That headline atop a graphic on the front page of USA Today grabbed my attention. I’m not a normal USA Today connoisseur and I’m sometimes skeptical of the “data” they report when I do glance at an edition. So I perused the pie chart with some doubt. Their chart maintained that 58% percent of surveyed adults claimed to never wear a helmet when bicycling, while only 30% reported they wore a helmet often. According to USA Today, 1% of the citizens of our great land are so preoccupied with things beyond my grasp as to not know if they wear a helmet.
These numbers, cited from a study done by the Consumer Reports National Research Center, were startling to me. I almost never see bicyclists sans helmets. I admit that I don’t see much when I ride, and the cyclists I do see when I’m on my bike are very predominantly those who train fairly seriously and almost universally sport helmets. But I’m actually pretty alert when I’m not on the bike and because of my interest in the sport, when a person on a bicycle is within eyeshot I generally notice. Obviously, there are lots of extremely casual bicycle users out there, maybe riding for exercise, but more likely riding to the corner market for a cup of coffee or taking a rolling evening constitutional by riding around the block.
In doing a little research on helmet use my formerly sanguine belief that almost everyone who rides accepts the common knowledge that helmets save lives was sorely challenged. The Internet is of course filled with so many completely contradictory “facts” that it’s best to ignore most of what you read (unless written by Examiners ;-). There are those on the non-helmet side who claim to have facts proving that helmet use is more dangerous than riding bare-headed. I don’t have time to waste trying to analyze that type of “data”. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, likely a much more reliable source than your average web “expert”, reports that 92% of bicyclists killed in 2007 were not wearing a helmet.
Even among dedicated proponents of helmet use there exist large numbers who are adamantly opposed to laws mandating such behavior. These folks argue their position on a number of fronts including: individual liberty, relying on more effective safety alternatives (education, bike lanes, better traffic enforcement) and threats to bicycle usage if helmets are required. A little over two years ago, a very public fight was waged over a proposed helmet law in Lance Armstrong’s hometown, Austin, TX.
As an aficionado of another two-wheel recreational form, I am on the side of mandatory helmet use for motorcyclists, but for bicyclists I think we’re better served by trying to educate riders on the benefits of wearing them rather than making their use mandatory. One thing I can do to help foster this cause is stop running pictures of helmet-less bicyclists. I’ll probably start tomorrow.
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Comments
As an aficianado of motorcycling AND bicycling, I take a nearly opposite position from you. I believe motorcyclists should be free to choose to wear a helmet or not, but riding a bicycle is more hazardous. Put simply, bicyclists go down more often than motorcyclists. Bikes have those skinny tires that don't have much traction, while cycles have much bigger tires.
I choose whether to wear a helmet on my motorcycles. I always wear a helmet on my bicycle.
The IIHS figures are based on the U.S. Department of Transportation's Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS). The forms used by FARS do not in general have a convenient box for recording helmet use, which if done at all is done in free text. Thus the data entrists do not record helmet use accurately after fatalities, and many deaths where helmets were in fact worn will be recorded as "helmet not used". (Geary, in Injury Prevention; this feedback form doesn't allow links but references to most of this can be found in the Wikipedia article on bicycle helmets, or all of this by emailing me). As a result the IIHS studies (and others based on the same data) are of no value whatever. They are meaningless. They do no credit to the IIHS, nor to anyone who uses them.
You may be referring to Ian Walker's interesting study showing that he got less space from motorists when he was wearing a helmet? It was interesting, but it was also only one very small and localized study...
The real trouble with bike helmets is that they don't seem to work - laws have stopped a lot of people cycling and have done nothing for head injury rates, see Robinson's classic paper in the BMJ. It appears that helmets break easily, but don't absorb the impact. A broken helmet has simply failed. Helmets have also strangled some young children who were wearing helmets while playing off their bicycles. At my moderately advanced age it's far too dangerous not to cycle - regular cycling, Danish style, not too far, not too fast, nearly halves the death rate. Gary, promoting cycling is great, but forget the helmets - they have nothing useful to offer.
The reason there is so much controversy over helmet usage is the very lax standard used to certify helmets in the US. Boiled down the bicycle helmet is designed only to protect your head in a fall from your bicycle, not in a collision with a motor vehicle. A helmet provides a small measure of protection from head injury in a motor vehicle collision when the primary impact with the motor vehicle is with some other part of the body and the head impacts the ground. This keeps the helmet within its design speed range, but impacting the motor vehicle at any speed greater than most school zones takes the helmet out of its designed speed range and at best merely reduces the extent of injury slightly. My own experience jibes with this. When I was hit the first 2 times my head did not hit the vehicle or the ground, which was good because bicycle helmets would not be invented for another 12-13 years. My 3rd wreck my head bounced off the windshield and in spite of having the best helmet I could buy at the time I suffered brain damage, mostly to my speech center. The motor vehicle was traveling at an estimated 65 MPH (in a 45 zone) when I was hit, but the primary impacts were to my left leg and hip, both of which were broken and had other impact damage.
I forgot to mention that I wear a helmet every time I ride a bicycle, except when I am working on the bike and need my ears free for checking for noises. When I ride I ride with the a helmet that has the highest protection I can buy, a full face DH MTB helmet. I forgot to mention that my face was pretty badly injured in the wreck that caused me brain damage, and that's not an experience I wish to repeat.
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