New Forest cyclist unscathed after crashing into tractor bucket on descent

SARMEDIC104 wrote:

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..........?! 

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)

brooksby wrote:

C,mon, people: calm down.  Lets just Share the Internet , m'kay? 

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:

brooksby wrote:

C,mon, people: calm down.  Lets just Share the Internet , m'kay? 

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.)

This thread is surely missing one of your squirrel pics - do it! do it now!

ktache wrote:

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.

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.

joeegg wrote:

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.

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.

hirsute wrote:

AndyRed3d wrote:

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).

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 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.

joeegg wrote:

    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.

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:

...,but sometimes shit happens.

Isn't it funny that shit happens much more often to those who wear helmets?  I wonder if there's a reason for that.

Rick_Rude wrote:

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?

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:

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

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:

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

Except in the UK where the fatality and KSI rate both fell as the helmet wearing rate increased. Stop lying to people Burt.

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:

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)

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.