Ditching bike helmets laws better for health
https://theconversation.com/ditching-bike-helmets-laws-better-for-health-42
Old but still true. The biggest promotor/beneficiary of cycle helmets is the motor industry...
Discussion
Loading...
About 15 years ago, the US department of transport released statistics on helmets that gave a few conclusions that I found surprising:
- People who wore helmets were less likely to suffer fatal injuries.
- People who wore helmets were more likely to suffer injuries that caused permanent paralysis.
- The second of these was more pronounced than the first: if you combined death and permanent paralysis in a single category, people wearing a helmet were more vulnerable than people without.
- People wearing a helmet were more likely to be involved in an accident than people without.
The first ones were quite easy to explain. The helmet fairly significantly increases the radius of your head. This, in turn, increases the amount of torque on the neck, so you're more likely to break your neck. Motorcycle helmets have padding around the neck to mitigate this, but they're also intended for higher-speed collisions where the risk of head injury is much higher.
A couple of years ago, I got some first-hand experience of this. I came off my bike and broke my shoulder breaking my fall. My head hit the ground and I had a small cut, but if I'd been wearing a helmet then a lot of the shock that went into my shoulder would have been split between my shoulder and neck. I would probably have broken my neck.
The last one was unexplained though. There was an argument that people who wore helmets took more risks. There was an argument that drivers viewed people without helmets as more fragile and took more care around them. There was also a suggestion that wearing a helmet shaped the airflow around your head differently and screwed up sound-based position information going to your brain. None of these was supported by much evidence (I suspect all of them are at least slightly true).
@david_chisnall @kim_harding Also have seen some bafffling figures on this. I could look things up, but it was along the lines of: helmet-wearing in NY very high, fatalaties very high. Helmet-wearing in Amsterdam very low, fatalaties very low.
The eye-catching conclusion being proposed in the article I was reading, was that the difference might come down to car-users in Amsterdam very often also being cyclists, and sympathising with them, and New Yorkers (and car users in many cities), often hating cyclists.