Frances Bula header image 2
← →

Mandatory bike-helmet laws: Preventing head injuries or discouraging people from cycling or all of the above?

June 21st, 2012 · 114 Comments

Gentle reader Frank Ducote pointed out that I’m creating havoc (just like mixing pedestrians and cyclists on the same path!) in a previous post by mixing discussions of the Granville Bridge greenway and the mandatory-helmet law together.

Therefore, I declare this post to be open for helmet discussions only, where people can continue to tell me how clueless I am not to have realized years ago that some in the cycling lobby were pushing for getting rid of mandatory helmets. I dunno, guess I don’t read the news enough but I truly did not pick up on that part of the cyclist bible.

For those wanting a sampling of the debate out there, here’s a link to Peter Ladner re why mandatory helmets are a problem (look a little way down the list) and Daniel Fontaine in 24 Hours with a good summary on the various sides of the argument.

Categories: Uncategorized

←  Older Comments
 →
  • jenables

    Bill, you are saying that to someone who, as a nine or ten year old child, was riding around in the Cul-de-sac where my parents backyard faced (unlike the rest of the street, theirs and the next door neighbors houses are on steeper lots that could not be divided) . I was riding an old hand me down bike with the backwards pedal brakes. I went over the lip of a driveway and became airborne. I was pedaling backwards but that doesn’t work in the Air! I hit the parked car at the bottom, and after making sure it wasn’t scratched, dragged my heavy, fender mangled bike up to go lay in the gravel and be dizzy. Eventually I was called up for dinner and my dad hammered the fender back into shape. I never really thought twice about it..I didn’t bike much because as much fun as it was downhill leaving home, I’d have to walk and drag it back up. And if climate had nothing to do with safety rates, then safety in numbers should be reassessed because climate CERTAINLY affects whether or not a lot of people will cycle. To remind you, average number of days of rain per year here is around 170.. Almost half! are we going to pretend that the road isn’t most slippery right after it begins to rain, that wet roads don’t decrease friction on tires, that visibility isn’t important? Or is cycling safer when it rains because very few ride their bikes in the pouring rain?

  • jenables

    Also bill, do we have similar bike infrastructure to Copenhagen? We certainly have very different cyclists and bikes, don’t we?

  • Chris Keam

    We really need to stop using our personal experiences as the litmus test for rules that affect everyone. Because if we are going to do that, then the reality is that the vast majority of individual cyclists don’t fall off their bike and end up with a brain injury. So, if we are legislating for the exceptions, then once again we are faced with the question of why motor vehicle occupants ride un-helmeted, when so many brain injuries happen in cars, and we know from auto racing that a good crash helmet and five point restraint harness makes a big difference in a car wreck.

    Also, rain days are counted as any day with 0.2mm of rain (0.008 inches). The issues of grip and visibility in a spring drizzle aren’t that crucial (in my experience) šŸ˜‰

  • James

    BC in 2008: ~10 cycling deaths, >10000 CardioVascular Deaths. http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/84f0209x/84f0209x2008000-eng.pdf

    The health benifits of Cycling outweigh the risks 77:1. Yes, you read that correct, for every 1 dollar in increased head injury medical costs, 77 dollars are saved in lowered Health Care Healthiness costs. http://cyclehelmets.org/1015.html

    Helmet laws reduce Cycling levels by ~30% when they were introduced in 1996, with NO DECREASES IN HEAD INJURY. In fact, a study showed that the number of head injury:cyclist ration before and after the helmet law actually increased! http://cyclehelmets.org/1103.html

    Stop punishing and discouraging people who make the right transportation choices. Visit http://www.helmetchoice.ca for more reading.

    Injuries from pedestrians and drivers: 10 000 of the former, and 20 000 of the latter annually in BC, and only 500 injured cyclists.

