> If you don't wear a helmet, don't worry about it, it doesn't mitigate that much risk. The exercise benefits of biking do way more to increase your life expectancy than skipping a helmet does to reduce it.
I've biked heavily for 30 years... advising people to wear a helmet never works. What works 99% of the time is the first freak crash. Not a crash where they felt like they were speeding, or not paying attention, or drunk... then they think it was avoidable. It takes a crash where you hit a rare little crack in the road, or a bump hidden in the shadows, or a car doing a u-turn out of the blue... then it 'clicks' Or, in my case, you witness someone take a minor fall and tap their skull on a curb and seizure and not be quite the same from that point on. If you're reading this and don't wear a helmet, you should consider experimenting with mind altering drugs as well, may as well enjoy the moment.
Take everything you just said and apply it not to a bicycle helmet but to a full face motorcycle helmet.
Now do you see how you sound? Bike helmets marginally help, but the same marginal difference is found going from bicycle helmets to full face motorcycle ones.
I’ve broken my face in 4 places in a bike accident where the only thing that would have helped would have been a motorcycle helmet, but I don’t go around town wearing one or telling other people to. I like the air in my hair and I’m ok with the additional risk that not wearing any helmet carries. I’m careful in otherways but I’m an adult making an informed choice about the relative risk.
You don't actually need a full face motorcycle helmet, that's overkill for cycling speeds (and uncomfortable with exertion). I regularly commute to work by bike and after a bad fall where I almost landed on my face, I decided to upgrade from a normal helmet to a full face bicycle helmet. You can get a decent one for ~$150 and it'll give you some protection even if you fall flat on your face. Highly recommend as a normal helmet doesn't do much for your face and a lot of falls could result in facial damage.
Shoot, now I'm getting paranoid... I've talked to a handful of people in full helmet gear and it's a similar painful story... definitely thought about the face/chin-plant scenario. I prefer the full peripheral vision but I'd be singing a different tune if I lost teeth or broke a facial bone... sorry to hear about your accident.
To throw an anecdote in, my brother was riding straight through an intersection on green when a driver turned into him. Witnesses said he flew up around 10 feet, up and over the car, and completely shattered his helmet when he landed. He got out of the hospital after 2 days with 3 broken vertebrae. He likely would have been in for over a week if he hadn't died. That helmet made all the difference.
Yeah it's still probably a net increase on your life expectancy to ride without a helmet compared to driving, but most people wear seat belts even though almost every mile driven doesn't result in a crash.
But it doesn't change the truth of the sentence: "The exercise benefits of biking do way more to increase your life expectancy than skipping a helmet does to reduce it."
They're uncomfortable, mess up your hair, make you extra sweaty, and you need to put them somewhere.
None of these are good enough reasons to not wear a helmet while you're riding a bike, but any one of them would be a good enough reason to not ride your bike at all. That's the point OP is trying to make by saying you can skip your helmet if you want.
If that comparison was apt, we wouldn't see so many people out riding sans protection.
But we do, and it's because they have a share bike that didn't come with a helmet, or they were worried about messing up their hair, or they lost their helmet, or they left it at the destination, or they're a rebellious teenager who just doesn't care, or no-one educated them about the risks, or they just forgot to put it on.
A better comparison would be to flossing your teeth, or wearing sunscreen: everyone should do it, but not everyone will do it.
There is ZERO reason not to wear a helmet every time you leave the house. You could trip and fall at any moment!
Presumably, you're willing to accept that risk. Biking without a helmet is no doubt riskier than walking without one, but both activities are well within reasonable risk-taking range.
You don't need me to tell you why I don't like wearing a helmet when I bike; you already use all those same reasons to avoid wearing one when you walk.
I'm sorry that you think my position is absurd, but I assure you it's offered in good faith. There are only trade-offs. This isn't just a comment on the wisdom of helmets; this is, as far as I can tell, an actual feature of the universe we inhabit. There aren't "problems" and "solutions to problems"; there are only trade-offs.
