An off-duty paramedic who crashed into the front bucket of a tractor while riding down a descent in the New Forest says he “would not be here to tell the tale” had he not been wearing his cycle helmet.
Les Goddard tweeted on Friday about the incident, which happened near Godshill, Hampshire the previous day, and attached pictures of his damaged Kask helmet.
“Yesterday whilst out cycling I encountered a large farm vehicle which unfortunately I collided with. Without my helmet which is cracked I would not be here to tell the tale.”
Acknowledging that the subject of helmets is one that can give rise to heated debate online, he added: “I really hope this doesn’t offend anyone, I just want to point out the importance of wearing one of these,” he added.
Yesterday whilst out cycling I encountered a large farm vehicle which unfortunately I collided with. Without my helmet which is cracked I would not be here to tell the tale.
I really hope this doesn’t offend anyone, I just want to point out the importance of wearing one of these pic.twitter.com/unBj1GXfAP— Les Goddard (@sarmedic104) May 3, 2019
The incident happened on a country lane, with police in Fordingbridge tweeting a picture of the tractor.
“Not long resumed from the scene of a Car [sic] V. Tractor incident near #Godshill,” they said.
“The rider is definitely going to be sore in the morning, but I can tell you for a fact that his cycle helmet saved his life. He came head on to this coming down the hill!,” adding the hashtag, #HitTheBrakes.
“His helmet hit right on the corner of the tractors loading bucket. Incredible that there is so little damage to helmet and rider,” they added, together with another hashtag, #HelmetsSaveLives.
Not long resumed from the scene of a Car V. Tractor incident near #Godshill. The rider is definitely going to be sore in the morning, but I can tell you for a fact that his cycle helmet saved his life. He came head on to this coming down the hill! #HitTheBrakes #25206 1/2 pic.twitter.com/dRc4J4YlFz
— Fordingbridge NPT (@FordbridgeCops) May 2, 2019
His helmet hit right on the corner of the tractors loading bucket. Incredible that there is so little damage to helmet and rider. Great work from @scas999 @HCResponseCops and @HantsPolRoads . You know what to do people… #HelmetsSaveLives #25206 2/2 pic.twitter.com/hHN1OhODNV
— Fordingbridge NPT (@FordbridgeCops) May 2, 2019
While the Highway Code does recommend that cyclists should wear a helmet, they are not a legal requirement in the UK.
124 thoughts on “New Forest cyclist unscathed after crashing into tractor bucket on descent”
I’ve never worn a cycling
I’ve never worn a cycling helmet. I find what “saves my life” is not riding like an idiot, judicious use of the brakes and choosing a speed appropriate to the view I have of the road ahead.
Descending at a speed at which you cannot avoid colliding with a (virtually) static piece of farm machinery is both insane and a recipe for disaster.
This is just another example of someone donning a ‘magic foam hat’ and assuming it somehow makes them immortal, however ridiculously they ride their bike. Mr Goddard’s helmet did not “save his life”. It was pure luck that he was not killed or seriously injured.
Never ride faster than you can stop within the clear view you have of the road ahead. If you do that then you don’t need to rely on a magic foam hat to “save your life”.
Joeinpoole wrote:
Absolutely. If it had been a rather more lethal bit of farm kit, with large spikes, he’d be dead, and his helmet wouldn’t have saved him, and we wouldn’t be reading tweets about the helmet not saving his life.
Is there no-one who lives in the Hants area who could make an official complaint about the sheer ignorance of their officers and their complete failure to analyse the facts and not make assumptions?
Joeinpoole wrote:
Diesel oil on a corner on crash one. A car on the wrong side of the road on crash two. Magic foam hat helped in both and was a write off on both occasions, my crystal ball didn’t help. The only “lucky” thing about it was that I took responsibility for my own safety to the extent that I could and protected the most fragile part of my body to what small degree I could. Each to his own, I just happen to prefer my life with a slightly lower risk of brain damage.
maldin wrote:
Clearly you didn’t take _enough_ responsibility for your own safety, or you wouldn’t have cycled. You’d have used a motorised vehicle, or walked, or not made the journey at all.
Also you woudln’t confine your helmet-wearing to when on a bike.
I _hate_ that sanctimonious ‘responsibility for my own safety’ rubbish. _Nobody_ takes complete responsibility for their own safety, because we don’t live in a state-of-nature. We all draw a line somewhere. You are implicitly claiming to have moral superiority over anyone less lucky than you. That’s what I find so irritating about the pro-helmet side. It’s both illogical and self-regarding. Wear a helmet, fine, but shut up about how it makes you morally superior. It doesn’t.
maldin wrote:
you do realise your cycle helmet cannot prevent the deacceleration and inertia of your brain hitting the inside of your skull on impact, and its that impact which causes concussion or brain damage, it might slightly reduce the impact G force by lessening the abruptness of the stop, as the energy goes into deformation of the polystyrene and cracking the helmet, but fundamentally even wearing a cycle helmet, if you hit your head on the ground or a digger bucket, your brain will impact your skull.
Awavey]
Please stop confusing people with facts. In the face of true belief, facts are irrelevant, that’s why so many people still believe that helmets save lives; they refuse to accept facts. Faith will always beat science, data and facts. cyclehelmets.org
Awavey wrote:
Deceleration is not the only thing that causes brain injury.
Skull fractures also cause brain injuries.
There is quite a bit of evidence that helmets can prevent skill fractures.
A lot of people seem to ignore this.
Awavey wrote:
… To be precise (heaven forbid!), drop test rigs with accelerometers inside the headform will measure:
With a helmet in place = around 150g (survivable with mild concussion)
Direct imapct with no helmet = around 1200g.
Now I could go into a very boring discussion about the effect of time on this as well. Automative impact testing includes time in an equation called the Head Injury Criterion, as if you experience the same decelleration for a longer time, it will cause more damage. This is largely related to the input speed of course, as if you’re going a lot faster, then even with a bigger crash helmet, you might experience the same maximum decelleration, but it could last double the milliseconds, causing a lot more brain damage.
But this quickly gets into tricky science, as all sorts of other variables come into play as well, such as your age or how dehydrated you are, or the location / direction, rotational component or multiple aspect of any impact. This is extremely complex bio physics that we could write books and books on…
But basically as a crude measure at a typical falling off and hitting the ground speed – 150g with a helmet, 1200g without.
AndyRed3d wrote:
I’m not sure what that means or how to translate that into layman’s terms.
hirsute wrote:
… To be precise (heaven forbid!), drop test rigs with accelerometers inside the headform will measure:
With a helmet in place = around 150g (survivable with mild concussion)
Direct imapct with no helmet = around 1200g.
— hirsuteI’m not sure what that means or how to translate that into layman’s terms.— AndyRed3d
‘g’ is the amount of acceleration that you (don’t) feel standing on the earth’s surface. Around 10g is the force that fighter pilots may feel when executing tight maneouvres, but will cause them to blackout temporarily (or permanently depending on their altitude at the time).
It’s tricky to get a feel for what the numbers mean as they are very short-lived accelerations rather than the two examples I just used. To offset that, here’s a handy graph on typical human limits. Additonally, jerk is the rate of change of acceleration. In SI units, jerk is expressed as m/s3; it can also be expressed in standard gravity per second (g/s; 1 g/s ≈ 9.81 m/s3).
hawkinspeter wrote:
Thanks but I think I’m more confused now !
What do the red, yellow, blue, red lines refer to ?
Also the Y scale goes up to 40, but the lines mention 1500, 500, 300, 200 – should there be another scale on the right hand side ?
hirsute wrote:
It’s tricky to get a feel for what the numbers mean as they are very short-lived accelerations rather than the two examples I just used. To offset that, here’s a handy graph on typical human limits:
— hirsuteThanks but I think I’m more confused now ! What do the red, yellow, blue, red lines refer to ? Also the Y scale goes up to 40, but the lines mention 1500, 500, 300, 200 – should there be another scale on the right hand side ?— hawkinspeter
The lines refer to different axes of impact/G force – there’s a pic of a man with different coloured arrows coming out of him.
The graph is onset of G forces for a total impact, so the 1500 will refer to the area under the line. At least, that’s how I’m interpreting it – I just copied it from the Wikipedia article on g force.
hawkinspeter wrote:
Cracking graph, thanks, I like that.
Someone said earlier that it’s OK to not wear a seatbelt as if it’s somehow equivalent to wearing a cycle helmet… it’s really not OK and is law for damn good reasons. As an example, my cousin has brain damage from a collision where a passenger wasn’t wearing seatbelt which caused his head to be crushed into the A-pillar. We nearly lost my cousin a few times and the brilliant staff in the ICU said, based on their experience, they didn’t think he would make it.
While there clearly is a pro-cycle-helmet brigade, I’ve never really seen any evidence that an “anti-helmet” brigade exists. The helmet debate isn’t really about helmets, it’s actually mostly about the stupidity of some of the assertions that come from those who are pro-helmet when it’s rather more important to be looking at the causes of injury.
hirsute wrote:
… To be precise (heaven forbid!), drop test rigs with accelerometers inside the headform will measure:
With a helmet in place = around 150g (hopefully survivable with some concussion)
Direct imapct with no helmet = around 1200g.
— hirsuteI’m not sure what that means or how to translate that into layman’s terms.— AndyRed3d
Well, ok here goes… During an impact, your head has to go from moving to stopped. The faster it stops (in a shorter distance) then the higher the decelleration experienced.
It is the decelleration of your head that causes your brain to slump against the inside of your skull to also slow down. Bit like if you crash a car, the occupants all go flying forwards and then bounce around off things. If your head stops very suddenly, the brain’s going to whosh around inside and get mushed up like a jelly in a bowl. In fact the worse damage is often at the opposite side where the brain has torn away from the inside of the skull. It’s this kind of diffuse damage that’s much more dangerous than a skull fracture, which can be very localised.
