decided the answer was five. ie you concluded that the helmet split so with that would have been your head that had split.
That's voodoo science.
The British, EU and American standard for impact protection is 50 joules. The very best and brand new and perfectly fitted reach 75 - 100 joules. They are supposed to work by using the styrofoam shell to compress and absorb impact. Only frontal impact though not oblique or rotational.
So my friend if your helmet cracked as mine did when I whacked my head mountainbiking in North Wales, then your helmet did not actually work. The impact was too great. When the forces are that large the helmet will compress and break in around 1/1000th of a second. The absorption of the initial force during this very short period is therefore less than the rating of 50 joules. It didn't even provide the minimum protection from impact though it may have saved you having a cut or a graze.
The formula for energy in an impact is Mass times Velocity squared over two. M x V2 /2
Do the maths yourself or look up my other posts.
I agree that the debate needs to be on the back burner. But we all need to keep pointing out that helmets are somewhat useful when you fall off your bike say when mountainbiking or when in a competitive race. They are only rated for 50 joules of impact so provide more of a protection agaist scrapes and cuts than impact. The best ones brand new get you about 75 joules.
They are completely useless in providing impact protection for your head if you are hit by a car. In that case the force being applied is 40,000 joules and upwards. (that's a smart with a small passenger car doing 22mph)
Make it a range Rover with family in it doing 40mph and that 500,000 joules against your 50 joules of protection.
Like I said if you come off in a sprint finish it will save you a nasty cut and a graze. That's what it is for.
Let's all keep pointing that out to people shall we?
I don't think anyone would say otherwise. The issue is with those who perceive cycling as a uniformly dangerous activity, and overestimate the ability of helmets to reduce this misperceived risk.
To be clear, he is anti mandatory helmet wearing, not anti helmet wearing per se. (would be hypocritical of him if he was, given the fact that he sells them!)
He is also rightly pointing out that the helmet focus should not be used as an excuse for our road safety.
So I wholeheartedly agree, just don't spin this to support a different agenda!
Boardman for Prime Minister
Good points. I think back to when I cycled to school in the 80s; didn't know what helmets or high viz was. What's changed? Some parallels to the ski helmet debate here. Everyone's wearing them but the overall skiing injury statistics say they haven't made a difference.
I cycled to school in the 80s too, cranially naked. Must be said though, there's a fuckload of extra traffic, with more distracted drivers too, and a different culture and attitude to risk.
I agree with CB though.
Hes certainly on the money, he needs an official government position with lots of clout.
The more comment I hear from Boardman the more I believe he needs to be our cycling Tsar, good lad
I really agree with that. Helmet most strongly advocated by people who don't ride bikes that often. I think it is time that calm common sense prevails.
Why o why can't we have more people in power in this country with this sort of pragmatic outlook ?
totally the correct approach. Helmets are a reaction to the problem not the solution to the problem
Well said Chris
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