This is one of those situations where there is a lot of fear and anecdotes but data shows that more accidents and injuries occur with helmets than without.
A company should design their safety protocol well and it includes what equipment workers should and should not wear to protect them best.
So prohibiting helmets is very responsible. Criticizing them seems to be taking an irrational stance that it’s better to address your feelings than the actual reality of what happens.
> Bicycle helmet use was associated with reduced odds of head injury, serious head injury, facial injury and fatal head injury. The reduction was greater for serious or fatal head injury. Neck injury was rare and not associated with helmet use. These results support the use of strategies to increase the uptake of bicycle helmets as part of a comprehensive cycling safety plan.
It's a common misconception amongst amateur cyclists that because helmets marginally increase the chance of neck injury and that head injuries are relatively uncommon on bicycles that helmets deliver negative returns in terms of safety but as others have pointed out the data doesn't seem to suggest this is actually the case. Also in terms of common sense consider that all professional cyclists wear helmets when they're competing.
I'm getting real sick of the, "your feelings" talk. You used to get socked in the eye for talking to people that way in public. There's a better way of expressing your point than speaking to proverbial others as though they're children. It's enormously toxic.
> Also in terms of common sense consider that all professional cyclists wear helmets when they're competing.
Helmets are mandatory in all major cycle competitions - so I'm not sure this reveals a preference among professional cyclists, so much as a preference among competition administrators.
> It's a common misconception amongst amateur cyclists that because helmets marginally increase the chance of neck injury and that head injuries are relatively uncommon on bicycles that helmets deliver negative returns in terms of safety but as others have pointed out the data doesn't seem to suggest this is actually the case.
The question is actually more interesting with public health. I have seen several studies that showed that mandatory cycling helmets decrease life expectancy. That's because less people will ride a bike if they have to wear a helmet and the benefits of cycling outweigh the dangers of not wearing the helmet. That doesn't mean it isn't good to wear one anyway if out cycling.
>Also in terms of common sense consider that all professional cyclists wear helmets when they're competing.
Mentioning professional cycling does not help your argument. The riders organisations were fighting strongly against mandatory helmets, and professional cycling was very late with requiring helmets they came many years after they were mandatory for amateur races. There is also the observation that professional cycling has become riskier, although I would not necessarily link that to cyclist wearing helmets, it would be worth investigating though.
Can you cite any of those studies? Is this one of those things where studies count the accidents reported for each group without controlling for population size?
I ask because there are “studies” that show there are more skiing accidents with helmets than without, but anyone who has spent a day at a ski hill can tell why that is: the vast, vast majority of people are wearing helmets. Throw a rock into a crowd of skiers and you’ll probably hit someone with a helmet. Does that mean helmets attract rocks?
Assuming their accident rates are anywhere in the same ballpark, accidents will involve more helmet wearers by a significant margin just because they outnumber non-helmet wearers.
It's been over a decade since I last stepped foot in a ski area. I don't remember anyone wearing a helmet that wasn't on a snowboard. Are they more common now? It makes a lot of sense with how bad things go when they go bad plus all the trees.
It's almost ten years for me and the last thing I remember was a landslide shift from "hardly anybody" to "almost everybody" within only a few seasons (Austrian alps).
Never read any triumphant reports about how this has saved ten thousands of lives though, so I suspect that numbers aren't that impressive.
Though I do very little downhill skiing these days, they're extremely common at US ski areas now whereas they used to be almost unheard of except for racers. (I don't wear one but I do wear a hat that has ribs of deformable material.)
I don't remember a big campaign or anything but probably some combination of snowboarders normalizing, it becoming seen as negligent not to make kids wear them, and probably a general increase in safety culture--especially among the sort of people who can afford to downhill ski.
There are only around 40 downhill skiing deaths in US annually--although the majority of those are brain injuries.
The landslide was 2009/2010, after the Ministerpräsident of Thuringia caused a really bad accident, which he survived but the woman he crashed into didn't. He was wearing a helmet, she wasn't.
I find the claim particularly hard to believe. I ride at least twice a week with my brother and we behave exactly the same with and without helmets. If you have a habit of always wearing your helmet, it just starts being something you don't even really consider as part of the equation. In fact, we will occasionally go almost an entire ride before realizing that one of us forgot to put on our helmet.