So back to ‘g’s… Accelleration is measured in m/s2, but heck, no one likes a measure with more than one letter, so as a shortcut we also use ‘g’, which stands for gravity (on Earth) – which is 9.81m/s2. So if you accelerate on your bike at 9.81m/s2 i.e. every second you go 9.81m/s faster, then you’ll experience the same force on you in that direction, that you feel vertically just standing on Earth.
In normal life we don’t experience much above this, in fact an emergency stop in a normal car is around -1g in the direction of travel… some of us know what that feels like and how much you fly forwards against the seatbelts. Hitting a wall in a car driving at 100mph, you’d probabkly experience around 60g. Fighter pilots can sustain a maximum of about 9g (vertically) for a few seconds before the blood drains out of their heads and they pass out. This is just to give you some context.
So as I said, smacking you head on the ground at 12.3mph, with a helmet your head will experience a peak of around 150g (which makes a sort of ‘douf’ noise and is clearly very unpleasant), whilst without a helmet it will experience a peak of around 1200g (which makes nasty sharp bang noise and is pretty deadly).
Caveat: this is obviously a very simplified test – an accident is never as straightforward as the impact on a drop test rig, as you’ll always try to protect yourself. But still, this is the reliably measurable difference that a ‘plastic hat’ makes. Arguably drunk people fighting outside pubs are more in need of helmets, as they tend to get pushed over backward and fall straight onto hard paving, with fatal consequences. But a ‘drinking helmet’ would be a much harder thing to market than a cycling helmet.
AndyRed3d wrote:
Maybe this is exactly what we need.
Anyone who’s drinking to get ‘legless’, would be wearing a drinking helmet and thus you can see at a distance which people to avoid if you don’t want to get into a fight or become their best friend ever.
I’d also recommend putting the owner’s home address onto the helmet and maybe incorporate some kind of finder’s fee (£50?) if the owner is found too far from home after hours – the taxi drivers could just round them up and deliver them home and collect the fee. Probably some kind of GPS locator would be useful as well, so it’s easier for taxis to find them.
AndyRed3d]
How much is “pretty deadly”, how many people die per head strike that reaches or exceeds this number.
Given the number of actual admittances to hospitals of people with head injuries from far more than trips (which as we know an adult head will exceed 12.3mph in that simple trip from walking speed) so it would seem that your figure is either incorrect or that ‘pretty deadly’ should really just be sometimes deadly, in fact 200g can sometimes be deadly also.
You infer that the 1200g peak figure is where death occurs often, I’d like to see some numbers on that please.
BehindTheBikesheds]
OK, ‘g’ is already quite confusing for people, so I was trying not to overload this with any more detail… just to be clear I wasn’t talking about ‘types of accident’, i.e. how the head could get there – I was just talking about the measurable result when a head hits something hard at a specific speed. This is nothing to do with hospital admission statistics, ‘survivability of g forces’ has been determined in a completely different way.
< 250g is widely accepted as a ‘survivability level’. I am not actually sure where this came from. through there are rumours that it originated from work carried out by the Nazi’s (mind boggles) but I’ve never been able to find evidence of that. That level seems to have been tested over time and continues to be accepted as a reasonable basis.
Of course we also all fuly understand that this is complicated by many factors: not least by the brain, fluid, skull structure being a complex shape and system; in terms of the person themselves – age, hydration levels, genetics, previous exposure to impacts and damage; and then the nature of the impact – the input speed, direction and location of impact, rotation (dangerous due to damage all the way round the outside of the brain on the nobbly bones inside your head), multiple impacts or skull damage…
So 250g is a somewhat averaged out ‘dumb’ guideline.
If you are genuinely interested, then here’s study where they included computer finite element analysis of a 3D skull/brain model, and the accelerations / strains on the brain material, which they then compared with previous impact studies on human cadaver heads, to validate correlations between the speed of impact and injury level:
https://www.internationalbrain.org/examination-of-bi-thresholds-in-terms-of-the-severity-of-head-motion-and-the-brain-stresses/
Also if you want to learn more about the causes and process of tramatic head injury, there’s an in-depth general decriptive paper here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4694720/
Enjoy the read!
AndyRed3d wrote:
I read plenty of studies/data from the US in the 70s that were from real life scenarios no 3d printed models, those datasets including babies falling from height. It’s fairly interestuing that the the forces in NFL is around 150 near the top end and 100g is common place, yet the concussive forces even with helmets has not prevented the massive CTE problems experienced by players.
The approach now is to reduce the actions of those presenting the harm as a method to reduce long term brain (not head as I first stated) injuries, this is the most effective since the helmets clearly don’t work to prevent brain injuries in any meaningful way. Notice the huge difference between rugby (league and union) were helmets are not used and whilst players do suffer concussions and they can be quite bad, the actions of the players has a far greater influence on the outcome, when gridiron added helmets to their players they simply signed a death warrant to many players and many hundreds of thousands of brain injured players that suffered the rest of their lives.
Even the head gear in boxing had the negative effect with respect to concussions and hence why the ABA decided to remove them for amateur boxing after they looked at the stats which showed a riduclously large increase, not surprising to myself nor my brother who was a decent amateur in the 80s when they weren’t worn.
You can take any sport you like, baseball, Ice hockey, cricket, not a single sport has had any improvement in head injuries since they mandated helmets, in fact for cricket at least they have got worse, in exactly the same situation as for NFL, for cycling and elsewhere, greater risk taking which then produces more incidents and produce more exceeding of any protective ability of the safety aid worn.
It’s pretty logical as to why helmets fail to protect at population and individual level basis.
maldin wrote:
Makes me wonder where you think your brain is if you are protecting it by protecting the most fragile part of your body 😉
“Incredible that there is so
“Incredible that there is so little damage to helmet”
“but I can tell you for a fact that his cycle helmet saved his life”
These two statements may be considered inconsistent. “Little damage to helmet” but “for a fact saved his life”. Possibly the first indicates that the collision — bad as it may have been — was not as potentially damaging as assumed. Or… helmets are magically resistant to damage?
rkemb wrote:
There are some important differences between the average head and a cycle helmet.
Looking at the marks on the helmet, it looks like he was lucky and it was a glancing blow on the side of the helmet, the side which is coated in a smooth, non-abrasive plastic, that can therefore slide along the side of the bucket he hit, deflecting the impact rather than having to directly absorb it.
The average head is not covered in smooth plastic, but relatively easily tearable skin, and hair. The hair and skin catching on the corner would quite probably catch on the corner and rather than simply slide on by, tear at the hair and pull the head harder against the corner of the bucket.
If it saved his life, is debatable, but it almost certainly saved him a much worse head injury, a head injury that could have caused him to have even less control of his landing, where again his head would be at risk of a significant impact.
Wear a helmet or don’t, your head, your choice. I know that falling off my bike as a child at low speed, I have had numerous lumps on my head, and cuts, but since I started with a helmet, the worst I’ve had is scrubbed arms and legs and an injured pride.
StuInNorway wrote:
I do wear a helmet. As you say, it is my choice. What I am [i]against[/i] is the automatic assumption that the helmet saved his life; or that helmets always save lives, which seems to be the narrative in these stories. Cycling is, in general, very safe. Countries that have cycling as a high modal share of transport generally have low levels of helmet-wearing. Encouraging people to think that you have to wear a helmet to be safe cycling puts people off cycling. [i]That[/i]’s what I am against.
StuInNorway wrote:
You missed the option whereby not wearing a helmet you’ll have missed the bucket completely, that extra circumference is massively important, it can be the difference between hitting your head and still having a series of head/neck injuries and not. You also missed the option that a non helmet wearer may well not have ridden so recklessly and wouldn’t have been anywhere near the tractor at all.
You don’t know that skin would tear’ how could you know what kind of blow and where an unhelmetted head would have IF it did strike the bucket at all, what if it was a glancing blow, not one where the bucket digs into the helmet as it clearly did?
BehindTheBikesheds wrote:
Quite.
A helmet absorbs, at best, 7N of force. Many manage less. To do so will squash the polystyrene dead flat (it doesn’t recover, so is a good indicator of how much force has been applied to it).
That helmet doesn’t even have the flimsy plastic shell significantly broken. The polystyrene looks as though it has abosorbed no force at all.
Of course, now that the magic hat is damaged, the owner will be rushing out to buy another “life saver”. The cost may kill his wallet though. 🙂
A better description of the event might be, “The helmet induced over-confidence and a foolish risk take that eventuated in a lucky escape”.
Cugel
rkemb wrote:
Took the words out of my mouth.
The officer who said it was a fact should be dismissed or sent for re-training if they can’t tell the difference between assumption and fact. The evidence shows that the helmet was not very damaged, but it definitely saved a life? Don’t these people think before they speak.
The rider says that it is cracked, but that shows that it failed. Helmets are supposed to work by absorbing energy by compression, not by cracking. Take a piece of expanded polystyrene, from which helmets are made, and try to compress it, then try to snap it, and tell me which one required almost no effort.
This is another cyclist going too fast for their own abilities, and they would have gone much slower if they weren’t convinced that the helmet would save their life, so a self-fulfilling prophecy really. The data shows that helmetted cyclists have more collisions because they take more risks, and the death rate does not fall with increasing helmet wearing.
This just looks like another para-medic, convinced of the efficacy of helmets, using his own failures to promote his views and sell helmets. Another anecdote with totally unreliable witnesses making utterly invalid assumptions, when all the real world data shows they are wrong. Why are people like this allowed to vote?
burtthebike wrote:
… Really!? You think a highly trained Police Officer should be dismissed for saying what he sees? The lack of Police Officers is a much bigger problem I would have thought.
