The Wrong Side of my Car

The blog that wants to go obsolete

Should we wear bike helmets?

Ah yes. Bike helmets. What are they? A simple piece of protective equipment? Or some ritual object which hopefully, after blessing it with the right incantations, will levitate you out of the way if a truck left hooks you? Or is this just the brain damage from this discussion speaking?

Not many things get cyclists up in arms as this simple object. And probably even cyclists who wear these things. Why is that?

What a bike helmet does

First we have to understand what a bike helmet does, and what it doesn’t. Standards for bike helmets generally assume they should protect against single sided accidents. Things like getting stuck in a tram track, or hitting a bollard, or slipping on a kerb. *1 These accidents are usually low speed, so the helmet is tested against impacts at 20 km/h or so.

For the higher speed impacts, like the ones that tend to happen in accidents with cars, those helmets just aren’t strong enough to offer much protection.

Secondly, a helmet is good at protecting your head. But not your legs or vital organs. If a truck left hooks and runs you over, you’ll die, and it will not be because of brain injury. (many people will not realise this until you explicitly point it out)

Helmets work, but you have to understand their limitations.

The numbers

It is really frustrating to try to find numbers. With helmets the main thing we’re interested in are brain injuries. But many statistics talk about head injuries. Things like losing a teeth, or needing stitches in your chin after coming off. (Both of which I have seen happen to cyclists wearing a helmet). These are pretty annoying things, and the former is potentially quite expensive, but they don’t ruin months, or even years, or maybe the rest of your life, like a brain injury does.

We’re also interested in risk per distance covered. Or, maybe, per unit of time travelled. Statistics of injuries per amount of cyclists are pretty meaningless because, define a cyclist. Do you count if you ride 3 times per year? Or do they mean trips?

Danger

Is travelling on a bicycle more risky than by on a car? Even in the Netherlands, the bean counters say yes *2. Various metrics, like hospitalisations per million kilometres, are much worse for cyclists.

So does that mean cycling is bad for your health? That is complicated. A big, largely unseen risk factor today is lack of exercise, and riding a bicycle in daily life is a pretty good way to get that exercise. In the short term cycling is more dangerous, but it is balanced out by better health and longer life expectancy.

Do I wear a bike helmet, and why?

Short answer: yes, I wear one. The infrastructure kinda sucks here, and it is a pretty easy and cheap way to have slightly less risk of brain injury. And our infrastructure is kinda crappy, which increases both your risk of car accidents, and of simply coming off.

Should you wear one? It depends. If you don’t wear one you’re accepting a higher risk. That is by itself not unusual. People go walking, and people drive cars without helmets, which both also carry risk of head or brain injory. People happily do DIY work at home. People go play soccer or rugby. People accept small risks all the time. Most of the time we don’t admonish them for that, so maybe we should also not admonish cyclists for that.

But you have to draw a line somewhere. Most agree that on a motorbike you must wear a helmet. Bicycles are in this awkward zone in between, somewhat dangerous, but not dangerous enough to obviously need a helmet.

But actually, this is a tangent. Safety is not the reason why this is getting people upset.

What a bike helmet doesn’t do

A few weeks ago, Gordon Ramsay made a plea to wear helmets *3, and whenever that happens, immediately graphs like this one will show up. *4

Graphs like this are a bit like clouds. What you see in those statistics is limited only by your imagination. The thing I see in it is that people aren’t stupid and in dangerous situations, more people tend to wear helmets.

But if you look closer you’ll notice something else. Note that the Dutch achieve a relatively good safety record, mostly without helmets. That tells you that while a helmet may be a factor, it is only a small factor, and whatever the Netherlands is doing is much more effective at preventing cyclists getting dead than having them wear helmets.

But this is merely pointing out the limitations. It is hardly rage bait. So what gives?

The dog whistle

For that answer we have to look at wider society. There is an undercurrent of people who believe cyclists are not entitled to be on the road at all. They don’t pay road tax *5. Maybe they didn’t pass the appropriate rite of passage. They interfere with traffic really badly. It is not our (that is, car drivers’) fault that cyclists are there so it is not on us to be careful — they take the risk, they deal with it.

Stating outright that cyclists deserve to die because it is their own fault is perhaps over the top, so how do you signal that virtue to like minded people? You look for a softer phrase that everyone knows implies that idea, but still offers plausible deniability if someone complains about it. A phrase like that is called a dog whistle.

And in this case, one of the dog whistles of choice is bike helmets.

If cyclists want to be safe, why don’t they start wearing helmets instead of moaning about infrastructure?

Pff he [dead cyclist] probably wasn’t even wearing a helmet.

Openly advocating for bike helmets can thus reinforce those ideas, in turn encouraging sociopathic behaviour. Like close passes, which Ashley Neal so rightfully condemns in this video. (a punishment pass is a legit thing, where someone passes a bicycle very closely even though there is plenty of room)

Speaking of which, Ashley Neal retweeted that post from Jamie Oliver and promptly got caught in the crossfire.

Oops.

The case of New Zealand

The other problem is just… be careful what you wish for.

New Zealand is like a cautionary tale about just how bad the outcomes of bike helmet advocacy can be.

