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- notjustbikes@feddit.nl
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“Around 30% of respondents also perceived cyclists to be less than fully human.”
What the fuck is wrong with people
As someone who drives almost every day I can confirm that I perceive motorists to be less than fully human just based on their behaviour.
Some people need to lose their licences.
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) 17•1 year ago
Person wearing a helmet and vest: not human
Car: definitely human
…Wait, what?
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.
All I can say is I’ve hit my head hard enough to get a concussion while wearing a helmet. Pretty sure I would’ve died without the helmet.
So I’m glad I was wearing one, and I will continue to do so every time I ride.
I’ve never understood why people get so upset about being forced to wear helmets. Why take a risk when it comes to what is arguably the most important part of your body? Even if you’re a perfect cyclist who will never fall over (and will never suffer any kind of mechanical failure, like the seat on my bike that broke off while I was riding down a hill) it’s still a sensible precaution and worth some minor inconvenience like having to bring a helmet with you or leave it attached to the bike.
Unfortunately for the perfect cyclists out there, cars don’t actually care about your bike handling skills.
As a cyclist, I rarely wear a helmet because there is enough data out there to show it may be more dangerous to do so. As a motorcyclist, I wear all the gear all the time, and won’t even get on the bike without a helmet. Personally, I’m really following data and research as much as I can. Low relationship between helmet use and bike safety, high relationship between helmet use and motorcycle safety
Can confirm I fell off my bike in my own Street, going about 15kph after a night at the pub. Didn’t even notice I’d smashed my helmet until the next day. Glad I had it on.
This may be the case, but may also not. Concussions are pretty tricky… If we look at common causes, many are activities done without helmets, and people do survive them, and conversely, many of them happen in spite of the presence of the helmet.
So it’s harder to link concussion safety to helmet use, and as the summary mentions, head injuries are currently more common in walking and driving than in cycling, so, again, it’s quite difficult to study and most conclusions have quite a bit of uncertainty.
I slammed my head into the concrete really hard. Hard enough to destroy the helmet. Hard enough I could have died even wearing a helmet.
It was a totally unexpected freak accident, did something I’d done a thousand times before, only this time I fell over. You just can’t predict some accidents.
I’ve probably crashed a bicycle or motorbike 50 times in my life. The only people who haven’t crashed are people who don’t ride often.
I get what you’re saying, people take more risks when they are wearing a helmet. But at the same time, not all crashes are the rider’s fault. Sometimes it’s another vehicle. Sometimes it’s an unexpectedly slippery surface. Sometimes it’s a mechanical failure (have you ever had a tyre rapidly defalte suddenly at speed and then come off the wheel rim before you could stop? I have. Twice. It’s not fun). Sometimes you just get hit in the face by a rock or a large bird.
Cycling is inherently dangerous. Protection is appropriate.
… also … if the statistics say wearing a helmet may protect you… then fuck, I’ll take those odds. Imperfect protection is better than no protection at all. If you cycle regularly, you will crash. There’s no uncertainty in that - everyone who has cycled regularly for any period of time has crashed more than once. And head injuries are the most common cycling injury according to Australian hospital statistics (among serious injuries anyway - hospitals obviously don’t collect data on minor bruises).
I actually think you’ve misinterpreted what I’m saying, unfortunately. The data consistently shows that head injuries are the most common form of injury for all forms of individual transport, that present in hospital. That includes modes where helmets are common like cycling and motorcycling, and modes where they are not common such as walking and driving.
The data further show that out of all modes of individual transport, cycling results in the least hospital visits per unit distance traveled.
Further, various studies suggest but can not conclude, that various policies which increase helmet use also contribute to higher rates of hospitalization for cyclists. The data also shows an inverse correlation with unknown cause in populations with lower habitual helmet use and bicycle hospitalization.
The actual point I would like to make is that the study of bicycle injury and helmet effectiveness is young, and the data are inconclusive at best.
I certainly don’t want you to not wear a helmet while cycling, but when we talk about public policy, that might be another question entirely. Unfortunately, the received wisdom based on emergency ward studies on the early 80s was itself not comprehensive, and has only become less clear over time.
The data further show that out of all modes of individual transport, cycling results in the least hospital visits per unit distance traveled.
If we put aside the requirement that, to be meaningfully compared, the different modes of transport would need to be normalised to the number of people participating in each mode of transport, wouldn’t this support the statement that helmets prevent hospitalisation?
Well, it shows that either all places in the data set have universal helmet use (they don’t) or that helmet use is not the dominating factor. Further, informing policy, is suggests that it would be better to mandate helmet use for the more dangerous modes such as walking and driving, and focus enforcement there
How do you conclude that walking and driving are more dangerous in terms of head injuries?
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.
- Taleya ( @Taleya@aussie.zone ) 5•1 year ago
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.
- Taleya ( @Taleya@aussie.zone ) 4•1 year ago
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.
- Taleya ( @Taleya@aussie.zone ) 5•1 year ago
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.
There is a sustained push to separate cyclists from motorists. It’s easier to invest in infrastructure than to educate motorists.
Safety concerns are definitely the major reason I’ve never got into road cycling, despite being pretty interested in the sport. I’m happy to ride my little folding bike to the shops and stuff cause I can use the footpaths, but there is no fucking way I am riding on the road with the type of people out there. Both cyclists in my family have been hit by inattentive drivers and were lucky to avoid major injury/death. This is before we even get to the psychos mentioned in this article.
what
Yup. When cycling on a road I only wear high-vis vest to look like a construction worker, not one of these fancy cycling ones, for this exact reason. Full Decathlon gear cyclists look like cartoon aliens.
They say you should only wear a helmet if you have something in your head worth protecting.