The rider says that it is cracked, but that shows that it failed. Helmets are supposed to work by absorbing energy by compression, not by cracking. Take a piece of expanded polystyrene, from which helmets are made, and try to compress it, then try to snap it, and tell me which one required almost no effort.— burtthebike
Once again, you daon’t understand physics. Polystyrene is a brittle plastic. Expanded polystyrene is made up of balls that when heated by steam expand and fuse together. Because of the stiff/brittle properties of PS, as a foam it becomes a very good shock absorber in compression where all the thin walls can collapse and crumple microscopically. In tension however it’s rubbish, usually propagating cracks along the fused lines between balls. So what tends to happen in an impact is the PS will collapse in the area where it’s been crushed, making it pull away and crack from the still intact PS material around it… The squashed material though tends to partly spring back making it hard to see the underlying damage, meaning that – the cracks are usually the visable evidence that the helmet has absorbed an impact. This is entirely contrary to your dangerous misinformation that cracks mean the helmet hasn’t absorbed an impact properly.
By the way, as an aside, the collapsing of all the microscopic bubbles and walls inside the PS, which makes it so good at absorbing impact, also massively and permanently degrades it’s ability to absorb a second impact, which is a bigger problem, as it can be so difficult to see (whihc is why cracks in some ways are a good thing as it does show people that there is some damage.
As the designer of a helmet using a totally new multi-impact material, I do understand the downsides of PS, but you’re barking up the wrong tree, so please get this right in future.
This I do agree with. My personal view is we should provide rider education with much clearer messaging around the limitations of helmets, so they don’t mistakenly think it makes them invisable and therefore take stupid risks, but then leave it up to people to decide for themselves either way.
And I don’t think we should insult paramedics saying they are not worthy of vote. Let’s just get back to discussing the evidence (accurately) shall we.
AndyRed3d wrote:
No, I think a police officer should analyse the data and reach a logical view, not jump to conclusions. That’s why they are supposed to be trained, and any officer who does jump to conclusions isn’t fit to be an officer and isn’t highly trained; they’re an idiot.
Your opinion might differ, but just look at the vast number of wrongful convictions, all of which as far as I know, caused by police making assumptions rather than looking at the facts.
burtthebike wrote:
Citation please. I can think of a number of reasons for something being deemed a “wrongful conviction” without it being due to mere assumption, but i’ve not put the time in you must have to make a judgement about whether they’re all unconnected to the vast number of wrongful convictions.
fukawitribe wrote:
This one, but there are many others https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Rachel_Nickell
Colin Stagg was targetted by the police to the exclusion of all others because the policeman in charge thought he was guilty. Birmingham six, etc.
burtthebike wrote:
How’s about
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jill_Dando#Investigation
or
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_Six
Lots of presumptions made there too…
burtthebike wrote:
All burt, all. I’m aware of cases where assumptions were pivotal, i’m waiting for your evidence that all wrongful convictions are due to it… or just say that was hyperbole, i’m easy.
fukawitribe wrote:
Which bit of “…as far as I know,…” did you not understand?
burtthebike wrote:
All of it. However when you state “the vast number of wrongful convictions, all of which as far as I know, caused by police making assumptions” i’d expect a certain reasonable, high percentage, of that ‘vast’ number to be familar to you if what you say is true – or you’re just making sweeping generalisations based on nothing much to try and make a point. I’m asking which , that’s all
fukawitribe wrote:
Citation please. I can think of a number of reasons for something being deemed a “wrongful conviction” without it being due to mere assumption, but i’ve not put the time in you must have to make a judgement about whether they’re all unconnected to the vast number of wrongful convictions.
[/quote]
This one, but there are many others https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Rachel_Nickell
Colin Stagg was targetted by the police to the exclusion of all others because the policeman in charge thought he was guilty. Birmingham six, etc.
[/quote]
All burt, all. I’m aware of cases where assumptions were pivotal, i’m waiting for your evidence that all wrongful convictions are due to it… or just say that was hyperbole, i’m easy.
[/quote]
Which bit of “…as far as I know,…” did you not understand?
[/quote]
All of it. However when you state “the vast number of wrongful convictions, all of which as far as I know, caused by police making assumptions” i’d expect a certain reasonable, high percentage, of that ‘vast’ number to be familar to you if what you say is true – or you’re just making sweeping generalisations based on nothing much to try and make a point. I’m asking which , that’s all
[/quote]
Sorry, if you don’t understand English, I can’t help.
burtthebike wrote:
I understand just fine – I just wanted you to put up or shut up, got neither, hey ho. Of this vast amount you could point out one, which rather makes your ‘as far as I can see’ moot. All wind.
Edit : burt, to be clear, I think you may be trying to say that ‘of the vast number of wrongful convictions, all of the ones I know about are due to assumptions’ rather than ‘all of the vast number of wrongful convictions, as far as I can see, are due to assumptions’ – they’re radically different statements and whichever way you read it, i’d like to see some evidence you’re basing that on rather that just noise. As it stands, your constructions reads much more like the latter.
fukawitribe wrote:
I understand just fine – I just wanted you to put up or shut up, got neither, hey ho. Of this vast amount you could point out one, which rather makes your ‘as far as I can see’ moot. All wind.
Edit : burt, to be clear, I think you may be trying to say that ‘of the vast number of wrongful convictions, all of the ones I know about are due to assumptions’ rather than ‘all of the vast number of wrongful convictions, as far as I can see, are due to assumptions’ – they’re radically different statements and whichever way you read it, i’d like to see some evidence you’re basing that on rather that just noise. As it stands, your constructions reads much more like the latter.— burtthebike
Congratulations! Suddenly you understand the meaning of “….as far as I know…” See, it wasn’t that difficult was it.
burtthebike wrote:
I’m just explaining you didn’t write what you seem to mean and you’re still missing the point – and you still don’t actually substantiate what you claim.. or is the sum total of the ‘vast number of wrongful convictions’ due to assumptions you can see equal to one ?
fukawitribe wrote:
Hole. Digging. Stop.
burtthebike wrote:
I’ll stop trying to discuss this – didn’t think you had much to back up what you said, thought you might have had something beyond a single datum though. Hey ho.
fukawitribe wrote:
I’ll stop trying to discuss this – didn’t think you had much to back up what you said, thought you might have had something beyond a single datum though. Hey ho. — burtthebike
Have you considered a Remedial English course for your comprehension problem? https://study.com/academy/course/remedial-9th-grade-english.html
@HawkinsPeter; squirrel with dictionary, or dunce’s cap perhaps?
burtthebike wrote:
@Burtthebike – I have to ask why so many of your replies mangle the quoting tags and make it confusing?
Anyhow, here’s a pic as requested
hawkinspeter wrote:
I don’t like excessive verbiage, so I shorten quotes to remove irrelevancies, and that can make it confusing.
Thanks for the pic.
burtthebike wrote:
😀 😀 😀
I’ll join you on the course then, hopefully improve ability to write what you mean…
” but just look at the vast number of wrongful convictions, all of which as far as I know, caused by police making assumptions rather than looking at the facts.”
Edit : to clarify again, ambiguious so which ?
‘wrongful convictions all of which, as far as I know, caused by..’
or
‘wrongful convictions, all of which as far as I know caused by..’
The former is inline with the point you seemed to be making about the role assumptions make in the cases in general, but over generalised, the latter infers something from your knowledge about cases in general – to wit a reasonable analysis of them, enough to make an informed opinion. I was fishing for both – neither you’ve actually replied to.
That said, you’d be a brilliant politician burt.
“…but just look at the vast number of people who have died due to suffocation, all of which as far as I know, caused by inhaling cream from doughnuts”
“Minister ? Seriously ? How many cases did it take to figure that out ?”
“It happened to Mrs Bellingham in accounts, I believe that should satisfy the Right Honourable Gentleman.”
fukawitribe wrote:
It really sounds like you are just quibbling for the sake of it.
What _else_ do you think is likely to lead to wrongful convictions? The only other option I can think of is outright corruption or a deliberate diversion from someone the police wished to protect…but it seems likely that’s rarer than the usual thing one hears in almost every case that makes the news – where the cops just ‘knew’ the suspect was a wrong ‘un, and saw it as their job to find a way to convict them.
Really, one would _hope_ that naked corruption was rarer than unthinking assumptions as a cause.
Every case I’ve heard of involved such assumptions – do you have any counter-examples?
FluffyKittenofTindalos wrote:
Yes, to an extent I am. Sometimes though, the shouty over generalisations just rile me and I like to actually try and get people to thing about what they’re saying.
Off the top of my head, apart from deliberate interference (which will account for quite a number i’d have guessed) – poor defense, issues with forensics, false confessions (either with or without misconduct), wrong application of law – i’m not going digging for more, it’s trivially searchable though.
Nope, not because there aren’t (use the first few reasons i’ve listed as a search qualifier for wrongful convictions for that) but because I don’t have an grandiose point to prove.
burtthebike wrote:
… Really!? You think a highly trained Police Officer should be dismissed for saying what he sees? The lack of Police Officers is a much bigger problem I would have thought.
The rider says that it is cracked, but that shows that it failed. Helmets are supposed to work by absorbing energy by compression, not by cracking. Take a piece of expanded polystyrene, from which helmets are made, and try to compress it, then try to snap it, and tell me which one required almost no effort.— burtthebike
Once again, you daon’t understand physics. Polystyrene is a brittle plastic. Expanded polystyrene is made up of balls that when heated by steam expand and fuse together. Because of the stiff/brittle properties of PS, as a foam it becomes a very good shock absorber in compression where all the thin walls can collapse and crumple microscopically. In tension however it’s rubbish, usually propagating cracks along the fused lines between balls. So what tends to happen in an impact is the PS will collapse in the area where it’s been crushed, making it pull away and crack from the still intact PS material around it… The squashed material though tends to partly spring back making it hard to see the underlying damage, meaning that – the cracks are usually the visable evidence that the helmet has absorbed an impact. This is entirely contrary to your dangerous misinformation that cracks mean the helmet hasn’t absorbed an impact properly.
