Why I Don't Wear a Bicycle Helmet

Here's a fun and well done video by one of New York's most well-known cyclists. He covers the basics of the bike helmet concern, but in a personal way that I hope just about anyone will be able to relate to. 

Public Outcry Against Seattle’s Bike Helmet Law

Seattle’s bicycle helmet law has been an unyielding blemish on the U.S. bike advocacy effort for decades. No data comparisons, no results from other parts of the world showing the damage done by these laws, no pleas from local cyclists could budge lawmakers to even consider repealing it.

Finally, a new study showing outrageous disparities in who police target for bike tickets has brought the law up for potential repeal.

Here are a few good articles about this impressive change in attitude:

Crosscut - King County to reexamine decades-old bicyclist helmet law

Bicycle Retailer & Industry News - Cycling groups call for an end to helmet laws

Cascade Bicycle Club - Cascade and Washington Bikes Support Decriminalizing Helmet Use

Let’s keep an eye on this effort. If Seattle, and surrounding King County, repeal this of all bike helmet laws, some more dominos could fall. I’m cheering!

Sue

The Damage Done by America’s Bike Helmet Fixation

I’ve worked with bicycle advocates all around the world who are pushing back against rampant bike helmet promotions, most of which lead to threats for mandatory helmet laws. This blog touches on many of these cases with articles labelled Fraud & Deception. I take pride in all these efforts and yet I live in the most helmet-obsessed country in the world. That can be tough at times as I see too many horrific bike helmet promotions to even respond to, including the one pictured here from the nearby city of Phoenix. So embarrassing as an Arizonan and so horrific as a bike advocate to imagine the terror of bicycling this image caused in so many kids.

So, I was very pleased to find this recent article confronting America’s fixation on bike helmets, and it’s even an American blog. There’s hope! Here’s how the article starts:

In the United States, official bicycle safety messaging heavily emphasizes helmet use. In a way, it’s worked: American rates of helmet usage are high. But by almost any quantifiable safety metric, the helmet fixation has failed. People bike at low rates in the U.S. compared to international peers, and suffer higher injury and fatality rates per mile of cycling.

It’s not a coincidence that bicycling remains dangerous in our helmet-obsessed safety culture, according to University of Heidelberg professor Gregg Culver. Emphasizing helmets as a singular solution to bike safety — rather than designing streets for safer car speeds or better bike infrastructure — upholds a political structure that favors “unfettered automobility,” Culver argues...

Read the rest of the article here. Great read!

Sue

Are Bicycle Helmets Holding Us Back? A Great Article

This recent article from Momentum Magazine is written by a U.S. public official who dared to notice helmet-free cyclists in Europe, then ride without one when he returned. For that simple, personal choice he was chastised and reprimanded. Too bad he didn't have one of these buttons:

He was also inspired to research and write a great article about the bicycle helmet problem in North American. Please take the time to read it, and enjoy.

Are Bicycle Helmets Holding Us Back?

Written by: Shaun Lopez-Murphy

Three years ago when I was the Bicycle Coordinator in Minneapolis, MN, I became involved in a controversy over a bicycle helmet – or lack thereof. After a trip to Europe, where I had ridden with the non-helmeted masses in three of the safest bicycling nations on Earth – Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands – I had declined to top my noggin.

I didn’t realize it but I had become one of the first U.S. public officials to question bicycle helmets openly, telling the local newspaper in an interview, “I just want [bicycling] to be seen as something that a normal person can do … you don’t need special gear. You just get on a bike and you just go.”

Locals immediately criticized me. The pro-helmet cry was passionate and full of concern over traumatic brain injuries, which is not unusual when bicycle helmet policy is debated. Soon after, I was told to start wearing head protection while bicycling on the job.

Continue reading...

Concussion, the Movie

I watched the recently released movie, Concussion last night. It’s a nice, fictionalized story about the man who revealed the debilitating results of repeated head trauma in American football. It’s certainly worth watching for the storyline, but as a fan of American football, I was disappointed with the lack of detailed information. The film includes nothing about the steps the National Football League has taken to try to prevent this problem. Perhaps this is because the film is only about this man and the time during his discovery.

However, the film did offer a few benefits for the bike helmet problem. For one, it was refreshing to spend two hours amidst a topic that is encased in helmets, without the slightest assumption that helmets would offer anything toward a solution. There are many scenes showing football players slamming their helmets together, which hint at the helmets actually worsening the problem.

There’s even a scene where the doctor shows his girlfriend the problem by holding out a sealed glass jar that contains water and an egg as he explains that a human brain floats loose in fluid. He then shakes the jar repeatedly to demonstrate what a football player’s brain goes through. Of course the egg breaks. I very much appreciated this as a needed twist from the misuse of eggs in terrifying children into wearing bike helmets.

