Bicycle helmet saves the day -- on foot

November 3, 7:30 AMBicycle Transportation ExaminerAdam Voiland

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A helmet saves the day--off a bike.                         (All Photos: Voiland)

If she hadn't been wearing a bicycle helmet, there's a good chance that my girlfriend would be in the hospital laid up with a concussion or worse right now. The odd thing is: bicycles had little to do with the accident.

 A few days ago, while she was entering the landing of her new painting studio in Washington, a sturdy pipe tumbled from the rafters above and landed squarely on her helmeted head. A ceiling panel, light fixture, and a chunk of drywall hang precariously now from an electrical cord.

The offending pipe was about the width of my wrist. It's heavy, bulky, and reminds me of a life-sized version of the now defunct lead pipe from the board game Clue. It's fortunate that she happened to be bringing her bicycle into the landing and hadn't, by chance, removed her helmet when the pipe struck, particularly because she doesn't always wear one on the short ride from our house to her studio.

As strange as it might seem, a pedestrian getting pummeled in the head is far more common than you might imagine.  In fact, though bicyclists and motorcycle riders are typically the groups that get grief from the media and public health authorities if they don't wear a helmet, there's a strong argument that pedestrians ought to be helmeting up for their commutes as well. 

Some numbers: there were 4,653 pedestrians killed in traffic crashes and 70,000 injured in the United States in 2007, according to the National Highway Safety Transportation Administration. Put another way, that's about about 11 percent of all motor-vehicle related crashes.  Or put another way, a pedestrian is killed in a traffic crash every 8 minutes. Most startling, however, is that by one metric, per kilometer traveled, walking is significantly more dangerous than both cycling and and driving. As I've written about previously for U.S. News & World Report, Rutgers University researchers have concluded that pedestrian fatalities are 36 times as high as driving fatalities and 11 times as high as cycling fatalities per kilometer traveled, for example, as shown in the graph below.

Despite the numbers, though, the idea of wearing a helmet while walking seems outright loony to most Americans. To which I can't help but wonder: why is it such a faux-pax for a cyclist--even one of President Obama's stature--to ride occasionally without a helmet?  Perhaps, though, we should all start getting used to the idea of wearing helmets for both cycling and walking (and, hey, why not driving as well?)  In Denmark, in fact, some insurance companies have already started encouraging people to wear pedestrian helmets.