By the way, as an aside, the collapsing of all the microscopic bubbles and walls inside the PS, which makes it so good at absorbing impact, also massively and permanently degrades it’s ability to absorb a second impact, which is a bigger problem, as it can be so difficult to see (whihc is why cracks in some ways are a good thing as it does show people that there is some damage.
As the designer of a helmet using a totally new multi-impact material, I do understand the downsides of PS, but you’re barking up the wrong tree, so please get this right in future.
This I do agree with. My personal view is we should provide rider education with much clearer messaging around the limitations of helmets, so they don’t mistakenly think it makes them invisable and therefore take stupid risks, but then leave it up to people to decide for themselves either way.
And I don’t think we should insult paramedics saying they are not worthy of vote. Let’s just get back to discussing the evidence (accurately) shall we.
AndyRed3d wrote:
Seems to me the cop said what he _thought_ he saw, not what he saw. He was putting an interpretation on it. Cops do that, and it can often be a problem. You are being disengenous in taking the suggestion of sacking as if it’s a serious possibility, rather than just an expression of annoyance at yet more propaganda and someone being treated as an authority on things outside their field.
Same goes for paramedics and voting. In fact in general its a constant dilemma in life when people who do important work and may in many ways be good people, say stupid things or appear to be idiots in relation to things outside their work. Medics in particular seem to be prone to it. Met a good few of them who had appalling, even crazy, opinions about a lot of topics.
FluffyKittenofTindalos wrote:
I agree, a lot of this crazy debate is based on misinformation and confusion on both sides, including the emergency services, who probably most of the time are just going about their (often horrible) jobs, and then getting asked dumb questions by journalists. Do we even know that they’ve not been misquoted (or judicioulsy edited) for example?
My point being, just being angry and insulting people undermines credibility. I don’t agree with Burtthebike, but I do respect that he’s generally trying to point us all to ‘the facts’. So for example, I preferred your pithy evaluation of medics, which doesn’t decend into “sack them, they don’t deserve the vote!”.
Yea! 3 cheers for people who
Yea! 3 cheers for people who never make errors of judgement. Truly we mortals are blessed that the infallible gods of cycling ride amongst us.
Mungecrundle wrote:
Or maybe we just never hear back from the subset of not helmet wearers who do have head injuries.
Lets just say it ‘mitigated’ some injuries and the extent to which the person would have been injured is difficult to calculate.
Organon wrote:
If only. Every time there is a collision involving a cyclist wearing a helmet, the helmet zealots use it to promote their cause by saying it saved the life of the cyclist, just as in this instance. The fact that they are making invalid assumptions, not supported by the facts, doesn’t prevent them. Have you written to them to tell them it didn’t save his life, and might, and only might, have mitigated his injuries?
As pointed out in a previous post, he could have avoided the situation entirely if he’d been riding within his capabilities, but because he was wearing a helmet, he rode beyond them and crashed.
I’ve fallen off a few times, and been knocked off a few times, all without a helmet, but I’m not dead. If I’d been wearing a helmet for any of those collisions, I’m sure the para-medics and police would all swear that it had saved my life.
Cycle helmets, like the lottery, are a tax on gullibility.
Mungecrundle wrote:
I’ve made errors in judgement, plenty of them, but this is RECKLESS not a plain careless error.
I’ve ridden down mountain passes with tight chicanes that had a thousand feet drop t’other side of the barriers but I ensured I scrubbed off the speed to make sure I got around the corner AND took account that other motor traffic that I couldn’t see around those tight bends might well be swinging out across the dividing line so I couldn’t take liberties. I’ve ridden on major trunk roads and NSL dual carriageways at rush hour taking strong primary so I was reducing the chances of being squeezed/close passed, even if the natural instinct is to ride in the gutter. I’ve ridden many a time on the inside of an HGV/bus, filtered on the outside of static traffic in the opposite lane but always making the calculation as to what possibilities may occur, even then I’ve made slight errors, miscalculations but because I held something in hand, wasn’t pushing matters to the nth degree which too many people do, even those errors that I do make haven’t ended up with me praising some deity for my life being spared.
This isn’t abnormal/out of the ordinary, it’s what a lot of people do every day, many good cyclists do this every day, I’m far from being alone in my thinking/approach to making progress but still being safe. When I did my advanced driving the police instructor (one of the guys who trains/instructs their traffic police) who was assessing me said something about one aspect of my narration on the test drive, he actually made a mistake in presuming xx, I’d made account for it, he was a bit arrogant and said it wasn’t something to consider, I disagreed particularly given the narrowness of the highway, the proximity of the potential hazard and the diminished thinking of those exiting near to the road (a pub at lunchtime in a village). People make errors BUT if you allow for errors by adding in a margin not just for oneself but errors by others then you are vastly more likely to not end up in the situation that the person in the article did. Learning and probably more important recognising your error in the first instance is huge.
Part and parcel as to why helmets (in any activity) end up not being the panacea people think they are – or should that be not reflected in the statistics, is that those that adorn them take far greater risks when donning them, particularly those who ride at a level that you might say is ‘competitive’ even if they aren’t in a race and also children/those with limited/restricted judgement for whatever reason.
Making silly snide comments that aren’t conbstructive isn’t helpful in any way shape or form.
Whatever the reason I’m glad the rider is ok, I just hope that he has learnt a valuable life lesson, however given the number of incidents that noddy hat wearers seem to experience I doubt it given he’s obviously a risk taker given one of the twitter responses!
BehindTheBikesheds wrote:
I’ve made errors in judgement, plenty of them, but this is RECKLESS not a plain careless error.
I’ve ridden down mountain passes with tight chicanes that had a thousand feet drop t’other side of the barriers but I ensured I scrubbed off the speed to make sure I got around the corner AND took account that other motor traffic that I couldn’t see around those tight bends might well be swinging out across the dividing line so I couldn’t take liberties. I’ve ridden on major trunk roads and NSL dual carriageways at rush hour taking strong primary so I was reducing the chances of being squeezed/close passed, even if the natural instinct is to ride in the gutter. I’ve ridden many a time on the inside of an HGV/bus, filtered on the outside of static traffic in the opposite lane but always making the calculation as to what possibilities may occur, even then I’ve made slight errors, miscalculations but because I held something in hand, wasn’t pushing matters to the nth degree which too many people do, even those errors that I do make haven’t ended up with me praising some deity for my life being spared.
This isn’t abnormal/out of the ordinary, it’s what a lot of people do every day, many good cyclists do this every day, I’m far from being alone in my thinking/approach to making progress but still being safe. When I did my advanced driving the police instructor (one of the guys who trains/instructs their traffic police) who was assessing me said something about one aspect of my narration on the test drive, he actually made a mistake in presuming xx, I’d made account for it, he was a bit arrogant and said it wasn’t something to consider, I disagreed particularly given the narrowness of the highway, the proximity of the potential hazard and the diminished thinking of those exiting near to the road (a pub at lunchtime in a village). People make errors BUT if you allow for errors by adding in a margin not just for oneself but errors by others then you are vastly more likely to not end up in the situation that the person in the article did. Learning and probably more important recognising your error in the first instance is huge.
Part and parcel as to why helmets (in any activity) end up not being the panacea people think they are – or should that be not reflected in the statistics, is that those that adorn them take far greater risks when donning them, particularly those who ride at a level that you might say is ‘competitive’ even if they aren’t in a race and also children/those with limited/restricted judgement for whatever reason.
Making silly snide comments that aren’t conbstructive isn’t helpful in any way shape or form.
Whatever the reason I’m glad the rider is ok, I just hope that he has learnt a valuable life lesson, however given the number of incidents that noddy hat wearers seem to experience I doubt it given he’s obviously a risk taker given one of the twitter responses!— Mungecrundle
But as you repeatedly make clear, you think you are a far better cyclist than pretty much any cyclist who ever lived including pros.
Funny how someone who believes they are the bees fucking knees on a bicycle seems to get run over quite so often and cannot seem to go more than 1/2 a mile without coming up with yet another story about yet another other idiot driver putting his life in danger though…
Mungecrundle wrote:
I’ve made errors in judgement, plenty of them, but this is RECKLESS not a plain careless error.
I’ve ridden down mountain passes with tight chicanes that had a thousand feet drop t’other side of the barriers but I ensured I scrubbed off the speed to make sure I got around the corner AND took account that other motor traffic that I couldn’t see around those tight bends might well be swinging out across the dividing line so I couldn’t take liberties. I’ve ridden on major trunk roads and NSL dual carriageways at rush hour taking strong primary so I was reducing the chances of being squeezed/close passed, even if the natural instinct is to ride in the gutter. I’ve ridden many a time on the inside of an HGV/bus, filtered on the outside of static traffic in the opposite lane but always making the calculation as to what possibilities may occur, even then I’ve made slight errors, miscalculations but because I held something in hand, wasn’t pushing matters to the nth degree which too many people do, even those errors that I do make haven’t ended up with me praising some deity for my life being spared.
This isn’t abnormal/out of the ordinary, it’s what a lot of people do every day, many good cyclists do this every day, I’m far from being alone in my thinking/approach to making progress but still being safe. When I did my advanced driving the police instructor (one of the guys who trains/instructs their traffic police) who was assessing me said something about one aspect of my narration on the test drive, he actually made a mistake in presuming xx, I’d made account for it, he was a bit arrogant and said it wasn’t something to consider, I disagreed particularly given the narrowness of the highway, the proximity of the potential hazard and the diminished thinking of those exiting near to the road (a pub at lunchtime in a village). People make errors BUT if you allow for errors by adding in a margin not just for oneself but errors by others then you are vastly more likely to not end up in the situation that the person in the article did. Learning and probably more important recognising your error in the first instance is huge.
