Commuter Diaries – luggage # 3

Looking at the casualty statistics it's far more likely that you will suffer death or serious injury riding to Tesco's than participating in racing, primarily because of the presence of cars. If you don't think helmets offer any protection then fine, don't wear one; if you believe they do offer some protection you're probably more likely to experience the benefit if you wear one for everyday commuting and leisure riding and leave it off for racing than vice versa. Certainly if I was offered a choice when riding to my local Herne Hill velodrome of wearing one to ride through traffic to get there but taking it off to ride round the track or vice versa I would choose the first option.

Here is where Burt has a very good point. The stats just don't support the claims of safety benefits, especially when combined with the effects of speeding motor vehicles.

"I think I nearly died doing extreme sport and my main takeaway is that the rest of you should all wear PPE to go to tesco". BBC loves helmet stories. I blame that Dan guy.

Ah yes. Because what a gravel bike needs is a shed ton more weight. None of the 32 tyre options are likely to be in Gravel friendly widths and weights.

Did he also make you wear a helmet for taking a shower, changing a lightbulb or being a passenger in a car? Statistically, those are also very likely to result in possibly fatal head injuries and the exact same argument applies to protecting your head for those rare accidents. Also, what was his opinion on traffic safety and separate infrastructure? I suspect his views and observations were coloured by the media's constant focussing on bike helmets and not actual effective methods to reduce danger.

By far the worst of these is Footon Servetto - probably the cycling equivalent of football's Coventry City brown away kit. The INEOS kit is unpleasant because I associate it with Ratcliffe. I own a HTC Columbia jersey. It looks OK, but I admit I bought it for £10 on a bargain rail in my LCS. I also used to own an Astana jersey and my performances always improved by 5% whenever I wore it. I got rid of it when my heart nearly stalled in bed one night🙂 Personally, I don't mind the Bogota Humana kit. It seems ok as long as all of the riders were happy to wear it. I'd like to think they were given the opportunity to approve the design beforehand.

I agree, stop building useless cycle lanes - build proper ones.

I love the castorama kit. Perfect to be able cycle to work, fix steam engines then cycle home again all in the same kit

Okay, well I don't doubt your experience but I can only say it's not mine and from the lack of mention generally in discussions not that of many other people. Maybe when you're racing with your head down the wind breaks over the crown and then round into your ears, intuitively I would say that riding heads up, which is what most commuters do, a helmet would be more likely slightly to deflect the wind away from your ears than into them.

Considering that AIs are trained on large datasets of Internet content, they're pretty much our condensed stupidity as a species. Also, current AIs are Large Language Models which is pretty much just a clever bag of words.