[josiahpeters]

I treat helmet safety like I do gun safety. ALWAYS TREAT A GUN AS IF ITS LOADED. If you don't, you behave differently around it always. And that's how people accidentally shoot their friends or themselves (even cleaning their gun). If you choose to not compromise on fundamentals like that, you are positioning yourself and others for less risk from the get go.

Thankfully I applied the same ALWAYS mentality to wearing a helmet for my biking commute. I was obeying traffic laws when a pickup truck turned into me while I was traveling through a green light. I had right of way and he wasn't paying attention and clipped me fairly hard. I tried to break and skid about 10 feet as he turned into me. I ended up in the hospital with a severe concussion and a terrifying 6 hours for my wife as she sat next to me. Praying that my lost memory would recover as the concussion wore off. I was initially forgetful of us having been married for less than a year. Eventually I started remembering things again, quite a scary moment for us.

Funny thing was I was riding to visit a friend who was just a few blocks away. He had recently criticised me for wearing a helmet to go less than a mile to visit him.

Fast forward a year and finally getting the nerve to ride again. My first trip out and a teenager blows through a stop sign without looking and almost hits me. In broad daylight, flashing lights on my bike and all.

There is an inherit risk in riding my bike to work. And a helmet may not provide a meaningful mitigation of risk. (I've never bothered to look up statistics, maybe you have?) However, I can control just a few variables to ride or not, ride defensively or not, and wear protective gear or not. I certainly have no control of the motor vehicles drivers or their distractions. So I choose the variables that I can control without losing the joy of commuting as a cyclist.