Part and parcel as to why helmets (in any activity) end up not being the panacea people think they are – or should that be not reflected in the statistics, is that those that adorn them take far greater risks when donning them, particularly those who ride at a level that you might say is ‘competitive’ even if they aren’t in a race and also children/those with limited/restricted judgement for whatever reason.
Making silly snide comments that aren’t conbstructive isn’t helpful in any way shape or form.
Whatever the reason I’m glad the rider is ok, I just hope that he has learnt a valuable life lesson, however given the number of incidents that noddy hat wearers seem to experience I doubt it given he’s obviously a risk taker given one of the twitter responses!
— BehindTheBikesheds But as you repeatedly make clear, you think you are a far better cyclist than pretty much any cyclist who ever lived including pros. Funny how someone who believes they are the bees fucking knees on a bicycle seems to get run over quite so often and cannot seem to go more than 1/2 a mile without coming up with yet another story about yet another other idiot driver putting his life in danger though…— Mungecrundle
Most pros and amateurs these days are dumb as fuck, they are far worse than their generation before them. We know this is a fact in terms of traumatic injuries and crashes. As an athlete I’m not a third of what they are, in bike handling terms I fall short too, in terms of actual thinking and understanding there’s few in the pro peleton who are anywhere near close to me and many thousands of others in terms of being safe on the public highway.
HTH
BehindTheBikesheds wrote:
Rapha Nadal wrote:
Is it a hat Yes, does Noddy wear a hat, yes. typical of you really, I expected nothing less, calling it a noddy hat is not snide, get a grip ffs.
BehindTheBikesheds wrote:
Are helmets hats? No, they are helmets, hence the different word. Do astronauts wear ‘space hats?’ Do you seek to denigrate their function through comparison with a hat, yes. Are bike helmets conical like a so-called Noddy hat? No. So you are wrong on two counts straight away. Can we expect to see your usual bile filled clap trap in the comments, inevitably. I hope your magical reserves of skill and arrogance never run out; you are in for a surprise, thankfully you won’t have long to regret your position.
BehindTheBikesheds wrote:
You may wish to look up the definition of “snide” and then the tone of your delivery.
Nice to see the anti-helmet
Nice to see the anti-helmet brigade have arrived on the scene as fast as usual.
It’s fine to choose not to wear a helmet, in the same way that it’s fine to choose not to wear a seatbelt, but I certainly know which one I would choose. I had an accident a few months ago and can remember the sound of the side of my helmet scraping along the ground for a good few seconds. Had I not been wearing my helmet, I would have been missing a patch of hair and probably a bit of ear too. But because I was, no damage to my head at all.
I just don’t understand why people go out of their way to tell the world that they don’t wear a helmet and that everyone else is a fool for wearing one, as if wearing one is an admission of lack of skill or a tendency to cycle dangerously.
We get it. You’re a big boy who doesn’t need a helmet. We all wish we could be as cool, skilled, and responsible as you.
fixedwhip wrote:
I don’t know anyone who is anti-helmet, but I know a lot of people who are anti-lies, myths, rumours, fairy tales, anecdotes and “helmet saved my life” stories. But perhaps you like all those things; your choice. I’ll stick to reliable data.
fixedwhip wrote:
How do you know that somebody is vegan? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.
How do you know a cyclist doesn’t wear a helmet? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.
Rapha Nadal wrote:
How do you know a cyclist is gullible? They’ll tell you their helmet saved their life, and of all their mates.
fixedwhip wrote:
Though your helmet increased the size of your head, making it more likely that you came in contact with the road.
In this story, the bloke had a glancing blow. Perhaps if he had no helmet, he would not have hit the bucket.
Reminds me of that scene from Ricky gervais ‘afterlife’ where he interviews a very fat lady in hospital who was pierced by a stake. “The fat saved my life”. ” Yeah, but did you not think if you hadn’t been so fat, the stake may have missed you completely and you wouldn’t be in hospital ?”
Lucky he didn’t come head on
Lucky he didn’t come head on with a family out with their trailer bikes. At least he only hurt himself… this time.
At a guess, the cyclist is
At a guess, the cyclist is now going to start a petition calling for helmets to be mandatory because he’s convinced (rightly or wrongly) that it saved his life.
New Forest residents, famously anti-bicycle at the best of times, will start a petition calling for cyclists to be banned from the area because of the danger they pose to poor innocent tractors.
And road.cc will use it as helmet clickbait for the next 3 years as it crops up again and again on Facebook alongside L-shaped cranks and disc brakes.
Hmm, all comments on helmet
Hmm, all comments on helmet vs no helmet but nobody cares about a tractor with the bucket down on an open road?
pretty sure this should not happen!
Nepomucene wrote:
But, y’know: “farmers”.
I remember years ago driving across the Cambrian Mountains in mid Wales, coming round a bend to find a tractor happily towing a trailer significantly slower than the speed limit (obviously!) but with no lights and no reflectors. At about 8 pm in November. Very very dangerous.
I wonder if he starts telling
I wonder if he starts telling people in motors or pedestrians who have head injuries that he attends to that a helmet might have saved them injury and that it could save their life. what about an elderly person who trips at home and cracks their skull, what if they die Les are you going to tell the family that if they were wearing a helmet it wouldv’e saved their life??
I bet you are all over that poor sod who has a seizure/heart attack and bangs their head accusing them of being irresposible for not wearing a Kask helmet, you know your favoured hat type that saved your life?
if it’s good enough for you Les I’m sure you’ll be pressing the NHS to make sure you have one for when you’re driving and also for your all colleagues and the patients in hospitals too, you never know when a large machine might be coming around that ‘blind’ corner down the hospital corridors …
There were nearly 156,000 head injury admittances to hospitals in 2016/17 Les (according to Headway), for the same year there were just over 3000 total cycling serious injuries of all types, somewhere between 800-1200 of those were head injuries 9depending on whose guess you believe). I think you should be focusing on helmets elsewhere sonshine!
There’s none so blind that cannot see!
This is a throwaway news
This is a throwaway news article not a headline story so no point scrutinising the details. I always wear a helmet because I always have and always will. I ride with complete disregard for my head as stated but I’m so so careful not to injure any other part of my body
This is a throwaway news
This is a throwaway news article not a headline story so no point scrutinising the details. I always wear a helmet because I always have and always will. I ride with complete disregard for my head as stated but I’m so so careful not to injure any other part of my body
Funny how certain people turn
Funny how certain people turn to victim blaming if the cyclist dares to say a piece of safety equipment did it’s job.
No doubt if some form of abrasion resistant lycra was invented the same people would be telling everyone how they’ve ridden for 50 years and never lost any skin if some guy said it was lucky they were wearing it.
I remember my mate crashing his motorbike and somehow his helmet appeared to be unscathed. Obviously he did not need to bother!
Rick_Rude wrote:
Clearly you don’t understand what ‘victim-blaming’ means. Or you do, but you choose to forget because you want to hit back at those who aren’t true-believers regarding helmets.
To be clear – who are you saying this particular cyclist is a victim of? From whom is the ‘blame’ being transferred?
Dipping my toe into this
Dipping my toe into this argument: it seems that mr goddard was very very lucky to escape from this collision relatively unscathed. Whether or not his polystyrene safety hat saved his life or even contributed toward his good luck to any degree is, in my opinion, unproven.
brooksby wrote:
No, it’s proven. The police said so.
And the earth is flat, in my opinion and that of helmet zealots. Proof is so last century.
Get ready, folks. Mandatory
Get ready, folks. Mandatory helmet laws are coming.
I know this road. Narrow,
I know this road. Narrow, twisting, around 10%, with high hedges, and roaming wildlife (donkeys, horses, the occasional sheep). Not one to be testing your descending bollocks on. There’s nowhere to bail out to – no grass verges, etc.
The helmet did not save his
The helmet did not save his life. It was a tacit rejection of facts. Oh, and infrastructure, isn’t that what you non-helmet wearing fuckups always say? “Helmets don’t save lives. INFRASTRUCRUE saves lives!”
A440 wrote:
Are you feeling ok?
A440 wrote:
I can’t think why we haven’t considered infrastrucrue before, in lower case or shouted in capitals by someone who doesn’t understand anything about safety and can’t spell.
Are some of you willing to
Are some of you willing to say a helmet can NEVER be a contributing factor in whether someone lived or suffered lesser injury?
Why do I have to wear one as a motorcyclist?
Rick_Rude wrote:
Of course a helmet could prevent death or injury, but the evidence shows that the death rate of cyclists doesn’t fall with increased helmet wearing, so either helmets don’t actually prevent death, or they prevent some but cause other deaths, so the risk remains the same. What would be the point of wearing something which doesn’t actually reduce risk?
You have to wear a motorcycle helmet because the politicians/police/health professionals lied about them, in exactly the same way they are lying about cycle helmets. The evidence that motorcycle helmets have been effective is similar to cycle helmets; almost entirely absent apart from some dodgy research by biased scientists.
burtthebike wrote:
Except in the UK where the fatality and KSI rate both fell as the helmet wearing rate increased.
Stop lying to people Burt.
Rich_cb wrote:
Of course a helmet could prevent death or injury, but the evidence shows that the death rate of cyclists doesn’t fall with increased helmet wearing— Rich_cb Except in the UK where the fatality and KSI rate both fell as the helmet wearing rate increased. Stop lying to people Burt.— burtthebike
So you respond with a point that doesn’t actually address the claim you are replying to, then accuse the other of ‘lying’. You are a slippery debater.