    BC law is an error. The Bicycle Helmet Research Foundation: http://www.cyclehelmets.org

    Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/business/about+your+finances/6821872/story.html#ixzz1yv2tMLvI

  • jenables

    So Chris are you saying my experience was uncommon? That hills and rain do not prevent a lot of people from cycling? Is it a perception of danger? I thought the road in rainy conditions was the most dangerous when it first starts, especially if it has been dry. if you want to look at brain injuries and cars i do hope you are taking into account both the sheer number of people who drive or ride in cars and the number of accidents where people were protected by that other safety device, the car around them, or the seatbelt, or even the airbag. Ultimately, are you suggesting that a hilly terrain and inclement weather do not cause falls off a bike? Or is it your personal experience as a seasoned cyclist? Hehe

  • Chris Keam

    What I’m really saying Jenables is that a consistent policy on harm reduction from traffic accidents would encase automobile users in head to toe Nomex, a full face helmet, and racing style seat-belts. And if we did that, we’d have billions of dollars to spend on other things than stitching broken bodies back together and burying loved ones. The bottom line is that if helmets=seatbelts, I’m OK with that, but not with the huge costs our current legislation and cultural environment fosters by letting people travel at high speed without sufficient protection to keep them healthy in the event of a crash. And if we are saying that that’s just the cost of our transportation system, then we really need to give our heads a collective shake.

  • jenables

    K, but Chris, one of my points is that in a car, you already have several things that protect you, one being the body of the car. On a bike you do not, so is a helmet that ridiculous?

  • brilliant

    @James 104-a pointless stat, making the ridiculous assumption that if everyone of those 10k cardiovascular cases biked they’d be alive today.

    @Chris Keam 102-autos have made a myriad of safety advances since the fays of the Model T. Bikes, not so much.

  • Chris Keam

    Jenables:

    Helmets aren’t a bad idea. The problem is that making helmets mandatory doesn’t reduce collective risk, only individual injury severity. That’s not good enough. Would motorists accept poor road design because there’s airbags and side impact beams? Clearly not, as exemplified by the billions spent on road upgrades such as the Sea to Sky, which was in part to improve safety on that stretch of highway.

  • Chris Keam

    Jenables:

    Helmets aren’t a bad idea. The problem is that making helmets mandatory doesn’t reduce collective risk, only individual injury severity. That’s not good enough. Would motorists accept poor road design because there’s airbags and side impact beams? Clearly not, as exemplified by the billions spent on road upgrades such as the Sea to Sky, which was in part to improve safety on that stretch of highway.

  • Chris Keam

    Brilliant:

    The issue, as noted in my inadvertent double post to Jenables, is that it’s not individual technological advances in the conveyance being used, but the safety-oriented changes made in road design. Suffice to say there have been huge changes in automobile road design in a hundred years, while the amenities for cycling have actually gone backward in many places, as road space was turned over to the private automobile and the biggest safety factor for cyclists — not having to share the road with vehicles travelling so much faster, was lost.

    The biggest red herring in this debate is confusing injury mitigation with safety improvements.

  • Chris Keam

    “Bikes, not so much.”

    Hard to improve on a damn fine invention in the first place. Like complaining there’s been no ground-breaking work in the field of dinnerware. Do we need a better spoon, or does it do the job as intended from the outset. We’ve actually wasted so much mental energy and resources trying to make cars safer that would have been much better spent on improving public transportation that it’s hard not to see the mostly-failed attempts to reduce the death toll from cars as a continual application of band-aids to a wound that won’t heal.

  • Chris Keam

    And one last comment while I’m monopolizing the podium… the changes in bicycle design and safety from the first velocipede (circa early 1800s) to today, are as comparable to those made from the first ‘real’ car (Benz circa 1885) to today’s models, and at a fraction of the economic and human cost. Why don’t bikes have seatbelts and airbags? Why don’t tennis racquets have safety straps? Same reason. Unnecessary.

  • Arno S

    @Silly Season
    The fact that helmet wearing is higher in Portland (without an adult helmet law) is higher than Vancouver (with a helmet law) speaks to the futility of the BC helmet law. Note also that Portland has a higher cycling mode share than Vancouver. No one is saying that a person should not wear a helmet but that it should be a choice. The helmet law frightens people away from riding a bike because it paints cycling as an extremely dangerous activity when, in fact, it is quite safe.

←  Older Comments
 →