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news
Maisie Godden-hall incident (via BBC).jpgGirl who went under car after braking too hard and going over handlebars now campaigning to make helmets compulsory
The BBC reports on a 12-year-old girl who is campaigning for there to be a mandatory cycle helmet law after she was told by doctors that hers had saved her life. Maisie Godden-Hall was riding to school more quickly than usual after struggling to find her helmet when she went over her handlebars and under a car.
Speaking to the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Air Ambulance website, Maisie recalled the events leading up to the incident on November 3, 2016.
“On the morning of my accident I got ready for school as usual, but I was running a bit late as I couldn’t remember where I’d put my cycle helmet. It was a strict rule that I wasn’t allowed to cycle without it, and by the time I did find it, it was later than usual.
“I was cycling my regular route, which involved using the crossings and cycling on the pavement. There is a junction on my route where I generally move into the bus lane, as there is a wall that blocks the view for drivers. I was travelling quite fast to make up some time, but I realised that a car at the junction was moving out and I needed to brake hard. I don’t remember much about the next few minutes, only what people have told me, as it all happened so fast.
“As I braked, my bike stopped, but I didn’t. I flew over the handlebars of my bike and landed in front of the car. The driver didn’t see me and, spotting a gap in the traffic, moved forward over me. Her son was sitting in the passenger seat and saw me fall so it didn’t take long for her to realise that something had happened.”
Maisie sustained three breaks in her pelvis, a broken collarbone, major facial injuries and the loss of seven teeth.
She stayed in hospital until November 28 and by the time she left was allowed to sit in a wheelchair for one hour, twice a day. By Christmas she was on crutches and she has now recovered sufficiently that she is back doing gymnastics.
Having been told that without her helmet she would probably have died, Maisie said: “I know I am only 11 years old, but I really want to use what happened to me to promote the cause for wearing cycle helmets; I think it should be law.”
Campaigners including Cycling UK say that it should be up to individuals to decide whether or not to wear a cycle helmet, often citing Australia as an example of a country that made them mandatory only to see levels of cycling plummet.
Opponents say that legislation deters people from riding a bike and therefore has an overall negative effect on public health.
British Cycling policy advisor Chris Boardman has previously been critical of the perennial debate, saying: “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.”
Responding to a link to the BBC article by Hampshire Roads Policing which stressed the importance of wearing a helmet, he tweeted:
The girl was ran over by a car and had her pelvis crushed....and this what you take from it? Wow https://t.co/XameeHMdm0
— Chris Boardman (@Chris_Boardman) December 15, 2017
Alex has written for more cricket publications than the rest of the road.cc team combined. Despite the apparent evidence of this picture, he doesn't especially like cake.
Latest Comments
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On two occasions I've stopped cyclists on the Bristol to Bath Railway Path because their forks were the wrong way round, and corrected them for...
- timmyotool 55 min 32 sec ago
£52 of sale price is so impressive, when you see some companies giving small %age of profits from sales to similar initiatives. Well done Galibier!
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If drivers routinely get away with this then how the hell do MPs like this expect it to work for bikes?...
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I'm all for my overall experience being enhanced.
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When was the submission? I have been informed by the Met that although they have to send an NIP within fourteen days they then have up to six...
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Try getting hit by 2 tonnes of metal moving at speed and tell me that half an inch of polystyrene (with holes cut in it) will make any real...
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116 comments
"I chose to do something, so you should be forced to do the same thing."
Sorry, no.
It’s obviously sad that a young girl has been seriously injured in this manner and it could well be that the helmet saved her life. Regardless this is an individual instance and policy must be based on evidence not anecdote, however emotive.
So she crashed because she was hurrying due to finding her helmet? No helmet, no crash. Ban helmets.
She hit a parked car. Ban parked cars.
She crashed as she's shit on her brakes, ban brakes?
Or more likely ban children from cycling until they do a bikeability course so they learn how to brake in an emergency, and know not to suddenly appear from behind parked cars when other road traffic can't see them.
Hold on a second - she was "forced" to wear a helmet (due to a "strict rule" presumably from an over-reaching headteacher). It sounds like she was running late due to not being able to find the helmet and so was travelling faster than she normally does. She then attempted to brake to avoid an incident and instead went over the handlebars.
To my mind, this sounds like the requirement to wear a helmet was a key reason that she was travelling at an unsafe speed (as evidenced by not being able to emergency brake successfully) and thus is one of the causes of her crash. The other main cause would be the driver of the car not seeing and reacting to her which prompted her to emergency brake.
So, a girl has a major injury, in part due to being required to wear a helmet, and now wants everyone to be required to wear a helmet!