That you can find one correlation of the two stats doesn’t disprove the claim that that the previous poster made.
(Granted, they don’t provide any evidence for their claim either, so the whole question remains open, but your response isn’t counter-evidence, becuase to say ‘A falls with increasing B’ implicitly claims universality and causality so finding one case where A happened to fall with increasing B doesn’t disprove the denial of that claim)
FluffyKittenofTindalos wrote:
Burt claimed there wasn’t a correlation.
There is a correlation.
Burt is wrong.
He knows he’s wrong yet he keeps trying to mislead people.
Burt is a liar.
Rich_cb wrote:
So you respond with a point that doesn’t actually address the claim you are replying to, then accuse the other of ‘lying’. You are a slippery debater.
That you can find one correlation of the two stats doesn’t disprove the claim that that the previous poster made.
(Granted, they don’t provide any evidence for their claim either, so the whole question remains open, but your response isn’t counter-evidence, becuase to say ‘A falls with increasing B’ implicitly claims universality and causality so finding one case where A happened to fall with increasing B doesn’t disprove the denial of that claim)
— Rich_cb Burt claimed there wasn’t a correlation. There is a correlation. Burt is wrong. He knows he’s wrong yet he keeps trying to mislead people. Burt is a liar.— FluffyKittenofTindalos
You aren’t thinking clearly. He didn’t claim ‘there wasn’t a correlation’, at least not in the post you were replying to. He was clearly denying causation , or at the very least denying the existence of a universal and necessary correlation. He did not say ‘in not one single case ever has cycle-helmet wearing risen as road deaths have fallen’. He didn’t say ‘the figures don’t correlate in the UK for this particular period’. He was clearly claiming the evidence shows there’s no necessary and predictable correlation, and that there was no thefore causal relationship. That’s a different claim. Albeit an unevidenced one.
I don’t see you have any basis for calling him a ‘liar’.
(I’m not at all convinced the evidence proves this negative conclusion either, admittedly…so, er, he might not be able to back up that claim after all)
FluffyKittenofTindalos wrote:
You’re interpreting his post in a different way to me. I disagree with your interpretation but can’t see much point discussing it beyond that.
Burt has form for denying any correlation exists repeatedly so I think it’s a bit of a stretch to assume he isn’t do exactly that this time.
He lies about this topic repeatedly.
Hence why I call him a liar.
Rich_cb wrote:
— Rich_cb You’re interpreting his post in a different way to me. I disagree with your interpretation but can’t see much point discussing it beyond that. Burt has form for denying any correlation exists repeatedly so I think it’s a bit of a stretch to assume he isn’t do exactly that this time. He lies about this topic repeatedly. Hence why I call him a liar.— FluffyKittenofTindalos
OK, enough. I generally refuse to indulge in debate with idiots, for the obvious reason that they will drag you down to their level and beat you with their experience, but I’m tired of being called a liar.
Either apologise or I will request that you are banned.
burtthebike wrote:
Effect of Italy’s motorcycle helmet law on traumatic brain injuries
https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/9/3/257
“data from the survey showed that the number of two wheeled motorized vehicles, in use throughout the country, did not decrease after the introduction of the new law.”
Stop lying and I’ll stop calling you a liar.
Off you run to teacher.
burtthebike wrote:
Of course a helmet could prevent death or injury, but the evidence shows that the death rate of cyclists doesn’t fall with increased helmet wearing, so either helmets don’t actually prevent death, or they prevent some but cause other deaths, so the risk remains the same. What would be the point of wearing something which doesn’t actually reduce risk?
You have to wear a motorcycle helmet because the politicians/police/health professionals lied about them, in exactly the same way they are lying about cycle helmets. The evidence that motorcycle helmets have been effective is similar to cycle helmets; almost entirely absent apart from some dodgy research by biased scientists.— Rick_Rude
Actually there is quite a bit of evidence showing that motorcycle helmets save lives. When Michigan dropped its rulling on motorcyclists needing helmets just a few years back, the death rate amongst motorcyclists soared.
There are a lot of differences between motorcyclists and the motorcycle helmets they use and cyclists and the cycle helmets they use. To put the two key differences briefly; motorcycles typically travel a lot faster than bicycle and motorcycle helmets are vastly more protective than cycle helmets.
There is no study showing the safety benefits of cycle helmets that has not been criticised for the methodology/results.
OldRidgeback wrote:
Actually there is quite a bit of evidence showing that motorcycle helmets save lives. When Michigan dropped its rulling on motorcyclists needing helmets just a few years back, the death rate amongst motorcyclists soared.
There are a lot of differences between motorcyclists and the motorcycle helmets they use and cyclists and the cycle helmets they use. To put the two key differences briefly; motorcycles typically travel a lot faster than bicycle and motorcycle helmets are vastly more protective than cycle helmets.
There is no study showing the safety benefits of cycle helmets that has not been criticised for the methodology/results.
[/quote]
There is some evidence that motorcycle helmets save lives, but just like the cycle helmet research showing massive benefits, the methodology is dodgy to say the least. The main “evidence” is hospital studies showing that the ratio of motorcyclists killed not wearing a helmet went up after the helmet law was withdrawn. To call this dodgy research would be a compliment of the highest order.
There is at least as much, and more reliable, evidence showing the opposite, just like cycle helmets, the UK for instance. When the motorcycle helmet law was introduced, there was an immediate fall in the number of motorcyclist deaths, so the law was declared a success, except that one researcher dug a little deeper and found that the reduction in deaths occurred mainly between the hours of 2200-0200. Unless the helmets became magically effective between those hours, the reduction was due to something else, so what else happened at the same time? Well the same act that brought in the helmet law also brought in the drink driving laws and the breathalyser, which is clearly a much more likely candidate for the reduction.
In Italy, one county decided to implement a motorcycle helmet law, and the death rate fell by about 40%, again, declared a success. But the number of motorcycle registrations fell by about 45%, so the death reduction was actually less than the fall in the number of motorcyclists.
burtthebike wrote:
Here’s a review of studies on motorbike helmets and is probably better than just looking at hospital admissions: https://www.cochrane.org/CD004333/INJ_helmets-are-shown-to-reduce-motorcyclist-head-injury-and-death
Conclusions: Motorcycle helmets reduce the risk of death and head injury in motorcycle riders who crash. Further well-conducted research is required to determine the effects of helmets and different helmet types on mortality, head, neck and facial injuries. However, the findings suggest that global efforts to reduce road traffic injuries may be facilitated by increasing helmet use by motorcyclists.
hawkinspeter wrote:
Here’s a review of studies on motorbike helmets and is probably better than just looking at hospital admissions: https://www.cochrane.org/CD004333/INJ_helmets-are-shown-to-reduce-motorcyclist-head-injury-and-death
Conclusions: Motorcycle helmets reduce the risk of death and head injury in motorcycle riders who crash. Further well-conducted research is required to determine the effects of helmets and different helmet types on mortality, head, neck and facial injuries. However, the findings suggest that global efforts to reduce road traffic injuries may be facilitated by increasing helmet use by motorcyclists.
[/quote]
Sorry, but after the utterly disgusting, totally biased Cochrane review of cycle helmets that broke every one of their own criteria for such reviews, I no longer consider Cochrane reviews reliable. They used to be the gold standard, but now they are as valuable as junk bonds.
burtthebike wrote:
Actually there is quite a bit of evidence showing that motorcycle helmets save lives. When Michigan dropped its rulling on motorcyclists needing helmets just a few years back, the death rate amongst motorcyclists soared.
There are a lot of differences between motorcyclists and the motorcycle helmets they use and cyclists and the cycle helmets they use. To put the two key differences briefly; motorcycles typically travel a lot faster than bicycle and motorcycle helmets are vastly more protective than cycle helmets.
There is no study showing the safety benefits of cycle helmets that has not been criticised for the methodology/results. — OldRidgeback
There is some evidence that motorcycle helmets save lives, but just like the cycle helmet research showing massive benefits, the methodology is dodgy to say the least. The main “evidence” is hospital studies showing that the ratio of motorcyclists killed not wearing a helmet went up after the helmet law was withdrawn. To call this dodgy research would be a compliment of the highest order.
There is at least as much, and more reliable, evidence showing the opposite, just like cycle helmets, the UK for instance. When the motorcycle helmet law was introduced, there was an immediate fall in the number of motorcyclist deaths, so the law was declared a success, except that one researcher dug a little deeper and found that the reduction in deaths occurred mainly between the hours of 2200-0200. Unless the helmets became magically effective between those hours, the reduction was due to something else, so what else happened at the same time? Well the same act that brought in the helmet law also brought in the drink driving laws and the breathalyser, which is clearly a much more likely candidate for the reduction.
In Italy, one county decided to implement a motorcycle helmet law, and the death rate fell by about 40%, again, declared a success. But the number of motorcycle registrations fell by about 45%, so the death reduction was actually less than the fall in the number of motorcyclists.
[/quote]
South East Asia has a horrendous road fatality rate. Poor driving, poor roads, excessive speeds and DUI are all serious issues. The problem is particularly bad in Thailand (with about 11 times the road death rate of the UK for s similar population size). Motorcycles are very popular and understandably, motorcycle users figure highly in the crash statistics. The number of road deaths in every single South East Asian country is increasing, bar one. Since Vietnam introduced compulsory helmet use for motorcyclists a couple of years ago, the country’s road fatality rate has dropped. Go figure.