I (honestly and in good faith) place walking and biking in the same "helmet not required" risk category. The point isn't whether or not you adjust the risk slider further in one direction than me. The point is to respond to the assertion that there is zero reason to avoid wearing a helmet. We all know that isn't true, or we'd all wear helmets all the way down the risk scale.
Where you place "time to put on a helmet" on the scale isn't really the point. The point is that the scale obviously exists and it's obviously the case that there are places on the scale where not wearing a helmet makes sense, because if it were literally the case that there were no tradeoffs, then there'd literally be no reason not to wear one at all times.
That's the reductio proof I'm trying to illustrate.
Statistics don't work that way. Applying an aggregate metric (life expectancy) to an individual is what gets you statements like "Babe Ruth and I hit a combined 714 home runs", or beliefs like colonial Americans all dying by age 30 (they didn't; the average is heavily skewed due to child mortality).
Wearing a helmet doesn't increase the number of minutes of your life like you're winding a clock or something. It decreases the probability that you're dead by 40 from a preventable tragedy, leaving your parents without a child and your family without a parent.
I'm not sure it is appropriate to think about helmet use as having a bearing on life expectancy. The data on helmet accident avoidance is terrible. i.e. we have no idea what the severity of an accident "would have been" because that kind of data is never reported. Anecdotally, I've needed my helmet many times, but never reported its use to anyone.
you could theoretically look at the injury rate for non-helmeted people, but, again, you don't know how representative that rate is of the population. You are assuming that the non-helmeted accident statistics sample is representative of the cycling population. I am not sure that is true.
Well, That is a very interesting example of why we can't compare populations. Many posts on HN have highlighted just how cycling-savvy the Dutch are both as cyclists and as motorists. Arguably, a Netherlands specific comparison would tell us something about whether helmets improved outcomes, but they wouldn't necessarily tell us anything about the rate, because falls may be less likely in the first place.
Your interpretation of these data is misleading at best and dangerously misleading at worst.
>The risk of death from 1 hour of cycling reduces life expectancy by about 24 minutes. Wearing a helmet probably changes this by a couple of minutes.
This data does not take road conditions into account. Most cyclists prefer to bike on roads with very few cars on them. For example the road outside my apartment, a two-lane road outside of town by a lake with no services, is always packed with cyclists. The boulevard connecting my road to the train station, however, is heavily car-trafficked and has almost no cyclists. It is wrong to apply data from cyclists on the first road to those biking on the second.
This is double-counting. If you count sitting as a detriment, you can't turn around and count biking as an increment. There has to be a default from which to decrement or increment.
>[first link]>Every Minute Of Exercise Could Lengthen Your Life Seven Minutes
>[second link]>In fact, exercise was a bigger factor than body weight in many cases. People who were normal weight but were inactive actually lived an average of 3.1 fewer years than obese people who kept up high levels of activity.
This is an unjustified assumption of linear behavior. It's possible (likely IMO) that the first couple hours of exercise make a big difference coming from inactivity, but additional exercise on top of this likely has a smaller impact. The data only strongly indicate that cycling will have such a large impact on life expectancy if you already get very little exercise -- less than 2.5 hours/week of brisk walking. It is hard to believe, for example, that biking for 4 hours per day would increase life expectancy by 13 years -- there are practically no interventions known to have such a large effect!
> "Cyclists without helmets triple their chance of death by head injury"
Nope. The correct interpretation is 'cyclists without helmets who get into a serious crash triple their chance of death by head injury'. The study doesn't look at cyclists who don't crash. This is important, because you can't assume that all cyclists have an equally likely chance of having a serious crash. I'm going to be riding with a helmet on regardless of the law, but by making helmets mandatory, you kill off so much transport and utility cycling which was at low risk levels.
> The study also cites Victoria, Australia, as an example of successful legislation. Helmet use in the city increased from 31 per cent to 75 per cent after the introduction of mandatory helmet legislation, and cycling fatalities decreased by 48 per cent.
