The Mom mentality of protecting you from the world. Are helmets the same?
Should you wear a bike helmet every time you ride or not? The helmet debates have been ranging in the cycling community for years and seem to be as entrenched and as bitter as the Israelis and the Arabs. One side says helmets save lives and make us safer. The other says the science behind the safety of helmets is dubious and point to mandatory helmet laws as a cause for reducing the number of people cycling, either by creating the idea that cycling is dangerous or simply creating an equipment barrier to entry. Personally, I usually wear a helmet but have to conceded that in the countries with majority culture acceptance of bicycles as transportation helmets are a rarity yet there is no epidemic of brain injury.
Recently, Tom Vanderbilt, the author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), recently hosted a guest post on his blog from British researcher Ian Walker. Walker made waves a few years ago with a research study that looked at interaction of cars and cyclists on the roads of England (as European countries go, a much more car dominated country like the U.S.) His findings were shocking in that he found cars tended to give less room to and behave less carefully around cyclists wearing helmets. In his guest post, he expands on this by looking at probabilities when thinking about what really makes you safest on the road and in life. After questioning the ability of a helmet to save your life in a crash involving 2 tons of steel at high speed, he makes the simple point that your chances of dying from a bicycle accident are infinitesimally small compared to the more than 50-50 chance you will die from heart disease and cancer. Yet the focus of our fear is on the unlikely here and now instead of the very likely off in the future.
Walker muses on the idea that from the cyclists point of view avoiding an accident is far more important that what you are wearing. This is a far different way of looking at safety than with the automobile where you have lots of material designed to protect you. In a car, crashes at 20-30 mph are not that uncommon and most people survive these with little in the form of personal injury. Yet that same crash with a bicycle can be fatal. Walker suggests that when you wear a helmet, it gives you a sense of safety that means you take more risks. Add to that the research he did about how motorists react to you, and you could be looking at a greater chance of being involved in a crash simply by strapping that lid on.
The focus on bicycle safety in this country has been on wrapping the rider in protective garb for the inevitable crash (a policy that sells an awful lot of widgets by the way.) Go down the aisle of children’s bike equipment, and you’ll see gloves, knee pads, and elbow pads sold with most helmets. As a species, these physical totems give us comfort when confronting the fear in front of us. In the most American of sentiments, “If I just have the stuff, I’ll be OK.” It’s psychologically easier to hand over our fear to an object than confront it and make a rational choice.
As one local bike advocate likes to say, “Stop assigning magical qualities to styrofoam.” While our current helmet-focused safety policy makes us feel good and helps the balance sheets of some companies, it is doing little to actually put more people on bikes and get them where they need to go safely. Good infrastructure, not the latest helmet, is what we need. Bike paths and bike priority streets will do far more to reduce injury and death. When you elevate the bicycle to an equal footing in importance on the road to the automobile that will change the way motorists view the bicycle. Plus more people will use bicycles to get from A to B increasing the likelihood that that driver is also a cyclists. All of these things reduce the likelihood of crash.
As Walker says, avoiding the crash is the most important part of avoiding injury and death. Kind of a simple concept. Think we can get it?
on Aug 11th, 2010 at 5:13 pm
darn it…I thought I had concluded my own internal debate on helmets…now you’ve started the argument all over again…thanks
kidding aside…nicely written
on Aug 11th, 2010 at 8:24 pm
I used to be on the fence about helmets- I wore them 90% of the time. But then about a week ago I was hit by a car while on a nice bike laned, traffic calmed, through traffic diverted residential street. If I hadn’t had my helmet on it would gave been worse than a concussion. I now wear a helmet every ride because I never know when that driver won’t see you. In my case the driver was blinded by the setting sun and inattentive but infrastructure doesn’t overcome everything.
on Aug 11th, 2010 at 10:15 pm
nice RT @austinon2wheels: Are bicycle helmets the cyclist’s talisman? http://bit.ly/b17n0M
on Aug 11th, 2010 at 10:17 pm
RT @austinon2wheels: Are bicycle helmets the cyclist’s talisman? http://bit.ly/b17n0M
on Aug 11th, 2010 at 10:25 pm
Jennifer,
Not to repeat the point, but read the end of Ian Walker’s post. He talks about the the error of assuming the helmet had anything to do with surviving an accident and the problems with applying one instance to everything. The fact is that we do not know that the helmet protected you from further injury, and even if it did, that single instance cannot be applied in general across the population. It may or may not help, but until there is good scientific testing, all we can do is hope the helmets do good.