Rick_Rude wrote:
A motorcycle helmet is very different to ordinary bike helmets. The full-face design is much better for protecting the face and I believe motorcycle helmets don’t just use expanded polystyrene for their impact absorption. The outside shell is remarkably different as well – motorcycle helmets often use polycarbonate which is tougher and harder than the thin plastic shell of bike helmets (polycarbonate shells are part of the impact protection which is why you should never drop a motorcycle helmet and then re-use when it looks undamaged). There’s quite a bit of foam padding in use in motorcycle helmets and that can absorb a lot of the decceleration forces that would otherwise mush your brain against your skull.
So, if you want decent head protection, wear a full face motorcycle helmet on your bike. They have much more rigorous testing and there’s much more evidence about their efficacy.
However, full face helmets also restrict your vision, your hearing and heat dissipation as well as being significantly heavier than bike helmets, which is why it’s probably not worth wearing one all the time on a bike as most people don’t crash very often, if at all.
hawkinspeter wrote:
A motorcycle helmet is very different to ordinary bike helmets. The full-face design is much better for protecting the face and I believe motorcycle helmets don’t just use expanded polystyrene for their impact absorption. The outside shell is remarkably different as well – motorcycle helmets often use polycarbonate which is tougher and harder than the thin plastic shell of bike helmets (polycarbonate shells are part of the impact protection which is why you should never drop a motorcycle helmet and then re-use when it looks undamaged). There’s quite a bit of foam padding in use in motorcycle helmets and that can absorb a lot of the decceleration forces that would otherwise mush your brain against your skull.
So, if you want decent head protection, wear a full face motorcycle helmet on your bike. They have much more rigorous testing and there’s much more evidence about their efficacy.
However, full face helmets also restrict your vision, your hearing and heat dissipation as well as being significantly heavier than bike helmets, which is why it’s probably not worth wearing one all the time on a bike as most people don’t crash very often, if at all.— Rick_Rude
Motorcycle helmets are rated to provide protection up to about 16mph, and the evidence about their efficacy is like that of cycle helmets; absent or extremely contentious.
burtthebike wrote:
Try telling that to the guy I scraped off the M4 one morning – his back tyre blew at something in the region of 70mph (he’d only just joined the motorway as I went past J12) and I watched him catapulted in the air.
Thanks to the helmet, he still had a head and face left when he landed – I’ll never forget the state of his visor. Proper leathers saved the rest of him from more serious injury.
My uncle crashed his motorbike into a tree when some drunk eejit stepped out in front of him – I’ve not seen it, but I’m told it had quite a sizable dent in his crash helmet. He still spent a couple of weeks in hospital.
hawkinspeter wrote:
A motorcycle helmet is very different to ordinary bike helmets. The full-face design is much better for protecting the face and I believe motorcycle helmets don’t just use expanded polystyrene for their impact absorption. The outside shell is remarkably different as well – motorcycle helmets often use polycarbonate which is tougher and harder than the thin plastic shell of bike helmets (polycarbonate shells are part of the impact protection which is why you should never drop a motorcycle helmet and then re-use when it looks undamaged). There’s quite a bit of foam padding in use in motorcycle helmets and that can absorb a lot of the decceleration forces that would otherwise mush your brain against your skull.
So, if you want decent head protection, wear a full face motorcycle helmet on your bike. They have much more rigorous testing and there’s much more evidence about their efficacy.
However, full face helmets also restrict your vision, your hearing and heat dissipation as well as being significantly heavier than bike helmets, which is why it’s probably not worth wearing one all the time on a bike as most people don’t crash very often, if at all.— Rick_Rude
No sorry, you’re actually wrong – motorcycle helmets use exactly the same polystyrene inside as the shock absorbing layer. The outside shell is made of either polycarbonate (cheaper helmets) or fibre reinforced plastic, i.e. fibre glass or Kevlar (on the most expensive), which is intended as a strong anti-puncture and load spreading layer.
Motorcyle helmets are therefore basically exactly the same principle, they’re just designed for much bigger/faster impacts. To be at all acceptable to a cyclist, bike helmets also have to be lighter and much better ventillated for blindingly obvious reasons.
AndyRed3d wrote:
I see. To be honest, I was just thinking about the foam inserts and didn’t realise that there was EPS on the inside of the shell. I feel like I’ve learnt something today, but I’ve still got a hankering for some graphs comparing different helmet types.
Rick_Rude wrote:
I don’t see the point of getting into an argument about motorbike helmets. They are completely different things in a completely different context (for one thing I personally woudn’t mind at all if they deterred people from motorcycling – it would reduce the noise level round here noticably…if they could just ban police helicopters as well that would help my sleep).
But I don’t think helmets can never be a factor, and if someone’s reason for wearing one is “I reckon it might help in some way in some situation, and I’m risk-averse, so thought I might as well, when I remember to use it and can face carting the thing around when off the bike” that would be better than piously going on about ‘”taking responsibility for my own safety”.
And an obvious response is to your question is why does it only apply to cycling rather than all the time? It could be a contributing factor to surviving a fall in the shower or falling down the stairs, or as a driver in a car crash, but so what?
(I’m quite sure if helmets were compulsory for showering or driving we’d get a few ‘helmet saved my life’ anecdotes about those cases as well)
I can’t wait for mandatory
I can’t wait for mandatory helmet laws.
Not because I particularly care about anyone else’s headwear choices, not really, but because the collective meltdown will be unbelievably epic. I suspect the noise of all the heads exploding in pure rage will be audible from the ISS…
After having 2 accidents
After having 2 accidents which wrote both helmets off , i can’t really see why i would change my mind about always wearing a helmet.
Its ok saying ride within your limits,read the road,etc,but sometimes shit happens.I know a helmet won’t save my life in a high speed impact but it just might stop me leaving a trail of skin and blood on the road.
joeegg wrote:
A written off helmet usually involves it splitting/cracking, ergo the forces absorbed by the helmet will have been a tiny portion of the total firces involved that actually your skull and brain took. This is in part why we don’t see injury reductions in compulsary wearing countries or countries that have high rates or users like the UK. Additionally you wearing the helmets themselves is often a contributary factor to the incident occuring in the first place.
The common ‘trap’ or cycle that helmet wearers fall into is that they have a crash, dent/damage/write off their helmet, think it did its job and then that solidifies their belief so go and buy another one., then rinse and repeat.
You only need look at the significant change in crashes and traumatic injuries within the pro ranks since mandation of helmets to know that this is false reasoning, those increases are actually despite better brakes/tyres, more safety protocols so marshals/barriers et al.
I’ve come off my bike a few times of due to my own fault, I’ve even been struck a fair few times by motors and a teen running out right into my path. Two fractured elbows (one motor + aformentioned teen), fractured hand bones from same teen incident and some bruising/grazing on legs/arse/knee/arm. That’s over 35 years of road riding, lots of it in high density traffic with all the usual morons/big bits of metal plus lots of high speed riding for leisure.
Maybe I’m lucky, or maybe helmets are total bollocks and/or the risk of head injury when cycling is massively over egged, given the numbers we see admitted to hospitals/medical centres etc for head injuries from the general population – circa 1.3million per year across the UK, and the admittances into hospital from that are about 160,000 I’d say the risk to you of a head injury is greater sans helmet away from cycling statistically, you know, shot happens but for some reason we only account for that shit happening when on bikes and not elsewhere in our lives. Why when the risks are already proven to be greater for other activities that isn’t cycling? Why when we already know that risk taking when wearing protection (effective or not) is proven to make people change their behaviour in a negative outcome way.
Maybe you are changing the odds by actually wearing a helmet, maybe you will have another incident involving striking your head again due to you wearing a helmet, the chances are you will IMO.
Have a think about it, maybe read up on the stats and your own incidents and why they might have occured, have a think about what the helmet did/didn’t do, how much a helmet can actually absorb in best case/in a lab situations and compare that to the firces involved and ask yourself did the helmet really make a difference, did the extra circumference of it actually mean I hit something/something hit me when without it may not have (also take into consideration the kinetic energy of the helmet too).
There’s a lot of factors as to why cycle helmets do not increase safety, but the main reasons as I see it as tyo why people do not question their efficacy is that people are either not interested because they’ve been told by a higher authority so it must be so and/or they use personal anecdote (which in itself does not equate to proof of a helmet actually working to protect) to justify continue wearing like yourself.
The rationale confounds logic in all honesty, some don a safety aid for x activity despite the evidence proving that said safety aid doesn’t change outcomes, indeed makes them worse/more likely, yet the same people won’t/don’t wear them (and even think doing so is ludicrous) for more riskier activities/one were there is greater chance of injury that the safety aid supposedly may help (from the point of view of the wearer). This makes no sense whatsoever.
joeegg wrote:
Isn’t it funny that shit happens much more often to those who wear helmets? I wonder if there’s a reason for that.
I can think of 1 particular
I can think of 1 particular occasion where I had a crash caused entirely by mechanical failure of the bike, resulting in me being catapulted over the handlebars and leaving quite a bit of skin from various parts of my body smeared along the tarmac, took one knuckle practically down to the bone and chipped both elbows.
Nobody else involved, good visibility on a straight bit of cycle track and didn’t hit anything.
I was wearing a helmet at the time and the damage to that says that yes, my head hit the floor and I would have had one hell of a nasty scrape across the left side of my forehead and side of my head.
So, while I’m fully aware that a helmet won’t save me in every situation, there are some situations that are beyond my control where it may well be a benefit and I’m therefore going to choose to wear one.
But I’m no evangelist and if you choose not to, then that’s absolutely fine with me.
What I would advise, though, is that if you hire a bike that you don’t just take it on trust that the mechanic that put it together is in any way competent and has actually installed the front wheel correctly!
You gotta love this article
You gotta love this article hey?
Written to get us all up and running, and here we go… helmet debate #473!
And don’t we love it?
In the future, maybe not that far in to the future, we’ll all look back on these discussions from our helmet legislated world and wonder what all the fuss is about.
And what that fuss will be about is being mugged off by society ignorance.
