Safety vests and helmets make cyclists look ‘less human’ to other road users
Safety vests and helmets make cyclists look ‘less human’ to other road users
Bike riders wear helmets and high-vis vests to reduce their vulnerability on the road. Problem is a new study finds this dehumanises cyclists, putting them more at risk of aggression from drivers.
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There's a long term debate about the effecacy of helmets. this article from 2014 summarizes it pretty well. All the studies, both in favor and against are relatively weak compared to what we might expect, but this is epidemiology, not biology.
The biggest indicator is simply that countries with heavy helmet use have more head injuries per 100,000 miles ridden than those with low helmet use. Even that is a correlation, but causality is unclear.
Surely that's like what happened in WWI (I think) where they found making soldiers wear helmets created more head injuries than before. They almost stopped using them before realising that less soldiers were returning dead so they just increased medic capacity to handle it.
Wearing a helmet is going to result in a head injury in an accident which would otherwise have caused death.
Naw, all injuries go down. It's not survivor bias, it's a solid inverse correlation.
Places without helmets tend to have a better cycling culture and infrastructure
That's quite true. And they get it because enough people are cycling that there is demand for it. Mandatory helmets laws actually discourage cycling. The data on that is clear. The data on whether mandatory helmets laws increase safety is much less clear, however.
When it's a matter of public policy, one should consider both these factors... A clear cost for an unclear benefit, and change policy as our knowledge continues to evolve.
I think the debate around helmets is beside the point. Why? Because it's not really up for debate that helmets prevent brain injuries.
If danger from road users increase because of wearing a helmet, that's an issue with the drivers and the non-separated infrastructure.
As a daily commuter riding a bike, I say we keep the helmets. It's like wearing a seat belt and should be mandatory as long as we have a semblance of socialised healthcare.
Except that mandatory helmets discourages bicycling which causes disinvestment in safe infrastructure, and keeps drivers unfamiliar with cyclists. This makes cycling much more dangerous. Note again that the mass cycling cultures do not have mandatory helmets laws and are also much safer than Australia.
Also, it's weird that cycling is singles out for mandatory helmets. Fully half of all head injuries from individual transport happen on automobiles, yet nobody is suggesting mandatory helmets for car occupants. Even walking creates a larger number of head injury hospital visits. The arguments for mandatory bicycle helmets apply there too.
Ultimately, at a time that we need greater investment in mass cycling than ever, for individual safety and for the environment, mandatory helmets laws are counterproductive
The meaningful number when comparing eg driving/walking to biking head injuries is not the absolute number but the fraction. If you’re 100 times more likely to get hurt when doing X compared with Y, it means X is inherently more dangerous/risky and warrants extra protection. Even if far fewer people overall do X.
I’m assuming here that far fewer people ride than walk/drive on your average day.
And the people who seem most discouraged by helmets are those who always want to tell you how discouraged everyone is by helmets. My experience is that most people who ride don’t really give a shit / are happy to have something to protect their noggin.
It's true, to get the best data, we need a common denominator, which is just not available. The initial post of this thread was pointing out that the studies all around are weak, including the study that lead to mandatory helmets use policy. What information we do have is suggesting that more ridership results in better infrastructure which results in less injuries over all
I think we all agree that the most important factor here to getting people on bikes is providing the feeling of safety (+ actual safety) and convenience, which I would argue needs to be better infrastructure first, helmet law relaxations second.
Can you imagine if they do helmet law relaxations first? The media would have a field day.
If someone is more discouraged to ride because helmets are a hassle or might ruin their hair, instead of death by car due to poor infrastructure and car-centrism, then I'd look at such a person sideways.
It's not really an either/or. In order to get investment in infrastructure, there needs to be interest in cycling. This means removing barriers where present. A great example of this is in bike shares. New York City introduced a bike share in the early 2000s, and that helped to increase ridership. Increased ridership lead to the construction of miles of inner city separated bike lane.
The Melbourne bike share had consistently low ridership, and was abandoned entirely in 2019. They explicitly cited the helmet law as the reason.. In Brisbane, 85% of people said the helmet law was why they didn't use the bike share.
If we want to increase actual cyclist safety, we desperately need the infrastructure, but for the infrastructure we need cyclists. One of the best methods for getting more cyclists doesn't work in Australia. Maybe that should change.
is not really up for debate that helmets prevent brain injuries
Not if you don't read the research, as you apparently haven't. As the poster above pointed out there really is a lot of debate and the research supporting helmets is of very poor quality.
countries with heavy helmet use have more head injuries per 100,000 miles ridden than those with low helmet use.
Now compare that to fatalities. There's the answer to your second sentence.
Yeah, fatalities also go down. All hospitalizations do. It's not survivor bias, it's a solid inverse correlation between helmet use and injury. Netherlands, Denmark, Japan all have very low helmet use and very low injuries.
The three you just mentioned also have a heavy cyclist culture, and infrastructure in place that facilitates separate biking though
That's quite true. And they got that via sustained policy to encourage cycling. It's been quite demonstrated that mandatory helmets actively discourage cycling, leading to both a disinvestment in infrastructure and drivers being less comfortable around cyclists (thus more dangerous)
I am not making a point about individual choices. Anyone should feel free to wear a helmet. But public policy is a different beast, and the data on mandatory helmets laws are inconclusive as to benefit and clear as to cost.
Good lord, no.
If having to wear basic safety equipment that literally dons and removes in a split second 'discourages' you from cycling, you are either incredibly vain or outright lying to yourself about the true causes of not riding.
Most people are vain, yes.