I suspect that if she hadn't been forced to wear a helmet, she would have instead left a bit earlier and not been rushing. She may then have been more cautious (due to not wearing a helmet) and not got into the panic situation at all.
I think she's being used to promote an agenda.
In what way did this helmet prevent which injuries that would have resulted in her death? The uninformed opinion of the doctor (or rather what the girl relates the doctor told her) is no evidence.
Let's see her helmet. Was it's polystyrene foam crushed flat in an area that covered a critical part of her head? If not, the helmet did nothing to mitigate head injuries.
Cycling helmets are flimsy things. It doesn't take much of a blow to make them look wrecked. For them to have actually absorbed any significant force (of the mere 7 Newtons they are build to absorb, at best) the polystyrene must go from fully expanded to fully crushed. A cracked shell and/or a broken part does not mean that the helmet protected the head in any significamt way.
Stories like this also have that unintended consequence of making wearers over-confident which increases their risk appetite.
These are probably the main reasons that helmet wearers statistically suffer more head injuries than non-wearers. Helmets protect very little; they make wearers believe they are immune from harm ("It'll save my life").
As to the opinion that people refuse to wear them because they are "not cool".... In fact, the "coolest" dogma-riding MAMILs and similar would not be seen dead without a helmet, to go with all their other pretend-I'm-a-professional pose. I never a met a helmet wearer yet who knew anything about the testing regime (or lack of it) for cycling helmets - what they can and can't actually protect from. They wear one because everyone else does; and they read an advert about how Cav or Bertie wears one.
Why are the facts that helmets provide little protection and induce over-confidence never mentioned in the "a helmet saved my life" anecdotal news blurbs? Perhaps there is a PR thing going on somewhere, paid for by helmet purveyors? Those things must be highly profitable! £100 or more for a bit of plastic that probably costs a few pence to make. As we know, 95% of so-called news these days is in fact PR blurb uncritically reiterated by so called news sources because it's a lot easier than doing real journalism.
How did this particular story emerge into the BBC News and elsewhere, eh?
Cugel the sceptical.
I sent a complaint to the BBC via their website regarding this video - I consider that it is lazy journalism, as at no point are the contentions of the child, the parent, or the 'expert' adults ever questioned.
How can they state so categorically that the child, who ended up with a car on top of her, would have died but for her plastic hat? What possible evidence do they have for that, or for suggesting that this incident (awful and frightening though it must have been for the girl and for her parent) supports compulsory helmets?
There seems to be an institutional bias in the media about cycle helmets, completely unjustified by the available 'efficacy' data, or tempered by the international evidence that making helmets compulsory reduces cycle use. Given the health and environmental benefits of cycling, that's verging on negligence in my opinion.
I do hope the girl makes a complete recovery, continues to ride her bike, and remains free to make a personal choice about wearing a helmet.
> as there is a wall that blocks the view for drivers
That's the issue here - poor junction design. That and a motorist not paying attention. The helmet is irrelevant and whoever told her it saved her life is ignorant.
It's worse than lazy - it's deliberately coming to a flawed conclusion based on the BBC's anti-cycling agenda.
She wasn't free to make a personal choice about wearing a helmet and I think wearing that her that helmet most likely caused the incident. That's the complete opposite of what the BBC is reporting.
Is there any proof that it saved her life? Nope.
Tired of all these total rubbish claims about cycle safety. Do a proper scientific test, publish a peer reviewed journal, then I'll notice.
In the mean time, I'll continue to ride wearing a helmet, safe in the knowledge that if a lorry driver doesn't bother to indicate and/or use their mirrors, I'll still be very squished regardless of the helmet.
Shamefully I actually Googled it while I had an argument with one of my brothers' about wearing one.
His son and a few other people I know told me to wear one because they know I will try stupid things to emulate the local teenagers....
Easy, now... graphs might happen.
Great, yet another helmet related feature to argue about.
Am waiting to read about what brakes she had, after all if she had disc brakes, then perhaps they were too powerful for her ability, so perhaps children should have quaint rim brakes...
"“On the morning of my accident I got ready for school as usual, but I was running a bit late as I couldn’t remember where I’d put my cycle helmet. It was a strict rule that I wasn’t allowed to cycle without it, and by the time I did find it, it was later than usual. "
And there we have the real problem, she was in a rush.
Ban watches and clocks and timetables and time!
Here is a chance for a real journalist to do some proper journalisming.
The circumstances of the crash seem to have contributed to it's occurence via a number of factors. (Surprise - there isn't just a single factor to blame - real life, eh). The child seems to have been inept at cycling in a number of ways, resulting in bad braking, whilst riding in a place and a fashion that was likely to require emergency braking. So ....
