This is why you should wear a helmet on a bike

hirsute wrote:

giff77 wrote:

Again, the van driver knocked the lad down. He was obviously driving in a manner that prevented him either avoiding or lessening the injuries caused. 

You can’t conceive then of any circumstance where a pedestrian or cyclist could be a fault?

It is very hard to conceive of a likely circumstance where the pedestrian or cyclist is entirely at fault.

I don’t entirely disagree with you, but you are showing some of the bias that is inherent in our vehicle-centric society. There are scenarios where the unforeseeable happens, but they are extraordinarily rare. In the vast majority of cases, if the driver was driving with enough care that they could deal with all foreseeable issues, then most ‘accidents’ wouldn’t happen. We drive as if the status quo is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. Look at motorway traffic, lines of cars 8-10 m apart at 70 mph. Realistically, to be driving with due care and attention they should all be about 80 – 90m apart. But there is a very strong expectation that the foreseeable, but unexpected, won’t happen. And that is considered fair and reasonable behaviour. To be driving at  25 mph around a residential area, or through town with pavements full of people,  rather assumes that the highly possible, but unlikely, won’t happen. In nearly every other sphere of life this is considered completely irresponsible (Coffee cups have “beware, contents may be hot” on them, as do apple pies. A toilet brush I once bought had “not for personal hygiene uses” on it…. but I digress). Fluffykitten has a very responsible, but rather rare, personal approach to this…. she doesn’t drive.

BehindTheBikesheds wrote:

hirsute wrote:

giff77 wrote:

This young fella should NEVER have been knocked down.

We have no idea what the circumstances are, so that’s just a meaningless statement. For all we know, the kid just cycled straight off the pavment without looking

Ah so what you are saying is motorists have no responsibility for what’s around them and the safety of a child on a bike or indeed on foot is solely down to them?

Gotcha, typical motorcentric victim blaming/responsibility diverting bullshit, you sound like the police and a motorist, they always pull that crap out of their hats to divert the blame and indooctrinate the vulnerable to make them think it’s their fault for being killed/harmed!

Fact is the police contable making a statement (made out to be fact) doesn’t know the facts either, yet was convinced enough to form a statement based on no knowledge of helmets or the incident itself.

If you had bothered to read the thread, you would have seen that I have criticised PC Stanton.

Since there are no details about the “incident”, coming out with ‘it’s the fault of X’ or ‘helmets save the day’ is pointless.

madcarew wrote:

And back on to the helmet question….
That is precisely the kind of injury a helmet protects against. Don’t believe me? Get an egg and tap it on yr kithen bench lightly. You’ll see a very similar indentation in the egg shell to that in the boy’s CAT scan. Now do the same thing with a few mm of polystyrene wrapped  around the egg….
In just the same way as people used to say about someone thrown from a vehicle “sure it’s ok to wear a seatbelt, but isn’t it better to not crash n the first place?”. 
Crashes happen. Kids do wheelies, van drivers have a momentary lapse of reason when they see a cyclist without a helmet…. wearing a helmet recognises that shit happens, and when it does, wearing a helmet is likely to protect against, or reduce the severity of, just this kind of injury.
However, in the wider scheme of things making helmet wearing compulsory will likely be to the detriment of the entire population. Wear a helmet, just don’t tell anyone else they should  🙂

Except you have precisely the square root of zero proof of that do you? Helmets are not tested for motorvehice impact forces, why, because it would show not only that helmets would be destroyed more often than not but the actual reduction in forces would be negligible simply because the foam would not be depressed in anything like that at low speed/low energy impacts. what with all the increased helmet wearing in this country serious injuries have outstripped cycling increases massively, that’s despite driver education, more segregated infra, despite the ‘safety in numbers’ thinking, this is replicated globally anywhere that helmet laws/increases in wearing, even Denmark ffs!

I look forward to your presentation to local authorities/police forces to promote helmet wearing for children on fooot and in cars, oh wait, did you forget that more children die of head injury alone in motorvehicle crashes (In England and Wales) than the total number of child cyclists in the UK, what do you think the numbers are for child head injury deaths elsewhere, what about adults, what about the serious head injury numbers, care to have a guess like your guessing on the what a helmet will protect against?

