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Put A Lid On ItCrowdfunding campaign wants all London cyclists to wear a helmet
The people behind a forthcoming crowdfunding campaign believe that everyone who rides a bicycle in London should wear a cycle helmet – and they want to raise money to produce a product “so cheap and so available that everyone chooses to wear them.”
Put a Lid on It, which launched on social media and put its website live last week, claim that 92 per cent of people who use the capital’s cycle hire scheme bikes don’t wear a helmet, and have made them the first target of their campaign.
While some people have tweeted messages of support to the campaign’s Twitter account, others have accused it of victim-blaming and ignoring issues that would improve conditions for cyclists such as safer lorries and separated infrastructure.
Launched last week, the putalidonit.co.uk website says: “We want to make helmets, so portable, so cheap and so available that everyone chooses to wear them,” which some might see as missing the point that there are other reasons people don’t cycle with one."
It adds: "Our primary goal is to make the helmets available through convenience stores by bike stands and bike shops. But there will be a limited edition version available to crowdfunding backers along with a range of other goodies."
The website outlines how Put a Lid on It came into being:
Sam Terry, a keen cyclist and Londoner, realised that the key is convenience. Cyclists need to be able to go to the corner shop next to the bike stand and buy a helmet. The helmet needs to be cheap enough to buy on an impulse and lose without irritation – a bit like a cheap umbrella!
The helmet also needs to be portable. Sam considered all the helmets currently available. Cheap helmets were bulky, collapsible helmets were pricey (and most just don’t collapse enough). The only option was design a new solution – LID was born!
LID is the only collapsible helmet that reduces to the size of a couple of books so it WILL fit in your bag. If we achieve our funding targets, we will sell it for the price of a budget umbrella. Most importantly it will protect the wearer. It will be thoroughly tested and certified to European safety standards. Let’s stop head injuries ruining everyone’s day!
While some tweets to the @putalidon account on Twitter back the initiative, others said they were distracting from other measures that would improve the safety of cyclists.
Clive Andrews wrote: “I know you mean well, but is your campaign based on any evidence? Helmet-fixation is demonstrably not helpful.
“If it's ‘about choice’, why does your campaign imagery clearly say there's ‘something wrong’ with a photo of a lidless rider?
Please don't be disingenuous enough to pretend posters like this are anything about promoting ‘choice’.”
Hackneycyclist asked: “Will you be asking pedestrians & drivers to #putalidonit as well? Many die from head injuries in collisions.”
Other messages were more supportive. Julian Swann wrote: “Hired my first boris bike today. So easy to do but no mention of helmets in the safety guidelines. #putalidonit”
Ken Livingstone, who as Mayor of London gave the go-ahead to the capital’s cycle hire scheme which would be launched under Boris Johnson, said in 2011 that he had planned to provide helmets for people hiring bikes.
He said: “It was always the plan that you should make certain that people who are cycling have got a helmet. You almost want to have a way where the helmet is actually chained to the bike, so people who don’t bring one can have one.”
In the Australia, where cycle helmets are compulsory, people hiring bikes from Melbourne’s cycle hire scheme can buy a helmet for A$5 from vending machines, as Terminator star and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger had to do last week when he was stopped by a police officer while riding a bike without one.
Critics of Australia’s compulsory helmet laws however have said that they have led to a lower uptake of cycle hire schemes there than have been seen elsewhere.
Of course, if you do choose to wear a helmet when hiring a bike in London, you could take your own helmet with you – as this pair of riders we spotted recently did.
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Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.
Latest Comments
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Also, it's very 'jumped up' to judge that someone is 'jumped up' - without even knowing them.
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95 comments
I've got one thing to say to Putalidonit.
Putasockinit.
I always wear a helmet, for a number of reasons eg:
- three young kids still at the occasionally falling over stage, and for those low speed impacts a helmet might do some good; a bit hard to encourage them to put on helmets if Daddy doesn't.
- it's not that uncomfortable and probably can't do any harm and might do a bit of good.
- it's less bad than explaining to mother/ mother-in-law etc on a continual basis why I am not wearing one. (Weak, or wisely choosing the path of least resistance- make your mind up)
BUT the one thing that really would make me take a principled stand and not wear one is the utterly inane arguments of the pro-helmet (and particularly pro-compulsory helmet) brigade.
http://putalidonit.co.uk/more-news/why-i-never-ride-without-one/
??? because you hurt your leg and arm???!!! How does a helmet help there?