A journalist might ask the question: how and why is such a child (and this one in particular) so inept that she places herself into potentially lethal danger? Without wishing to put words in the mouth of this hypothetical journalist, one might suggest that consideration be given to the possibility that the cultural regime in which she took up cycling has eschewed some useful training & education about cycling in favour of a magic bullet (the helmet) plus some wishful thunks (I wish nothing bad to happen so it won't).
Step forward parents and educational establishment, not to mention law makers and others who might regulate the use of bicycles in a fashion that is actually of utility to riders rather than fodder for creating pariahs and scapegoats for the gutter press to chew on.
And how about the notion that motor cars doing 10mph in urban environments might be much more likely to stop before they run over understandably inept children than are those doing a (legal) 30mph or the more common (illegal) 37mph?
Cugel, on the lookout for fundamental causes as opposed to made-up-stuff.
Must be time for someone to pop up a helpful graph to help this discussion along?
or maybe a video?
a graphic?
It is up to you not to wear a helmet... but nobody abolished natural selection. It works!
P.S. Darwin was right...
Regardless of whether or not the helmet helped reduce her injuries and the fact that both the cyclist and the driver made errors that contributed to the accident, I am surprised that nobody has picked up (unless I have missed the comment) on the fact that she was cycling on the pavement for part of her regular route to school. So she is under strict rules to wear a helmet (not a legal requirement) but not under strict rules to not cycle on the pavement, which i am making the assumption wasn't a shared use pavement.
Sounds like the rule-maker, whoever that might be, isn't very consistent!
Because the presence of a helmet at the end of her ride is observable by whatever clown made the rules. Pavement cycling, bad cycling, bad driving, crap junction design are all out of his or her view.
I think she's persuing the wrong end of the stick here. She's crusading for helmet use rather than 'pay some fucking attention' to those driving.
The issue is not whether I want to wear a helmet. The issue is what more important measures are being ignored while everyone focuses on helmets.
Watch the BBC video and it clearly shows the white car, hit her after it crossed the hashed give way markings, there is even a bike painted on the road indicating a cycle way. The girl tried to brake and lost control, which may be down to inexperience, but it's clear that she took invasive action due a car being driven without due care and attention. Take the helmet debate out and this child was hit by a driver who was not paying attention, just like the many videos road.cc insists on showing. This is where the focus should be and maybe a campaign for cycling perficiancy to be included in the school curriculum.
And what you've said highlights the part of the many problems that helmets create, instead of focusing on the criminal/dangerous behaviour of the person behind the wheel of a killing machine pretty much everyone concerned are paying homage to a bit of polystyrene foam and trying to force their will on everyone else all the whilst being utterly devoid of understanding of the problem and the very real likelihood the helmet did shit and certainly did not prevent her other severe injuries.
As others have said, if it weren't for the fucking stupid helmet rules and the needing to wear the helmet in the first place and a motorist that is trained properly, is observant and willing to slow down, look and see (i.e. obey the law) and give a shit about safety this incident does not happen.
This BS is replicated so many times and yet when head injuries occur elsewhere in society many hundreds if not thousands of times over (remember the 300,000+ serious head injuries annually admitted into hospitals alone) they are ignored with no calls to implement a law that makes matters worse not better.
The BBC are a fucking disgrace as always and doctors should be banned from making false statements that have not a jot of evidence to back up their claims.
I hope whatever this girl is doing falls flat on its arse and someone actually tells her and her family that they are making a massive mistake in judgement and should focus on getting criminal behaviour by motorists to be reduced and helmet rules removed so that children aren't rushing and taking risks when they wear one.
If you don't like the biased reporting on the BBC, then make a complaint like I did.
Nothing may change, but then if no-one complains, nothing will change.....
Here's the link;
https://ssl.bbc.co.uk/complaints/forms/?lang=en&reset=&uid=362530853
As per usual they come out with the susual BS, I press and press all the time but they can do what the fuck they like.
i've got 3, inch and a half long scars on my right eyebrow, from a crash last month, and still i'll fight for it to be the riders choice to wear a lid.
Yeah I'm not going to be forced to wear a helmet because you can't ride a bike.
In my line of work, as in many, I have to waste several hours per week jumping through hoops that only exist because other people are substantially less careful than I am. But my employer pays me to do so. I do not wish to be forced by law to do likewise when popping down to the shops on the weekend.
Yes, let's make policy by an emotional response to one specific situation where the main claim is completely untested or challenged.
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