Yes, but a major reason for those reductions are because people stopped cycling after the introduction of those laws. See http://www.cyclehelmets.org/1194.html - "In 1985-6, 3.4 per cent of trips in Melbourne were by bicycle. In 2004 this was only 2.0 per cent, suggesting that cycling was still much reduced compared with before the helmet law". Trauma surgeons are happy, public health experts are not.
I would suspect that "$PEOPLE without helmets triple their chance of death by head injury". I also suspect that there are more car drivers with head injuries than cyclists, because there are much more car drivers to begin with. Should you wear a helmet in a car? Should you wear a helmet as a pedestrian?
After five minutes of googling, I sadly did not find any relevant statistics.
Pedestrians without helmets triple their chance of death by head injury.
Car drivers without helmets triple their chance of death by head injury.
Bather without helmets triple their chance of death by head injury.
And so on.
The assumption is that wearing a helmet somehow reduces the odds of exercise. Just keep your helmet with your bike, and you'll never forget it.
I've been cycling to work for years, which which has varied from 10 miles one way, to 1 mile. I always wear my helmet, and in all these years an many thousands of bike miles, it only been "useful" once. A drainage grate was covered over with leaves, I didn't see it, my front wheel fell in, fork snapped off, and I flew over the handlebars, headfirst into the curb. My helmet split in two and I had a massive head bruise, but had I not been wearing it, I'd be dead.
> wearing a helmet somehow reduces the odds of exercise
Helmet paranoia DOES reduce the odds of exercise. On a group level, at the level of public health, that's PRECISELY what it does. I encourage you to read about it, that's why they call it the helmet paradox. This piece is a nice summary.
> Helmet proponents are right about one thing: If you're in a serious accident, then wearing a helmet makes the odds of a head injury significantly lower — by somewhere between 15 and 40 percent. (This is why ER doctors and brain surgeons are so pro-helmet — they've seen firsthand what happens in helmet-less accidents.)
So this is why most of us wear a helmet. The logic is not "so few people get in accidents that if I wear a helmet it is likely to be overkill!". The logic is "if I get in an accident I will be very glad I am wearing this."
Generally, you prepare for the worst, not hope that you are on (typo) the right side of statistics.
For this reason, I wear a helmet. But the health benefits of cycling vastly swamp the risk of death, so the helmet gain is only a small marginal difference.
The person who is truly taking a risk is the person who doesn't ride a bike because of the perception that it's dangerous, and continues to be sedentary and drive a car to work. This person is literally reducing their life expectancy by years. (See links I posted elsewhere in the thread.)
You need to be able to think about conditional probability.
> so the helmet gain is only a small marginal difference
This is such, such flawed logic. If you are a cyclist getting hit by a car, the averages and statistics don't matter at all. If you are the cyclist getting hit by a car, the helmet is not a "marginal difference". Your protective gear matters. You need to consider the individual cyclist when you are making sweeping statements about the usage of protective gear.
If I were not wearing a helmet routinely I'd be so paranoid about getting hit/falling/some injury that there would be no health benefits at all. Wearing a helmet is comfortable, relatively in expensive and life saving. There is really no argument to be made to not have one on your head. I can't believe you are needing to even make a pro-helmet case at all here.
2. Car drivers think ‘you’re protected’ thus make larger risks
3. Helmets are inconvenient to carry around at your destination
4. It hampers the development of saver bicycle road situations, since ‘the cyclists are already protected’
I’m dutch, driving without a helmet since forever (started at 2 years old). Most serious accidents on the road that I know of are broken colar bones, broken hips and broken wrists. You really need a strange fall the land on your head. I guess with a head-on collision perhaps?
As a gating item to riding at all, its arguably a negative influence on public health. Since otherwise exercise-leaning people might not do it if they couldn't work the helmet into their schedule (have it at all; carry it with them all day)
> The person who is truly taking a risk is the person who doesn't ride a bike
No, that is not what "risk" means. Sedentary people can still be fairly certain that they will die when they are over 60, even if it's a few years earlier than they would if they were active.
A cyclist without a helmet has a much greater chance of dying an an unpredictable time. That is what "risk" means.