Out of the 1.3million reported head injuries annually to UK hospitals (this is a big under estimation of head injuries BTW) and circa 161,000 hospital admissions, what % of those are from people on bikes?

I’ll give you a hint, even if we take the 161k as the absolute figure for serious head injuries, (which it can’t be because not all serious head injuries are going to be admitted for one thing and it must be fairly serious to be reported at all so it’s closer to half a million SI) that still makes cycling head injuries across both adults and children, most of which will be the fault of a criminal around 0.5%. And you think this is the only group that should be targetted despite the facts saying helmets should going by your theory make a massive difference elsewhere.

Well?

You and your type are dangerous and should be exposed as such, you restrict freedoms, you aid impose unlawful rules, you aid impose bias and discrimination from those that are supposed to anything but, you aid exclusiion of participation, you aid ill health and pollution and you aid those that cause the massive harm to have responsibility removed and pushed onto victims of their actions.

Your type are disgusting, not just short sighted but determined to impose your outdated rules so that everyone suffers.

get fucked!

BehindTheBikesheds wrote:

hirsute wrote:

giff77 wrote:

This young fella should NEVER have been knocked down.

We have no idea what the circumstances are, so that’s just a meaningless statement. For all we know, the kid just cycled straight off the pavment without looking

Ah so what you are saying is motorists have no responsibility for what’s around them and the safety of a child on a bike or indeed on foot is solely down to them?

Gotcha, typical motorcentric victim blaming/responsibility diverting bullshit!

Fact is the police contable making a statement (made out to be fact) doesn’t know the facts either, yet was convinced enough to form a statement based on no knowledge of helmets or the incident itself.

As a driver, and a cyclist, I can’t disagree with this (even if you have to drill down to get the real meaning).

giff77 wrote:

giff77 wrote:

This young fella should NEVER have been knocked down.

I would much rather the

I would much rather the various police forces enforce the Highways Act and have ‘strong words’ with miscreants if they are not going to charge them. For the CPS/DPP/Fiscal to actually process charges to court And for judges/sheriffs/magistrates doing something other a slap on the hand. 

This young fella should NEVER have been knocked down. The driver in question has received a license to operate HEAVY machinery on a public road. He has been tested to determine if he has the skills and the temperament to do so. The license was introduced because of the increase of motorised vehicles on OUR roads and to ensure the safety of road users. 

It makes little odds on what the lad could have worn to ‘protect’ himself. There would still have been some inattentive, distracted , impatient bugger who would still have hit him. 

Pitbull Steelers wrote:

So then are people not allowed to give their opinion on what might or might not have been the outcome if the laddie had been wearing a helmet ? 

It seems not, going by some of the comments on here, but hang on, aren’t they giving their opinion on someone else giving their opinion……hmmm interesting. 

It might be right, it might be wrong, we’ll never know but freedom of speech is still legal in this country, of course though thats just my opinion.

it’s not an opinion, it’s a statement made out to be fact by someone who should know better than to make claims that are utterly without fact, it’s no different to all helmet saved my life/saved me from TBI stories.

From that it propagates into being fact as in a real hard fact, from that we end up with legislation, victim blaming increases, focus of responsibility turns away from those that harm and policw start handing out £200 fines for not wearing a helmet which is more than fines for distarcted driving. You only need look at NSW were a not wearing a helmet fine is the same for speeding, except more people get busted for not wearing helmets as a proportion of those flouting the law. Near miss law, a handful of transgressors in a year, no bell, no ID, no helmet, over a million dollars in fines.

THAT is what these people’s so called ‘opinion’ leads to, it’s not just wildly inaccurate but dangerous and ends up costing more lives, ends up killing off cycling instead of making it flourish.and the end result it a massive clusterfuck, just like Australia, NZ and increasingly Canada and other countries with increasing rates of helmet use/law.

If someone said if a women had not been wearing alluring clothing/walking down x street at x time and had an anti rape alarm she might not have got raped, how would you have reacted to a police constable coming out and saying that?

What about if a child is sexually abused, would you come out and publicly say well if only the child had done x/y/z they might not have been abused, no, thought not, because that would be disgusting, so why do some people including those sworn an oath to keep the peace do exactly that, VICTIM BLAME and come out with absolute unproven bullshit but only for one group of vulnerable people, in this instance it’s ALWAYS people riding bikes.

Well?