I personally don’t wear a helmet 90% of the time. when I do wear one its for racing and for MTB.
I’m no anti-cyclist crusader, however I struggle to overcome the following;
– the risk that helmets mitigate against are incredibly small. Chances are, and very high chances at that, is that you are not going to fall off your bike. If you are unlucky enough to do so, the chances are, and still very good chances too, is that you are not going to bang your head hard enough to do any real damage. Fundamentally you don’t need to be mitigating against what are freak events.
– The limitation of helmet design. Helmets can save lives, and they can certainly reduce the chances of many injuries… for instance, piercing injuries, scrapes, and to a degree impact damage. However of those three, the one a helmet does the least is reduce impact damage. If we are honest, the one we are really hoping the helmet will help us avoid is impact damage. It is incredbly rare that a helmet truly saves your life, generally a helmet lives in the world of damage limitation. When they save lives, really make that life and death difference, the injured party is in no position to be posting on social media the same day.
– The Jazz hands – I’m a cynical git, and I have to say I struggle to buy it. You put a helmet on your head to protect it. In doing so, you increase the weight and size of your head, significantly increasing the chances of hitting it in an accident. Then, because helmets are very fragile, even a minor hit will destroy a helmet… and in doing so, somehow confirms its life saving qualities. Come on, think about it?
I could list personal anecdotes that support my views, but I’ll save you as they are just that, anecdotes. And this is the key thing I’d stress. No one is anti-helmet, not really, but many people are anti bullshit anecdotes being touted as fact to push legislation that is not required or widely wanted.
Chris, we could argue that
Chris, we could argue that seatbelts and all the ‘safety’ devices in cars are part of the problem, how many people now reverse and barely glance backwards as their parking sensors are beeping at them?
Crashes in the 1970s saw many more people flying through windows, add to seatbelts ABS, airbags, crash zones et al yet fatalities are still happening. The obvious answer here is people’s perception of their own safety meaning they drive like Twunts. Meanwhile, if we’re not lit up like a Christmas tree in broad daylight or wearing polystyrene then it’s our fault that the drunk, uninsured idiot, speeding along ran into us!
So the plod attended a ‘Car V
So the plod attended a ‘Car V Tractor’ incident? Well it’s definitely not a car, and looking at the photo, I don’t think it’s actually a tractor is it? Looks more like ‘heavy plant’ to me. And no, I don’t mean a Triffid.
Sorry to deflect from the thread, but soooooo bored of the helmet debate!
Fine point, is that an
Fine point, is that an articulated loader or handler? Could also be telescopic.
I regularly cycle around that
I regularly cycle around that area, and I’ve been brought down a couple of times by errant wildlife, and often encounter big farm machinery on the lanes around there. Regardless of how shamazeballs a rider you believe you are, should you encounter a sudden unplanned dismount, or get clipped by several tons of machinery, and your head takes the brunt of the impact, I am of the belief that wearing a lid is a sensible precaution.
AndyRed3d wrote:
Thanks, not sure why a car at 100 would be 60 but 12.3 gives 150 or 1200.
Then again this is another topic where I’m regretting not doing A level physics. This may need to be rectified in the autumn.
hirsute wrote:
Thanks, not sure why a car at 100 would be 60 but 12.3 gives 150 or 1200.
Then again this is another topic where I’m regretting not doing A level physics. This may need to be rectified in the autumn.— AndyRed3d
Hirsute don’t worry – you don’t need A Level Physics! You just need to visualise what’s happening to the occupants of a car when it crashes…
Although the car is going a lot faster (100mph for vs 12.3mph for the helmet drop test), there’s also a lot more car between the occupant and the wall. So whilst the front of the car stops in effectively zero distance, the rest of the car ‘gradually’ crumples behind it, bringing the occupant to a much ‘gentler’ stop over a distance of say 0.5m, reducing their peak acceleration to say 60g. Aside from all the other complications that occur in a collision, like whiplash, being crushed etc., 60g is survivable.
As an important side note – this is why seat belts (and airbags) are so important – because without them, as the car comes to a stop, the unrestrained occupant will carry on forwards at 100mph and crash into the inside of the now stationary vehicle. Obviously Burtthebike would be cushioned by the fact that this wasn’t statistically possible, but the rest of us normal humans wouldn’t do so well.
So back to helmets… even though the drop test is only 12.3mph (not 100mph), the helmet being a lot thinner, means the head comes to a stop in only about 15 – 20mm, making the peak acceleration about 150g.
If you reduce that stopping distance down to the thickness of your scalp, it’s an undeniable mathematical certainty (reliably demonstrated on our drop test rig) that the peak decceleration of the head increases to about 1200g. A near tenfold increase in the forces acting on the jelly inside inside your skull.
Burt,I have to ask,but you’re
Burt,I have to ask,but you’re not a political adviser are you ? If not you should be,as the way you can twist stastics is remarkable.You’re reference to Italy truly outstanding.What was it ? Deaths were reduced by 40% but registrations for new bikes fell by 45%.So actually more motorcycles were on the road that year unless all the other ones were scrapped.
I’d happily read you’re comments if YOU actually had some experience of head/ground contact.
joeegg wrote:
Oh dear, another idiot with little comprehension; perhaps if you learned to read you might find yourself looking less stupid. Here’s what I said;
“In Italy, one county decided to implement a motorcycle helmet law, and the death rate fell by about 40%, again, declared a success. But the number of motorcycle registrations fell by about 45%, so the death reduction was actually less than the fall in the number of motorcyclists.”
That’s registrations, not new registrations. JHC. A motorcycle doesn’t have to be scrapped to be taken off the road and deregistered.
Since you are clearly happy to read my comments, even if you deny doing so, and can’t even spell basic English words, your comments are puerile, especially when you use the infantile technique of putting something in capitals.
Why would experience of banging my head on the ground make my views more worthy of consideration? Doesn’t seem to have made your views in the least credible.
Come back in ten years when you’ve grown up a bit and can actually make a cogent argument.
Even if the 45% decline in
Even if the 45% decline in registrations were new registrations only I suggest it would be very relevant. It’s Italy, if we may make a few slightly reasonable assumptions. I don’t know but I would bet that Italy doesn’t have a big of a Hog riding culture as, say, the US, but even those few Harleyesque riders might put a lid on so that they can ride their treasured machines. The sports bike riders probably were wearing a lid anyway,(and leathers) just like their heroes off the pro scene so even if the weren’t, not too much off a big push needed. The main difference, it being Italy, would be in the young on scooters. We would know that the very young are 45% disinclined to ride scooters needing to wear a helmet, are all of the slightly older (but still young) riders going out to buy a helmet and wear them on their scooters, you would look a lot less cool, it’s Italy, scooters aren’t very expensive, no more wind in the hair, less freedom, you need another helmet to carry someone on the back. Ditch the scooter, take the bus, tram or train, or get a car.
So I think we could reasonably say thet a 45% decline in registrations could be said to be relevant to the wider, youthful, scooter population. If your 16 (?) year olds don’t want to do it, then your 17 and 18 year olds might also not be as keen to continue riding also.
4 pages of folk shouting into
4 pages of folk shouting into the void. Peak road.cc
If you have an opportunity,
If you have an opportunity, have a watch of BBC4s excellent history of the Yorkshire Ripper investigation. I also caught bits of the last part of the series about the very botched investigation of the murder of Stephen Lawrence, and those were cases that eventually reached a conclusion.
The thing abot the big miscarriges of justice cases, Birmingham six, Guildford four, Colin Stagg, Barry George, Winston Silcott, is that not only does the innocent spend too long inside, but the guilty get off.
ktache wrote:
Reminded me of that excellent book “Arthur and George” the story of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edalji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_%26_George
Great read, a fascinating study of what goes wrong in miscarriages of justice, and one of the reasons we have a court of appeal.
C,mon, people: calm down.
C,mon, people: calm down. Lets just Share the Internet , m’kay?
brooksby wrote:
You must be kidding!
I’ve been waiting for this argument to fully kick off, but at the moment it just seems to be minor quibbling. (I’ve been waiting for all the graphs to appear so that I can start posting ridiculous squirrels.)
hawkinspeter wrote:
This thread is surely missing one of your squirrel pics – do it! do it now!
No one seems to be asking
No one seems to be asking what the tractor driver thought about the incident?
Apologies to everyone else by
Apologies to everyone else by the way, i’ll shut up now. Nice squirrel again Peter 🙂
Wow,
Wow,
There are a lot of opinionated people out there who have absolutely no idea of the facts, what happened or what helmets do actually save?
Well, I can you all that if I wasn’t wearing my helmet that day my head would have hit the tractor bucket killing me out right!!
This is isn’t a case of a paramedic promoting helmets or any other rubbish like that, it’s merely my own personal opinion not only having seen many head injuries that could’ve been avoided should riders be wearing helmets but experiencing it for myself!
Im not blaming the driver of the farm vehicle, it was down to me and I’ll hold my hands up! I choose to wear an effing helmet! Yes it’s your choice but when you do crack your heads on whatever is it is you hit, be it a farm tractor, kerb, tarmac or a family on bikes you will come off worse!
Combative head injuries that will require Critical Care Teams to come to the roadside, anaesatise you and take you to a trauma/neuro centre where you may or may not live!
So, I have some serious injuries that I will get better from and have learnt my lesson. Oh, and on the helmet front, the inner road has cracked/split all the way through in more than one place along with outer shell damage!
So, no campaign from me, if you want to wear a helmet then great, if you don’t, well maybe I’ll see you on the roadside one day……….?!
SARMEDIC104 wrote:
First post, eh? Yeah… Talking about the efficacy of bicycle helmets can be fightin’ talk around these here parts…
Glad you’re OK (assuming you are who you are purporting to be)