Lots of ordinary activities present a similar or greater risk of head injury than cycling. Do you wear a helmet to get into the bathtub? Do you wear a helmet to climb the stairs?
The problem with the helmet debate isn't that it's wrong, but that it's irrelevant. Every minute spent arguing about helmets is a minute that isn't spent making the most important point - cyclists live longer than non-cyclists, regardless of whether they wear a helmet. Wear a helmet, don't wear a helmet, it doesn't really matter. TO AVOID A PREMATURE DEATH, MOVE YOUR BODY.
> The logic is not "so few people get in accidents that if I wear a helmet it is likely to be overkill!". The logic is "if I get in an accident I will be very glad I am wearing this."
You could use the same logic to justify extreme defenses against all kinds of rare-but-deadly events. You should be wearing a helmet in your car to protect against accidents in which your head hits the side window. You should be carrying a rifle to fight off wildlife every time you go for a hike. You definitely shouldn't be crossing any streets in auto-heavy cities. (And we could go on and on and on like this. There's no reason to even leave your house! Better to get everything delivered and not risk contact with the world at all!)
Everything is a tradeoff. There are no absolutes. Just tradeoffs.
> (This is why ER doctors and brain surgeons are so pro-helmet — they've seen firsthand what happens in helmet-less accidents.)
Except for the fact that the CPSC (Consumer Products Safety Commission) impact testing standards for bicycle helmets only test for impacts for a guided free fall drop from a height of 6.5 feet. That's the equivalent of someone falling over while doing a track-stand on the bicycle.
If you're going 25 mph and hit the ground, the helmet won't protect from an impact it wasn't designed or tested for.
The second problem is that helmets won't protect you from forces that lead to concussive type injuries.
If you really want adequate head protection, then you need to wear a motorcycle helmet.
this is like saying you can keep drinking whiskey after quiting smoking because your life expectancy is greatly increased. these things are additive, not either/ors.
Actually not wearing a helmet is very clever advice. In the Netherlands almost nobody wears a helmet and yet it is one of the safest places to cycle. In fact we all tend to overcompensate safety with more risky behaviour. A car is basically a 1.5t full body steel armor. And then we go and drive at speeds far beyond of what this armor can protect us from. If you'd remove the body work and make it a buggy, people would drive a lot slower.
Personal anecdote: I bought a helmet a few years ago. While it was still in delivery I came into a situation where I was not sure what a car was doing and I caught myself thinking: "with a helmet I'd not braked" - but rather taken the risk.
Thus I have never worn it and it is sitting there collecting dust.
Another abstract example: no country is more obsessed with "low carb" and "low fat" than the US. Yet no other country produces more plus sized people than the US.
Yet another example is Michael Schumacher. Without the helmet he may not have taken the risk to go into unknown terrain.
I feel vulnerable without a helmet and that keeps me alive.
(FWIW, I always use a helmet except when I use shared bikes, which is rare, only a few times a year. I get on one of my own bikes, helmeted, hundreds of times a year.)
I really don't need to cite anything to tell you that if you get in an accident you are better off wearing more protective gear. I don't care that very few cyclists get in bad accidents compared to walkers and joggers. I care that if I am in an accident, my brain doesn't become a smear on the pavement.
You're assuming that accidents are equally likely with and without helmets and ignoring OP's point that, on balance, you're better off biking without a helmet than not biking at all.
You might actually be right here. I do not know. Either way, don't expect "I really don't need to cite anything" to convince anybody serious.
Don't understand why this has been downvoted. The research behind helmets is exactly why in The Netherlands helmets aren't mandatory. For one, they reduce the amount of people who cycle. Thus they take a car with higher speed, etc. Secondly, wearing a helmet causes cars to be less risk adverse when interacting with you. Lastly, most helmets are utter crap. They tested various and the majority sold in shops are of very poor quality (don't help at all).
Strangely, in Denmark most cyclists do wear a helmet. To me it's very inconvenient. E.g. where to store the damn thing when going anywhere?
I think it's better to concentrate on educating riders on bike handling skills and skills they need when riding in traffic rather than concentrate on helmet use to the exclusion of all else.