Anyway, I can recommend the movie as good entertainment, but don’t watch it expecting to garner many gems for fighting bike helmet laws or promotions.

Sue

BMJ Article Finds No Benefit to Bicycle Helmet Laws

I have read countless scientific studies since embarking on this bike helmet discovery journey more than ten years ago, so when I find one that is readable, concise, and easy to understand, I just have to share. This one, recently published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), clearly shows the important finding that bike helmet laws have little if any effect on head injury rates.

To give you an idea of how thorough the study is, here is an excerpt:

“…Helmet legislation was not associated with hospitalization rates for all injury or traffic-related injury causes. We separately examined potential associations for each body region expected to be protected by helmet use (brain, head, scalp, skull or face; brain; head, scalp or skull; face) as well as for the neck which, in some studies, has had elevated odds of injury with helmet use. ^{7 8} There was variation in helmet use with helmet legislation, and this may have been related to municipal by-laws mandating helmet use within some provinces or territories without helmet laws (table 3). We therefore also examined the relationship between hospitalization rates and helmet use proportions in the strata, and again did not find the expected protective effect. Studies among those injured in a cycling crash consistently show lower odds of head, brain or face injuries among those who wore a helmet,^{7 8} though the potential for uncontrolled confounding in observational studies of a health behaviour suggests that confidence in the effect estimates should not be unquestioning.⁴⁷ Before–after studies of the impact of helmet legislation have shown weaker and less consistent effects. Some have found reductions in brain or head injuries of 8–29% related to legislation,^10–13 whereas others have found no effect for some or all outcomes.^{9 11 13} Differences may be attributable to study design features including location, the selection of a control group unexposed to helmet legislation, whether baseline trends in injury rates were modelled, and whether surrogates were used for cycling rates and if so, which ones. Our study compared bicycling hospitalisation rates across jurisdictions rather than within a jurisdiction before and after legislation, and used exposure-based denominators to control for differences in cycling rates.”

To read the whole article, click here. Great stuff.

Sue

Are Helmet Programs Scaring Kids Away from Bicycling?

When I was in elementary (primary) school in the 1970s, my friends and I rode our bikes as naturally as we walked. We might walk to the house next door, but a journey of any farther distance was obviously done by bike – duh, no discussion. Also no helmet. And no finger wagging at “improper” riding methods.

The only bike safety course I recall was in fifth grade when the teachers cleared our paved playground to show us braking distances. A car was brought in and set at one end of the playground. At the wave of one flag, the car took off. At the wave of another, the driver slammed on the brakes. Tires squealed and blue smoke billowed. The distance was marked between the flag wave and where the car stopped. Then we each got our chance on our bikes and the braking distances were compared. The whole exercise took about half an hour, but it stuck with us because it was cool and involved us in the discovery of the message. From then on, we gave cars a lot more room.

We never went through bike rodeos or learned hand signals or got lectured about our heads splattering like dropped melons. How did we survive? Quite happily, thanks. And with those happy memories of riding as children we became proud adult cyclists.

As I found myself involved in bicycle advocacy, bicycle safety programs gave me pause. I get twitchy anyway around the term “safety.” To set something out as “safe” is simply a lie. We all know that it is an impossible aim. And yet bike safety programs propagate along with their escalating assertions that if cyclists do this or that they will be safe.

I understand that certain riding behaviors will increase the likelihood of a cyclist reaching their destination unharmed. But these behaviors are easily taught through exercises like the one I enjoyed on that playground. We weren’t frightened about any potential outcomes, only shown a bit of physics so we could change our riding behavior to accommodate them. The same could be done to show riders why riding with traffic is a better choice than riding against it.

Yet today’s bicycle safety programs go far beyond physics and most land squarely on an irrational assertion – that all cyclists must wear a helmet all the time in order to be “safe.” Not only is this a lie, it does nothing to teach cyclists better riding behaviors so they can avoid a crash.

Taking this message to our schools is a dramatic change from my experience as a child. I wonder how my friends and I would have responded if we had spent that half hour watching our teachers drop melons and eggs as if they were our heads as we rode our bikes. I hope we would have been independent thinkers enough to call bullshit and just continue to ride. But we sure wouldn’t have learned about braking distance and the whole thing would have been a negative, miserable, and scary experience.

Do an internet search for kids bike safety videos and you will find countless, proud examples of melon drops. Look for kid’s bike safety brochures and you will find many with scary titles like “The Dangers of Bicycling.” This is the backdrop teachers are now expected to use when discussing bicycling with their students.

Never mind that bicycling is one of the least likely ways to suffer brain injury. Find a few charts that show this clearly on One Street’s Bicycle Helmet page. I’ve never seen a melon drop video made for children who ride in cars, but that would be the more logical reason for searing this horrifying image into children’s memories.