"From that moment onwards I have never ridden without a helmet. I never had another accident riding in Belfast."
Oh, the magical accident avoiding aura of the helmet!!!
"These are rare incidents during a lifetime of cycling but these hard lessons have served to make me hyper-vigilant and aware when riding to prevent accidents. "
??? So hypervigilant that notwithstanding three previous serious accidents you don't look where you are going, careen though traffic cones and hit a road sign???
FFS.
Wish I had been wearing one when I fell.
Most of the impact was taken by my broken ribs and vertebrae (all now healed) but I still more than a year on am recovering from hitting head, plus have tinnitus now.
Cycling helmet may have saved me from this, I have promised my mate I will always wear one in future when I go up a ladder!
It's not will it save you just it may and it probably will reduce your injuries if you are unfortunate enough to come off. Still a personal choice cos you do look a bit daft, especially when used for ladder work!!!
As a 50/50 wearer of helmets I was very lucky that I happened to be wearing my lid when I decided to fall into an angular metal bollard and headbutted another. 6 days in hospital with badly mashed up arms (Thank you UCLH) and 4 months not cycling. Without the helmet it would have been a lot worse, I have a lovely dent in the old helmet I was wearing which would otherwise have been my forehead and considerable bruising on my forehead from the helmet impacting on it at speed.
I now wear mine at all times but I would not push it on others. I feel that compulsion and the whole helmet debate is just a distraction. Most of you are not as stupid as I and don't need to be protected from yourselves I would hope
A spokesperson for government said a few years ago that although the number of cyclists wearing helmets was too low to make it easy to introduce compulsion, that they were monitoring the situation and would review the idea if a high enough proportion of cyclists wore them. I'm afraid I have lost the reference for this.
So I think it is fair to say that helmet wearing is an (inadvertent) vote for compulsion.
A.jumper, there's no conspiracy! Nobody's dictating anything to you! (you, on the other hand..)
If a government really wanted to make a stupid decision such as mandating helmets but would only do so once enough people wore them voluntarily (!), then I can see how wearing helmets might increase the likelihood of such a law coming in.
I don't know of any such official policy, but if you want to hold me, a helmet wearer, responsible for lunatic policy in a parallel universe, then I will also hold non-helmet wearers responsible for some kind of presumed liability law where you're responsible for a car hitting you when riding helmet-less.
Because that's just as bonkers and just as outside of my control as introducing compulsion!
Funny how vehemently-anti-helmet people rely on the prospect of compulsion to try and make their point. No matter what you say, it's a personal choice and I'll continue to take it, whilst you continue to believe my choice is somehow affecting your life (and that everyone is out to get you!)
If some government wanted to make a stupid decision to impose a law, there's nothing you or I could do about it, apart from voting accordingly if it was in a manifesto or official policy. It isn't. Anywhere. In fact, if a helmet law came in, I'd be inclined to wear mine less in protest, simply because I wouldn't agree with it - now that's cause and effect the vehemently-anti-helmet people probably didn't expect, not least because they like to charactise the arguments of anyone who disagrees with them and polarize the debate accordingly. But then that's nothing new on this forum I suppose.
Go to a head trauma unit at a hospital and the probability of finding a cyclist is small. Partially because cyclists on average only makeup about 2% of road users, but mainly because head injuries happen for reasons other than cycling.
If you are going to suggest any activity merits head protection, you should at least be able to show that the activity is at a raised level of risk for head injury. According to Prof David Spiegelhalter (google him if you want to know who he is) the risk of cycling is about the same as walking: http://understandinguncertainty.org/micromorts
I tried to engage @putalidonit in a debate but they avoid, saying that it should be a matter of choice, which clearly contradicts the narrative of their their campaign website.
I would really like to know who these clowns are, and what their motive is, because I don't think it has anything to do with safety.
Interesting comments by these people. No evidence of course.
http://startacus.net/culture/put-a-lid-on-it#.VRlqfI7F9vC
There is no good real-world evidence to support "it probably will reduce your injuries if you are unfortunate enough to come off" - if helmet-wearing goes up, injuries don't necessarily go down. Wearing a helmet is not a rational act.
