A collection of material from several PT participants:
Chris Boardman, British Cycling policy advisor, makes an over-the-top analogy around mandatory helmet laws, which contribute little to safety, and are quite rare in the world. But such laws are a dandy distraction in Vancouver and elsewhere when it comes to discussing how to keep people safe when they ride a bike. And a major impediment here to bike share systems and their success.
“It’s a bit like saying ‘people are sniping at you going down this street, so put some body armour on,’” he said.
Government encouragement to wear helmets was therefore “a big campaign to get people to wear body armour, by the people who should be stopping the shooting.”
Widespread use of helmets, he said, sends the wrong message. “Once you see somebody wearing body armour, even if there’s no shooting, you think ‘Christ I’m not going down there if they’re wearing body armour to go down that street.’ It scares people off.”
Eben Weiss, a.k.a. the Bike Snob, writes in the Washington Post and describes current trends in thinking towards the solutions to vehicular death and injury in our cities. And provides a good summary of the helmet debate.
Don’t make bicyclists more visible. Make drivers stop hitting them.
. . . . It’s just that cars are like white people and Wall Street — they don’t need any more defending from anybody…… Meanwhile, in countries like the Netherlands and Denmark, where lots and lots of people ride bikes, a helmeted bicyclist is about as rare as a helmeted driver here in America. And yet they seem to be managing pretty well — maybe because they’ve got bike infrastructure, and because they still subscribe to the notion that the person operating the giant machine on public roads needs to be responsible for not killing people with it.
A look here, by Lloyd Alter in Treehugger, at just how effective painted sharrows on roads are at encouraging people to ride bikes (it’s easy to guess the answer). And just what does encourage people to ride (an even easier guess for people in Vancouver).
A study by University of Colorado Denver researchers Nick Ferenchak and Wesley Marshall examined safety outcomes for areas in Chicago that received bike lanes, sharrows, and no bicycling street treatments at all. The results suggest that bike lanes encourage more people to bike and make biking safer, while sharrows don’t do much of either. They found that bike commute rates more than doubled in areas with new bike lanes, compared to a 27 percent increase in areas with new sharrows and a 43 percent increase in areas where nothing changed.
A more detailed look at the study is HERE, and reveals that the “bike lanes” are not the protected variety, since there were nearly none in the City of Chicago at the time. The study was published by the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies, and is paywalled. The paper’s title is (amusingly) “Relative (In)Effectiveness of Bicycle Sharrows On Ridership and Safety Outcomes”.
It should be noted, that Boardman faced a horrific crash in the 1998 tour, and in that case, the helmet did as it was designed to, protect a falling rider against an impact with a stationary ground object. So he certainly knows the place where a helmet is a good idea, as well as knowing where it isn’t.
Right. Helmets are nice to have when racing but are not needed for everyday cycling.
Why is racing gear being forced on people when they’re not needed? (Oh, right, The Bell Helmet Company wanted to make more sales.)
I am sure we all know stories like the following, a physiotherapist friend riding with her husband, a long time cyclist, who for reasons unknown, bumped her and she fell onto the curb in Richmond. The helmet saved her life. And when watching Youtube videos of Amsterdam, the children are often seen wearing bike helmets while parents do without. The funny quote on several tourist videos is that the trams and cars are safe for pedestrians it is the bikes that are the danger as they ride helter skelter without care for the pedestrians.
… and natural response to the physiotherapist friend is to ask if they would consider wearing a helmet while walking, where they have an equal or greater chance of head injury … or while inside a car, where there is also a greater risk of head injury (per hour of activity in each case).
If they weren’t considering wearing a helmet for those? Why not?
I know of many tourists who are concerned with the car traffic on Granville island, but this never seems to be sufficient anecdote to reducing said. How selective are we to be with tourist anecdotes?
The point of well designed infrastructure is that it be for All Ages and Abilities (which is always shortened to AAA instead of AAAA for some reason) … I think think few would argue that the current situation, in ‘requiring’ helmets, is well suited ANY ages or abilities. Bringing it back to those tourists again, I think that they might find that this is a case where what seems dangerous, isn’t, where what seems ‘normal’ is very so.