Never mind that frightening children into wearing bike helmets does nothing to show them how to avoid a crash.

And never mind that bike helmets are only designed to withstand crashes up to the speed reached by falling over from a standstill. They do little if anything to prevent brain injury in most crashes. See my previous post “My Bike Helmet Saved My Life!” for more details on this misconception.

More importantly, I am concerned that bicycle safety programs are scaring our kids away from bicycling. If children aren’t riding, we are losing our next generation of adult cyclists. The evidence is frightening in itself:

• U.S. National Sporting Goods Association found: fewer kids riding bikes
• European Cyclists’ Federation article showing significant drop in child cyclists after helmet law: What happens when you mandate helmet-wearing among young Swedish cyclists?
• This U.S. Bicycle Market found that bicycling is not for kids any more.
• Australian studies show significant drop in child cyclists since helmet law was passed.
• U.S. Safe Routes to Schools programs show no measurable increase in kids bicycling.

Kids who buck the trend, perhaps because they are independent enough thinkers to call bullshit on these scare tactics, are losing the Safety in Numbers protection we enjoyed as kids. We rode in packs, which made us very visible. But my pack was just one of many packs of bike-riding kids in my town and others around the world. Drivers expected to see kids out on bikes and drove accordingly. Now to see even one kid riding a bike is a surprise.

This mess bothers me to no end. I can hear all the bike safety schoolmarms justifying their strict doctrine with their belief that if just one life is saved the reduction in bike riding by kids is worth it. Bullshit. No one can claim they saved a life with a frightening safety message. The life, rather the person in charge of that life, needs a whole package of knowledge in order to make the decisions that will keep them from harm. With that full package, including the knowledge of how safe riding a bike actually is and how little protection a bike helmet offers, the decision to wear a bike helmet will be the last on their list for crash avoidance tactics.

Even as I wallowed in the sorrowful heap of fearmongering materials to write this post, I was cheered by one hopeful discovery from, of all places, Detroit. Awhile back some fearmongers had passed a slate of ordinances criminalizing any kid in Detroit who dared pedal a bike in the streets. As I waded through the muck left by similar fearmongers all over the world, I came upon the uplifting news that Detroit has repealed all their restrictions on youth cycling. While it was a sad occurrence to begin with, this repeal may be a sign that people of all ages are finally calling bullshit on scare tactics that do nothing but frighten away our next generation of cyclists. Thanks Detroit!

Are you fed up with fearful tactics that could be scaring kids away from bicycling? Do you have childhood memories that cause you to question their claims? If so, please offer them in the comments section. A solution may take many small steps like the one in Detroit, but the more people who stand up against these scare tactics, the more small steps will be taken until kids can finally ride free again.

Sue

Welcome to The Bike Helmet Blog

Well, this is exciting! After two long years of talking about what could possibly work next for bringing balance back to perceptions about bike helmets, we’ve launched this blog. A lot of research and academic studies have been published, but this will be the first open-discussion platform where everyone should feel comfortable jumping in with comments.

There are five of us pitching in as authors for this blog. My particular interest in the topic comes from my personal shame for falling for the fraud of bicycle helmet propaganda. I owned a bike shop here in Prescott, Arizona for 13 years from 1991 through 2004. During that time I terrified countless customers by asking them “How much is your head worth?” in order to sell them a helmet. But it wasn’t just sales I was after. I truly believed I was saving their lives with each helmet sold.

Then, in 2004, the same year I sold the bike shop to my husband, I met advocates who were fighting against the very messages I was spreading. When they showed me the stats and explained that scaring people into wearing helmets only scares them away from bicycling, I felt sick for my part in it. Through my participation in this blog I hope to redeem at least some of the damage I did. 

Since then I have read countless research papers and engaged in many lively discussions with like-minded advocates. We continue to uncover more and more evidence that bicycling is not dangerous and even if it was, bicycle helmets do not provide the protection people believe they do. But how to break this barrier to bicycling out of our close-knit circle so that it receives just as much attention as bicycle helmet promotions? I hope this blog will become part of the solution.

My particular passion within this topic is the disturbing relation between bicycle helmet promotions and the budding culture of fear paralyzing our society. Perhaps this stems from my own guilt for using fear to sell helmets.

Other authors of this blog, like Thomas Krag and Lake Sagaris (joining us soon), will present the best of research papers and academic studies in their posts. Interlaced in these research-based posts you will find posts from Mikael Colville-Andersen, Kaethi Diethelm, and myself presenting the broader view of the damage bicycle helmet promotions and mandatory helmet laws are doing to the overall bicycle movement.

Thanks for joining us on this journey. Let’s get this blog started!

Sue