Sadly, helmet-wearing is not a personal choice. Any rider choosing to wear one harms everyone. It harms people who ride bikes because if enough people wear them, we will all be forced to, carrying an annoying useless hat around. This is explicit in various government reports which use the current low adoption rate as an argument against forcing us because it would be a huge waste of resources policing the likely mass non-compliance. It harms people who don't ride bikes in a double-whammy of making them less likely to start riding and stopping some current riders or reducing how often they ride, with the consequent health disbenefits and costs to the NHS.
OK, if you're doing high speeds on a club run, often in tight formation, that's completely outside my experience. For all I know, maybe you should wear protective gear, but I suspect you'd need more protective kit than a basic EuroNorm helmet if you want it to do much good. A split/failed helmet tells you nothing unless you're willing to repeat the crash without one - there's a near-total absence of crash-test-dummy experiments doing that, which seems rather odd, doesn't it? And cycle-sport head injuries haven't reduced since helmet compulsion in its regulations, which is also rather odd, isn't it? Anyway, sport should be a tiny fraction of atypical cycling, so please don't generalise it to everyday riding.
That doesn't equate to 'harm'.
Compulsion either way should be avoided for a number of reasons.
No parallel universe required, sadly! I can't find the original source that @felixcat mentined but the official attitude shows through in spokesperson comments like http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/48526 which (despite the best efforts of helmet-pushers TRL to show any real-world benefit) says "Regular Department for Transport surveys have shown that the wearing rate for children has remained at around 18% i.e. the majority of children cyclists do not wear helmets. Compulsory laws would therefore cause significant enforcement difficulties and without greater public acceptance could have a negative effect on levels of cycling with direct disadvantages and costs in terms of health. For these reasons, the Government has no plans to introduce compulsory cycle helmet laws." (emphasis added)
It's not quite out of your control: both electing less stupid governments and refusing to wear their head-potties voluntarily reduce the probability of legal compulsion. If you either vote for helmet-pushers or voluntarily obey them, then you are surely responsible and effectively acting against everyone else's freedom to choose to ride hatless.
This is the reverse of reality. There is a large and vociferous lobby for helmet compulsion. There is no one who wants to ban them.
Oh no, I'm not anti-helmet because of compulsion. Now who's deliberately trying to polarise the debate? Is it fun to make up weak arguments and misattribute them to those who disagree with you?
I'm anti-helmet because I was injured by one (fortunately only mildly) and when I looked into it, helmet wearing trades a lot of increased risks for an insignificant reduction in basically one specific risk - and that's assuming that you wear the helmet properly, that it's not defective (which you can't easily test without destroying it) and many other things which often aren't true.
I mention the compulsion threat that hangs over us only to contradict the lie often repeated by helmet wearers that their personal choice doesn't carry any danger for others. We know the current government attitude towards compulsion - they've expressed it often enough - when enough people wear helmets voluntarily, they will try to stop the rest of us riding.
Try here: http://www.bhsi.org/index.htm#standards
LOL really!
I do not think compulsion to not wear a helmet is a possibilty, to say the least, so I am puzzled by your "compulsion either way".
Compulsion has demonstrably resulted in sizeable reductions in numbers cycling in Australia and New Zealand, and anywhere else it has been enacted. This is a clear harm to public health.
I would regard my being forced to buy and wear what I regard as an absurd foam hat as harm, though a rather minor one. You could say that the legal penalties I would suffer for refusing to wear one would be my own fault, but they would seem to me to be harm.
Well done, you've just discovered freedom of choice is an illusion. You've still got to make a compelling reason as to why we've all got to agree with you, rather than risk theoretically creating the dynamics where its theoretically possible to force people to wear a helmet though.
Apart from the very person I was referring to in my post!
Anyway, to address the more serious point of lobbyists supporting helmet law, I think you've over stated their influence and risk they present. It's the kind of thing that would probably go to a free vote anyway, rather than supported ad policy by a serious party, but by all means campaign against it if and when the time comes, just don't hold me responsible for such idiocy.
some people will always read the daily mail, some will support the EDL, hold racist views, others will hate cyclists, whatever. More reasonable people can stand up against them, but they shouldn't hold their peers responsible for the misguided or bigoted views of others.
Interesting - might I ask how ?