That story starts in 1986, when a 12 year old boy, Aaron, was hit by a car on a highway, and landed in a coma. *6 He would be paralysed from the neck down for the rest of his life. So, in a bid to ensure that no other mother and child has to go through that ordeal, his mother, Rebecca Oaten, spent the next six years going around from school to school, four per day, on average, with her paralysed son. Well that is dedication. if you’re reading this (or writing this) you could learn something from it.

Campaigning for safe bicycle infras—. No just kidding. Campaigning for bike helmets.

In 1994, those years of efforts paid off, and we officially got a bicycle helmet law.

OK, maybe I should not make jokes about it. But one got to wonder. You can’t really blame Rebecca herself for any of this, but what were the people around her thinking? There was another country where people protested against children getting hurt and killed in traffic, and somehow, they got better infrastructure and not a helmet law. That story would already have be known by the late 1980s.

But no. Bike helmets. You can already hear the Health and Safety people go like oh nooo. *7

Anyway, someone with a child, in a wheelchair, paralysed from his neck down, is telling everyone that this happened while cycling, and all sorts of details, like how going to the toilet does not work if you are paralysed from the neck down. How would people respond to that? Parents?

If you guess, kids will wear more helmets, you guessed wrong. Think about it. Imagine this as a parent. “Hey, this could happen to your kid”. You get kids to stop riding their bicycles.

We can try to look up the numbers on what happened next.

A graph you’ll almost immediately find is a variation of this one. Including a colour version on Wikipedia:

The head injury percentage here is as a proportion of the total of head injury and limb injury. (That is oddly specific, and I don’t have the full text of the source to see why they picked that one). Helmets protect your head, but not your limbs, so that metric should go down when helmet usage increases. But it barely budged at all.

Here’s another classic:

Which links to a page titled Mandatory bicycle helmet law in New Zealand, with a lot of graphs (including the other one above).

Cycling uptake halved around the time the helmet law was introduced.

Other graphs on that page show that cycling did not get meaningfully safer after the helmet law. Cycling uptake halved, and various metrics like hospital admissions also roughly halved.

And that brings us to today. Auckland has large areas where cycling is so low you can’t even meaningfully define a mode share. In some statistical units, an estimated 0 — zero — out of 2000 or so ride their bike to school or to work.

We are now a country where this sort of idiotic stuff happens. It is now normal to see blatant, open contempt for the lives of cyclists.

The concrete barriers on a bike lane got damaged. This is a road with a flush meridian. Why did it get damaged? What will happen to cyclists if those barriers are removed? Think this one through.

But we have a helmet law to keep cyclists safe. Yeah, right.

That is what Rebecca Oaten’s efforts helped to achieve. Those years of effort. Riding bikes got incredibly marginalised, kids largely lost the freedom to get around by themselves at all, a lot of cyclists still get killed or injured on the road just the same, and approximately nobody cares about safety for cyclists.

She’s got to be one of the most tragic figures in bicycle advocacy, ever.

In short, New Zealand got helmet advocacy, and then a helmet law. It did not end well for cyclists.

The case of the Netherlands

We saw the Netherlands in that graph above. Good safety, no helmets. So, do helmets not work after all? Or are there other, bigger factors at work?

Factors like infrastructure, and a society where hitting a cyclist with a car is frowned upon. Ironically, since they are so good at keeping cyclists and cars apart, a helmet law may be more effective in the Netherlands than in New Zealand.

But they don’t have a helmet law, and are not introducing one any time soon.

One reason, I think, is second order effects. A successful helmet law must by definition convince people that cycling is dangerous enough to warrant a helmet. And the natural reaction to that information is not to get helmets — it is to stop doing it. Now, bicycles are usually used for short trips that are still too far to walk. Public transport is usually debilitatingly slow for such trips so the obvious alternative is to drive cars instead.

Some cities, like Utrecht, have something like a 50% bike mode share. If a substantial portion of that switches to driving they are in big trouble. They would need more road lanes, which is expensive, and more parking, which is also expensive, and the extra traffic would make everything more dangerous and unpleasant for everyone, potentially undoing the benefit of wearing helmets.

They have a lot to lose. A 30% drop, like some suspect happened in Australia after their helmet law *9 would be a catastrophe.

The case of skiers

If you went skiing back in the 1990, you would hardly ever see a helmet on ski slopes. People telling you should wear one, might very well have gotten the same incredulous response as people talking about bike helmets are getting right now.

And yet, if you go back today, you’re in for a surprise. Everyone is wearing ski helmets now. I don’t know what brought that on. Maybe it was a few high profile accidents. Maybe it was snowboarders — as a beginner, you dig the edge of your board into the snow all the time, and your head will then make a perfect quarter circle and hit the ground. Maybe it is technical progress, with helmets reaching the point where they are cheap or comfortable enough for the masses.

Anyway: skiers didn’t use to wear helmets, and now they do. With, as far as I can tell, minimal fuss. And it was voluntary. Apart from some rules for children, I don’t think helmets are mandatory on many slopes.

So, now that people have helmets, did ski slope operators stop installing things like safety barriers? Can we now just let rocks stick out on a ski slope? No — those safety measures are not going away. That is in sharp contrast to what seems to happen in countries that get bike helmet laws.

So will this shift also happen for cyclists? Maybe yes, maybe not. Your week of skiing is much more risky than cycling all year round *10, so the case for helmets there is much stronger. Then again, electric bikes and speed pedelecs may well shift cyclists towards wearing helmets.

---

No comments