Cyclists Sure Do Love Arguing About Helmets
Bicycle helmets, specifically whether or not we “should” wear them when we ride, tends to be a topic that elicits a strong opinion from cyclists and non-cyclists alike.
We shared a story yesterday about a judge’s ruling to dock a cyclist 20 percent of the settlement she was awarded in a hit-and-run case in Ireland because she wasn’t wearing a helmet at the time of the incident. The story has gotten a strong reaction from Bicycling readers and the conversations around this subject are, well, never boring.
We, the staff, discussed the topic amongst ourselves here at Bicycling too, and were reminded of this video, hosted by BikeSnob NYC's Eben Wise, in which he lays out some of his own personal Helmet Arguments.
“I’m one of the most boring people on the face of the earth,” Weiss says. “The craziest thing I do in my life is that I get on my bike without a helmet, and I’m perfectly comfortable with that.”
The “Helmet Arguments” people generally make fall into one of a few camps and, broadly, they go something like this:
Mandating bicycle helmet use actually makes riding more dangerous, not less.
Some researchers have suggested that there is, strangely, danger in making cyclists feel a greater sense of safety on the road because it lulls them into a false sense of security, which makes them less vigilant to what drivers are doing.
“Your idea of how much [a helmet] going to help may be a little overblown because the pro-helmet messaging out there that you’re subjected to constantly has given you a sense, perhaps, that it’s going to protect you more than it will,” Weiss says.
Another problem with mandating helmet usage is that statistically, helmet laws have unfairly affected the BIPOC community and the homeless, which is leading some states and municipalities to do away with them for that reason.
But helmets do protect our brains.
Helmets offer protection against more serious head injuries. The Cleveland Clinic recently released the results of a meta study that found that wearing a bike helmet reduces serious head injuries by sixty percent, traumatic brain injury by fifty-three percent, and reduces the number of cyclists killed or seriously injured by thirty-four percent. Those numbers are…high.
However, helmets are far from a panacea of safety. Helmets are not designed to protect you against impacts with motor vehicles, Weiss says, and cars are ultimately the biggest dangers for cyclists on the road.
But helmets make bicycling seem more dangerous than it is, and deter people from riding.
This argument often cites cycling culture in the Netherlands as one of its main points. For the Dutch, riding a bike for normal transportation is very much a part of the culture (as are drivers who share the road), and “normal everyday transportation” trips generally don’t involve lycra or special gear, and that includes helmets.
Cycling is so normalized in the Netherlands that the sheer number of cyclists on the road ends up making it safer in numbers, and there’s less of a barrier (so the logic goes) to taking that quick trip by bike and forgoing the car if the bike trip doesn’t involve a specialized outfit. If people could just ride without wearing a weird lid, more people would and we’d all be safer out there. Or something.
Either way, let’s do away with helmet shaming.
“Please, if it makes you feel better to wear a helmet you should wear a helmet, but the worst thing about our fixation with them is the shaming….if you don’t wear a bicycle helmet you will be soundly shamed,” says Weiss.
The cyclist we told you about yesterday, Raissa Lopes, 22, who lives in Dublin, was shamed and at least partially blamed for her injuries by some commenters simply because she wasn’t wearing a helmet. Media reports, which are often not terribly sympathetic to cyclists when reporting car/bike collisions, tend to emphasize when a cyclist was without a helmet in a finger-wagging tone that puts some of the onus on the victim.
Now we’d like to hear from you.
Do you wear a helmet when you ride? Every time or just sometimes? If you have children, do they wear a helmet when they ride? Let us know how you roll in the comments. Let's start a conversation.
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