Some part of the US obsession over helmets is about submission and power
@bikepedantic I'm just blown away that there's a guy at U Washington (Rivara) who has such a hard-on for helmets that he'll spin "adding bike-share put more bikes on the road yet reduced absolute (not per-bike) injuries of all kinds" as "bike share needs helmets" because head injuries didn't decline *as much*.
Will I let my bias corrupt my research? Heck yeah!
@bikepedantic 98%, at least
@bikepedantic I haven't heard any news stories about bike helmets, but I know my kids have this idea that biking is very dangerous without a helmet, even if you're just riding within the neigorhood at jogging speed. It feels like a culture of paranoia to me.
I tell them it's better to wear one, esp if you're tempted to go fast, but no transporation is risk free, so I wouldn't sweat it.
@bikepedantic Hi. Another awkward person whose life was saved by a helmet here. It depends.
My accident was an abrupt fall traveling downhill with a load. My head hit the pavement first, and hard. Courage & bravado wouldn't have been much help.
I recently met a member of a Japanese Olympic team. She took a fall at 60km per hour on a downhill segment during training and woke up in hospital with no memory of the accident.
Like they say in driver ed, speed kills. But with a helmet it kills less.
I don’t think that helmets should be mandated — safety in numbers etc.
But, I, too, had a bike crash ~4 years ago where the bolt holding the front fork of my seatless bike sheared. I lost steering and crashed at moderate speed on a greenway so, didn’t get run over! The ‘kind’ of crash where the helmet works.
No illusions that the helmet will do anything in a bike v car crash. But why not wear it and encourage folks to wear them. (+Make them easy to get and store and ‘normal’.)
@atthenius I wear a helmet too. That wasn’t the point.
Misdirection and deflection would be my preferred words to describe obsession with helmets. Hamstrung by bureaucracy is how I would describe helmet mandates.
Worded that way to reinforce the idea Wearers give nothing away by wearing them.
@atthenius @bikepedantic "seatless bike"?
"why not wear it and encourage folks to wear them." Personally, I'm less safe by wearing a helmet if it means even one person perceives biking as too dangerous to try. So I'm definitely not going to encourage anyone to wear it and sure as hell don't want my government out here talking about how it's the "first rule of bike safety", because the 1st rule is infrastructure & the 2nd is air+brakes+chain mechanical soundness of the bike.
My helmet kept me from early retirement.
I never wore a helmet as a kid — only started once that behavior was normalized and encouraged in NYC. peer pressure that made me start.
Helmets don’t cancel motorcycles; wrist guards don’t cancel inline skating.
You’d have to do a lifetime integration of a single TBI event against the daily decrease in bike volume risk to get the risk scaling right.
I crashed on a microkick seatless bike, now pulled from the market.
@atthenius Wow that's wild. I have one of those and it's very sketchy to ride, even after I sized the chainring down to ~10mph. If you're doing stunts or much over 20, you might benefit from wearing a helmet which is designed for that. The jauntily worn foam ornaments though, may just extend the distance that one needs to bend to avoid impact to their head. (Sorry I ran out of room to mention the don't do stuff that leads to falling on the head rule https://urbanists.social/@enobacon/110571984537736599 )
@bikepedantic
@enobacon @bikepedantic if you have one — literally you will be shocked that the steering is held together by a 💩 3/8” bolt that (in my case) rusted out. Suggest you take apart and check for that before using again…
@atthenius @bikepedantic wow yeah it looks like the bracket failed, or does the bolt go through only one wall of the tube?
There is the hand-tightened bolt and 1”x3” cross groove thing for folding… this whole assembly is actually held together by a bolt that goes through the steering column, through the middle of the folding groove pieces and connects to the hand-tightener (it is significantly more flimsy looking than the groove thing that lets you fold). That is the bolt that failed for me.
I had attached a metal vacuum water bottle carrier to the elongated steering column, which helpfully acted as a crumple zone when I crashed.
I never meant to fall on my head either — but I don’t wear a seatbelt intending to crash. I am admittedly a little risk averse.
PS TLC BB (baby)
is my pneumonic for keeping my bike in good order.::
tires
lights
chain
brakes &
bolts
@bikepedantic It really is. :/