Helmets – personal experience

The NHS will also patch up

The NHS will also patch up idiots who injure themselves whilst drunk driving too.

And those criminal arseholes also put the innocent into A+E, the wards and the morgues too.

Now we have wandered into car

Now we have wandered into car safety I can rant a bit more. Why the hell can I not, should I wish to, buy a car without all these silly safety feature?  Best car owned. Landrovers. Sodding great big bumper stopped silly expensive scratches for example. 

They were a great idea and people avoided coming so close to my LR. 

Don’t accept, before some one starts, the idea that pedestrian safety is an issue. I can’t find the link but a year or two back it was published that something like 90% + of all pedestrian/car collisions were the pedestrians fault so why should a car driver have to pay for that?  Same with a cyclist. A nudge with a feather pillow will still knock you off you bike. 

The pro helmet people are actually missing a point. It’ s no one elses business but mine if I wear a helmet and suffer if I am hurt because I don’t. Our government has a moral duty NOT to have any influence on us. 

I am (un)lucky/stupid enough

I am (un)lucky/stupid enough to have fairly good data on a scenario similar to the OPs both with and without a helmet

Last year in winter (a few months apart) I came off my bicyle when hitting black ice in the exact same location on my way home from work. The 1st time I was wearing a helmet and the 2nd time I wasn’t.

The first time my helmet hit the ground, was damaged and resulted in some pain in the head for me (along with some neck pain & similar road rash described by the OP).

The second time my head did not impact with the ground as the reduced circumference meant that it did not get past my shoulder. I still had road rash & neck pain but no head injury or headache.

Takeaway:

Just because you damage your helmet does not mean that it saved your head.

FluffyKittenofTindalos wrote:

FluffyKittenofTindalos wrote:

It’s pretty easy to see that it isn’t that the denominator has descreased, because the first graph on the page shows that total casualties _went up_ that year.  I already made that point.  You keep invoking ‘random fluctuation’ while ignoring the fact that the fluctuation that year is much larger than in the other years.  There’s an obvious change in the trend there.

 

Still seems to be you are just desperate to avoid a conclusion you don’t like.  And as I said already, I doubt any negative influence of seatbelts is very large, and don’t assume it has to remain constant over time, but the evidence for the existence of at least some element of risk-compensation appears strong, which is why you keep repeating arguments against it that clearly don’t work.

You still can’t seem to grasp the problem with your ratio.

You are claiming that the ratio has changed because the cycling fatality number is larger than it would have been without the seatbelt law.

The ratio may also have changed because the motorist fatality rate was lower than it would have been without the seatbelt law.

It’s completely impossible to say which of those statements is correct.

That makes the ratio meaningless.

Also the fluctuation in cyclist fatalities isn’t larger than other years, the cyclist fatality rate varied by up to 30% per year during the 1980s.

In 1983 the variation was 10%.

Finally the data I’ve found shows a large drop in car occupant deaths during 1983 undermining your claim that there was no such drop.

Link:
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/743645/ras30060.ods

burtthebike wrote:

mattsccm wrote:

Bit like seat belts I guess. My fathers generation need to be reminded to use them, mine sticks them on most of the time and my neice would put her on like she picks up her phone. 

Compulsion and fear of getting caught has brought this about.

And just like helmets, the benefits have yet to be proved.  Sure, they save some drivers and passengers, but because of risk compensation, more pedestrians and cyclists die.  The safest car wouldn’t have seat belts, air bags, side impact bars or any other kind of preservation device for the driver, but it would have a rusty 14″ bayonet sticking out of the steering wheel.

Basically, we’ve approached road safety from completely the wrong angle, and instead of making it safer, we’ve made driving more survivable so that people drive more recklessly, putting vulnerable road users at greater risk.

100% agree. Not that seatbelts were the key to this change but the entire experience of driving has changed. Modern cars insulate you from the outside world, road noise, sense of speed, reduced impact of bumps, improved handling, acceleration etc. Etc. These all contribute to increased confidence and lack of awareness of speed and surroundings because you are exceptionally safe.

Rich_cb wrote:

Rich_cb wrote:

[quote=Burtthebike]

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.  Seat belts would increase collisions if it was the sole thing that happened at that time, but the road traffic act which introduced them had many other elements, including the breathalyser and drink driving laws.  Seat belts increase the likelihood of collisions, but if another element introduced at the same time reduced it by more, the effect would be swamped.  The same RTA introduced motorcycle helmets, and similarly, the predicted life-saving effects have never been realised.