Strangely enough I looked into this after an off and came to a completely different conclusion - and i'm not sure where you get 'an insignificant reduction in basically one specific risk' from. What are these 'many other things which often aren't true' ?
Often repeated ? Really ? 'danger' for others - do you mean consequences ?
Who will stop the 'rest of us' riding and how ? Do you mean if compulsion came in, and I hope to hell it doesn't, that you would choose to never ride rather than wear one ever ?
That's a list of helmet standards, which unsurprisingly have a vested interest in selling contrived laboratory helmet tests and sometimes standards documents. Real-world monitoring of the effects is conspicuously absent from them. You may as well have written "try here: http://www.google.com "
Why did you decide to do that, does it happen often enough to be worth a helmet and why the hell are angular metal bollards near a cycleway anyway?
a.jumper wrote above:
"Any rider choosing to wear one (a helmet) harms everyone."
And subsequently went on to agree: 'people should not be able to make a choice about wearing protective gear, it should all be banned.'
The specifics are not relevant to this discussion but I suffered cervical acceleration-deceleration that it is thought wouldn't have happened without the added weight of a helmet.
Well how do you think their benefit is produced then?
Features of the injury incident, basically.
Most likely, there will be police issuing fines, Australian-style. I couldn't afford that, so unless there's some sort of solidarity fund to pay those fines, or I can obtain an exempt cycle, I don't see how I could continue riding, which would upset me greatly.
fully concur with the latter bit, they are lethal, I was trying to avoid a road bump, clipped it with my pedal and started flying sideways!! I am clearly not to be trusted.
I see. I didn't read that. Have you ever heard of any serious campaign to ban foam? This seems to be Mr. Jumper's wild fantasy, and not a possibilty, as I said.
Do you have any comment on my point that wearing may well encourage compulsion, and that compulsion is certainly harmful?
Hugely relevant to your comments about the efficacy (or lack) of helmets - but not to the OPs point granted. It it was the added weight of the helmet then i'm 'surprised' (to be generous). I won't go into the obvious side-story about when the corresponding 'helmet saved me from injury' comment is made.
Sorry ? What do you mean ? There are two primary modes of protection I can think of with helmets - abrasion and deceleration - which cover a number of risks to a lesser or greater degree.
Eh ?
You could continue to ride if you wore a helmet - but I guess you're saying that's not an option. If you believe that will give you a net safety benefit, then fair enough. I just happen to think differently and so will behave correspondingly.
That's OK. I didn't write that second quote, although I broadly agree with it as far as riding on open public roads goes (what people do on closed roads is up to them).
Oh I need to have these dreams to counteract putalidonit's nightmare of helmet compulsion!
Come on, you can't expect helmet wearers to have a clear view of how their irrational headgear selection affects us all: their chinstraps are probably too lose, so the helmet falls forward and obscures their view. It's the blind leading the sighted, the dangerous dictating to the safer riders...
You said "Yes, it would!" That's quite broad on a scale of broadness.
1st part - the purported theoretical link, if any, is so insignificant that it would be fallacy to consider it. Laws aren't made just because 'most people do it' or speed limits would be higher on Motorways. Are you seriously suggesting no one should wear a helmet in case, sometime in the future, that might be used as a reason to make all cyclists wear a helmet?
2nd part - harmful no not by any definition of harmful. Un-reasonable, not beneficial, un-helpful yes.
I did not suggest that a compulsion law would be made "just because" many people wear helmets. You quote above my words that "wearing may well encourage compulsion". There is a difference. You should not try to distort my meaning.
Your example of speed limits is quite telling, but not in the way you think. Limits ARE set with reference to the 85th percentile (or some such) of actual speeds.
If you are determined not to see the obvious truth that if helmet wearing is more prevalent then it is politically easier to mandate it there is little I can do, except hope that other readers are not so purblind.
At least you only ask whether I am "seriously suggesting no one should wear a helmet" for that reason. I was pointing out that helmet wearing has a downside for others, as this was the point under discussion. What you make of that is up to you.
I would seriously suggest no one wear a helmet for other reasons, but again, it is up to them.
You do not address what you call the 2nd. part. Helmet compulsion has always reduced cycling wherever it has been imposed, and I hope you see this as bad thing quite apart from the effect on public health. More drivers to make your rides less pleasant and more dangerous is one harm
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