On the larger point, what Walker points out about a correlation between helmet wearing and riskier situations is backed up with some empirical data and should give everyone pause about the conventional wisdom on the safety of helmets.
on Aug 11th, 2010 at 11:12 pm
RT @austinon2wheels: Are bicycle helmets the cyclist’s talisman? http://bit.ly/b17n0M
on Aug 12th, 2010 at 9:04 am
I think the helmet controversy is a reflection of American culture. There is this uptight, preachy, black & white, good/bad, rules-oriented attitude that permeates much of our behavior. It’s no different from the rantings displayed in comments to news stories on the net about science (especially evolution), where the “Christians” feel threatened and start frothing at the mouth if they perceive anything that goes contrary to “God’s word”, or abortion, taxes, you name it. Most people who get involved in these arguments know next to nothing about the subject and merely express an emotional conviction that they are “right”.
on Aug 12th, 2010 at 3:22 pm
Lots of interesting points. The bit about drivers being less cautious around helmeted riders is really troubling. Like Tim, I’ve been internally debating helmet usage for the last couple of years. Even if a helmet “saved” my life, I’m not sure I’d be glad to linger with the inevitable serious injuries.
But the question of survival misses the point: helmets are to minimize damage in a non-fatal crash, e.g., a headache instead of a concussion, or in Jennifer’s case a concussion instead of massive head trauma. And a false sense of safety is something we all need to be alert to, helmeted or not.
on Aug 14th, 2010 at 10:50 am
I always wear a helmet on my road and mountain bikes. I had a bad accident last year on the mtb and landed on the helmet and my shoulder. I got a broken collar bone and busted the helmet in about 5 places. Not sure what would have happened without a helmet, but I might not have survived to figure it out. I think anyone not wearing one while mountain biking is incredibly stupid, but that’s just my opinion. On the road bike, the last time I didn’t wear a helmet was about 20 years ago. On that ride, I got side swiped, broke my leg and got road rash on my back and arms, but not a scratch on my face or head. I figured I got lucky once and wasn’t about to push it. All that being said, when I was in grad school recently, I commuted about 5 miles each way without a helmet. I felt the conditions were pretty safe, even though there were cars around. My objection to wearing one for that commute was that I didn’t have anywhere to safely put it at school and didn’t want to lug it around all day. On the road and mountain bikes, I don’t have that problem, and with the increased speeds, distances, and danger, the helmet just makes sense.
I don’t think helmets should be legally mandated because there are plenty of situations where they aren’t necessary. I never thought of them as representing bicycling as a dangerous sport, but let’s face it, there are real dangers when riding a bike, so maybe that’s not a bad thing.
Finally, of course I agree with the author’s point that better infrastructure would be an tremendous improvement for bicycle safety, but it’s also not a silver bullet and in a place like Texas, no amount of urban infrastructure is going to address the safety issues of riding on rural roads.
on Aug 14th, 2010 at 11:09 am
Tod, I don’t think I’m suggesting that infrastructure is a panacea. What I am suggesting is that it is the most effective way to reduce the risk of being hit by a car, and that all the focus on helmets has allowed policy makers to ignore building this infrastructure. It’s so much easier to just leave all safety up to the individual purchasing a helmet rather than actually build a city that makes cycling safe and convenient.
on Aug 14th, 2010 at 10:48 pm
All I have to say about helmets is I wear a full-face helmet every time I ride because my last big wreck I landed face first after getting tossed about 16 feet in the air, and getting your face sewn back on is itchy, and the studies that show a reduction in head injury after a helmet law is introduced also show a larger reduction in leg injuries. I don’t think helmets do anything to protect legs, so the reduction in leg injuries has more to do with reduced cycling rates than increased safety from helmets.
on Aug 18th, 2010 at 7:52 pm
elliot, my point is there needs to be a balance of solutions and messages. Having the safest and most bike friendly urban area won’t change the reality for riders in rural areas, and like you said, relying on helmets won’t solve the problem either.
on Oct 27th, 2010 at 8:42 pm
Bicycle helmets – are they a talisman or an invite to carelessness? http://bit.ly/b17n0M