I find it much more likely that claims of "data shows..." are due to uncontrolled confounding factors, such as riders being more likely to wear a helmet when they perceive the ride as meeting a certain risk threshold.
I think I have seen several studies that showed that drivers are more aggressive towards riders in lycra and with helmets, so it could still be true that it is riskier to wear a helmet even if you don't take more risks.
It’s just really hard to eliminate adverse selection in population studies.
If people only choose to put on their helmets when doing dangerous things, but don’t bother when doing relatively safe things, then it’s going to look like helmet use is correlated with injuries. Even if, on a per-person basis, the helmet actually reduces injury severity.
And it’s difficult to test helmet effectiveness directly because it is widely considered unethical to randomly subject people to blows to the head.
Similar story for helmets during WW1. Prior to metal helmets, soldiers wore cloth caps. After the soldiers started wearing helmets, the number of head injuries climbed rapidly. The alternative, of course is that the soldier would otherwise have been dead.
You shouldn't follow up a source request with another unsourced fact, but let me follow up with yet another: the statistic are entirely different for motorcycles because motorcyclists are far more likely to have the type of accidents that helmets protect from.
Comparing the fatality rate of bicycling to the one for riding a motorcycle is not good.
edit: That's not only a claim that bicycle helmets vastly reduce the fatality of bicycle accidents (rather than just significantly reduce them), but a claim that so many unhelmeted riders die from bicycle accidents that it distorts safety figures. All of this without any safety figures.
I keep hearing this, here and in other online spaces, but until I see link to one of these studies I'll be skeptical, because I don't see how you could test this in a meaningful way. I see very different people wearing helmets versus not. The people I see not wearing helmets tend to be taking leisurely rides around the neighborhood or screwing around on sidewalks downtown. The people I see wearing helmets are going longer distances and taking trips that span neighborhoods. All the delivery cyclists, racing/fitness enthusiasts, and commuters I see are wearing helmets. For myself, the risks I expose myself to are almost entirely determined by where I ride, which is determined by the purpose of my trip. Show me a study that somehow controls for that, and I'll take it seriously.
My personal feeling is that the "helmets don't help" line is a strategic choice made by bike activists who are doing work I approve of, but I don't trust them when it comes to my safety. They're fighting for separate infrastructure, which I like, but they're dedicated to the idea that the kind of riding I have to do to get anywhere is inherently unsafe. They aren't interested in making what I have to do now more safe; they're interested in making sure people in the future don't have to do it.
Even with a causal effect, it’s important to consider the effectiveness as an intervention for a specific group (riders for this company).
There’s a reasonable causal story to tell wherein helmet-wearing leads people t take make riskier maneuvers on trips they’d be on, which leads to helmet wearing being associated with injury.
There’s another reasonable causal story wherein helmet-wearing leads people to chose to bike on trips they otherwise would take alternative transport, or skip entirely, which leads to helmet wearing being associated with injury.
In the first, a pedicab company might prohibit helmets to reduce risky behavior, but should really compare that intervention to just training and incentivizing lower-risk riding. In the second, the company is severing the connection between the intervention and the effect! The passengers tell riders where to go, so helmet wearing has no effect on risk-taking behavior _specifically for their riders_. Prohibiting helmets then dramatically increases risk/severity of injury.
I’d want to be very sure about the specifics before taking such a counterintuitive decision.
I am an individual, not a statistic. I am completely capable of wearing a helmet without increasing risky behavior, so why should I be prohibited from protecting myself for some dubious statistical effect?
I don’t know if the UK is sufficiently litigious, but if this were in the US, one bad accident causing a head injury would lead to the company being sued into the Stone Age.
Helmets may inadvertently create more accidents, but they also protect the most vital organ in your body during those accidents.
I'm curious to know what your data is. Offhand, sounds more like most riding is with helmets, so will dominate the numbers. But it's being interpreted as causal? Feels unlikely. What is the mechanism?
I’d like to see the evidence of this. I can imagine that maybe wearing a helmet gives a false sense of security, and therefore leads to a bit more recklessness. Still, I’d bet that even if you have more accidents when wearing a helmet, you have fewer deaths.
A company should design their safety protocol well and it includes what equipment workers should and should not wear to protect them best.
So prohibiting helmets is very responsible. Criticizing them seems to be taking an irrational stance that it’s better to address your feelings than the actual reality of what happens.