Parliament commissioned a report on seat belts in countries which already had a law, The Isles Report, which was completed before the vote on the RTA, but it was never published, because it showed that more people would be killed than would be saved.

Do try to keep up.

Which bit of “Do try to keep up.” did you miss?

Rich_cb wrote:

Rich_cb wrote:

burtthebike wrote:

And just like helmets, the benefits have yet to be proved.  Sure, they save some drivers and passengers, but because of risk compensation, more pedestrians and cyclists die.  The safest car wouldn’t have seat belts, air bags, side impact bars or any other kind of preservation device for the driver, but it would have a rusty 14″ bayonet sticking out of the steering wheel.

Basically, we’ve approached road safety from completely the wrong angle, and instead of making it safer, we’ve made driving more survivable so that people drive more recklessly, putting vulnerable road users at greater risk.

As with pretty much every ‘fact’ you post this is not really true. If seat belts actually induced more risk taking then the number of car accidents and cyclist KSIs would both have risen the year after seat belts became mandatory in the UK. They both fell after 1991 and the accident rate fell after 1983.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.  Seat belts would increase collisions if it was the sole thing that happened at that time, but the road traffic act which introduced them had many other elements, including the breathalyser and drink driving laws.  Seat belts increase the likelihood of collisions, but if another element introduced at the same time reduced it by more, the effect would be swamped.  The same RTA introduced motorcycle helmets, and similarly, the predicted life-saving effects have never been realised.

Parliament commissioned a report on seat belts in countries which already had a law, The Isles Report, which was completed before the vote on the RTA, but it was never published, because it showed that more people would be killed than would be saved.

Do try to keep up.

FluffyKittenofTindalos wrote:

FluffyKittenofTindalos wrote:

Rich_cb wrote:

FluffyKittenofTindalos wrote:

Exccept that the graph plotting ratios shows no such large percentage fluctuation due to simple chance.  Over nearly 40 years it shows a coherent trend, with small year-to-year changes, except for the year where the law came in, when there was a change dramatically larger than between any other succesive years in the period.  That change is an outlier – is your position that something else happened that year to cause an usual change in the ratio?

And at the same time, contradicting your second point,  there’s no decrease in overall casualties in that year that is large enough to cause such a large effect (in fact the total went up slightly) – which suggests it’s not particularly about the denominator getting smaller, but more about a change in the distribution of casualties, with cycling getting relatively more dangerous.

 

Your responses just don’t work, as far as I can see.  Which is not to say the increased risk for cyclists is a large effect or that it is even necessarily a permanent one.  But some measure of risk compensation does seem to be apparent in the figures.

 

It’s also claimed here that the similar effects are visible in Australian and Canadian data, but I haven’t found the papers referred to, so don’t really know how convincing they are.

 

http://www.oocities.org/galwaycyclist/info/seatbelts.html#_ednref1

 

 

On balance I still think you are wrong.

If there was increased risk taking by drivers after seatbelts became mandatory then we would expect to see an increase in the number of accidents. There was no such increase. Unless you’re suggesting that the increased risk taking took place exclusively around cyclists then I don’t see how you can continue to claim there is any evidence for the proposed increase in risk taking. The ratio is completely irrelevant to the argument, it’s meaningless.

 

Not in the context of an existing downward trend.  Insisting there must be an absolute increase is disengenuous when it wasn’t a flatline to begin with.

 

I know you keep insisting “the ratio is meaningless”, but that isn’t an argument, it’s making a noise.  Unless you can prove that the casualty rates are completely independent and have no common factors, which you haven’t done.  Arbitrarily declaring anything that contradicts what you want to believe to be ‘meaningless’ makes rational debate kind of difficult.

Umm. My tree stump legged mate shaves his legs such that skin slides and grazes rather than tearing chunks.
Most people know it’s gonna hurt and a helmet is merely an easily worn piece of riding kit. When wearing a helmet or not, that handle bar end can be a spear, those teeth are sharp; pedals, cogs, that bicycle can trap me, the list is probably long.. Helmets are a protection device which are easily worn during the heat or the cold, the brain is your rhythm coordinator, it makes sense to wear a disposal skull. Beat and breath; your pump and oxygenation systems are useful too but dude, that’s your brain in a box in another box if wearing a helmet. It’s similar to zits.. Don’t take the hits if the zits above your nostrils. I don’t know why, just sucked in because everyone loves squeezing zits.