Is it time for a helmet?

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Tangled Metal
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Is it time for a helmet?

Post by Tangled Metal »

Post accident evaluation, nagging from the bosses and a load of non-cyclists, means I'm wondering if it's time to wear a helmet on my work commute? I took a flyer after hitting a large pothole in very new brompton.

I broke my arm and scratched my face/glasses. Bike had a front puncture. Doubt the helmet would have done much as the damage was my arm.

The commute is 5-10 minutes from and to the station? A minute at the home end. I think helmet use is purely to get people off my back. I don't have enough arguments as to why it's unnecessary besides they're the sort to not listen or believe it. They'll simply think you're being stupid and even use the "think of your family" point.

Pro helmet is potholed industrial estate without any chance of road repair. Gets people off my back.

Con helmet is that they probably wouldn't stop my only serious cycling accidental damage caused by this recent over the handlebars incident. I'm only cycling a mile. I don't see why I should conform to others views. On a purely schoolboy level nobody else at work wears a helmet to work so why are they pressuring me?

Just curious what the collective views on this are. Go along with helmet or not and why?
Steady rider
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Re: Is it time for a helmet?

Post by Steady rider »

You could ask is it time for 27 inch wheels or for higher standards for roads.
Cavemud
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Re: Is it time for a helmet?

Post by Cavemud »

Do you own a helmet?

Why not give it a try for a few weeks and see how you feel about it?

I go either with or without depending on the type of riding, conditions etc, and tend to briefly weigh up the overall risk in my head for any given ride.

Small wheeled bike on a potholed road might tip the balance?

Public attitudes to helmet wearing generally infuriate me, and I often find myself arguing against just to redress the balance, but the truth is I have several, the choice to wear one being made entirely on the risk factors of any given ride.
gom
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Re: Is it time for a helmet?

Post by gom »

These are choppy waters in which to dip a toe, but I say wear a helmet.
I used to not wear one, then occasionally, but for the last 15+ years always.
I have a few times fallen over with no warning (such as when riding through a tiny but very shiny ford), hitting my head on the tarmac with no time to put an arm out. I was very glad that it was actually my helmet & not my skull.
A helmet won’t save your collar bone, but a blow to the head is never a good thing.

Anecdotal evidence warning: My grandfather was partially deaf and had no sense of smell after coming off his bike in the blackout. I wonder if a helmet would have helped?
Cyril Haearn
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Re: Is it time for a helmet?

Post by Cyril Haearn »

One simple fact* is that a helmut makes ones head bigger and heavier. In many falls one might land on a shoulder so the head is not suddenly wrenched by hitting the ground. A helmut might catch on a kerb, thus wrenching the head

I recommend trying to avoid 'accidents' by cycling slowly

* alternative facts welcome
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yakdiver
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Re: Is it time for a helmet?

Post by yakdiver »

I feel naked with out mine
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simonineaston
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Re: Is it time for a helmet?

Post by simonineaston »

sorry to hear 'bout your broken arm, tm - GWS! Your experience chimes a little with mine, a) as a Brompton user, with its small wheels and slightly twitchy steering which can take a bit of getting used to... and b) helmet use. When I used to commute, I mmed & ahhed about whether or not to use one & came to the conclusion that I would not. The only repercussion from that decision is the occasional voiced criticism from work colleagues. On these occasions, I forbore to mention that, as car drivers, a big chunk of the risk I face daily was as a result of their hurtling about in sundry Merc.s and Audis... I did briefly contemplate wearing one, just to shut them up, but then remembered that it was none of their business.
You might take the view that, while you're getting used to the Brompton, thre might be a slightly elevated risk of taking a tumble, in which case a helmet might be seen as a sensible precaution. On the other hand - you might take the view that you've had your tumble and are less likely to have another... or that you may well have another, but that, like the first, it will not involve your head! Who knows??
S
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Marcus Aurelius
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Re: Is it time for a helmet?

Post by Marcus Aurelius »

Helmets aren’t all about protecting your head. They can also be useful aero devices, which is more important in a velodrome sprint or a road TT, but still quite useful if you are really interested in saving Watts. They also help stop possible ‘chains of escalation’. For example, you’re riding on a road, something gets flicked up, from the road, by a passing motorist, if it hits your head, it is probably going to hurt a lot more if you don’t have a lid on, than if you do. That increases the risk of you suddenly deviating from your current course, and then you have to hope nothing around you doesn’t react accordingly. I’ve been hit on the lid, by some pretty large things (stones / rocks / bits of stuff from the unswept bit of the road ) in the past, It’s my primary concern really, when road riding, and the main reason I wear a lid, when road riding.
roubaixtuesday
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Re: Is it time for a helmet?

Post by roubaixtuesday »

The risk you're trying to mitigate is injuries from a fall on a very short potholed bike journey. General experience, and your sample size of one suggests that limb injuries are most likely.

Wearing a helmet doesn't seem like an obvious mitigation.

Going slowly or using a more suitable bike seem like the most obvious mitigations. If PPE is your thing, gloves, elbow pads, kneepads in that order are likely the most effective against injuries you're likely to sustain. Finally, walking - how long a walk is a 5 minute bike ride over potholed ground?
Mike Sales
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Re: Is it time for a helmet?

Post by Mike Sales »

Cyril Haearn wrote:I recommend trying to avoid 'accidents' by cycling slowly



And carefully.
Bore da, croeso nol, Cyril.
Last edited by Mike Sales on 25 Mar 2021, 11:08am, edited 1 time in total.
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Mike Sales
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Re: Is it time for a helmet?

Post by Mike Sales »

The first post is, to me, almost a parable about the failings of helmets.
Tangled thinks that it would not have made any difference, just as the population statistics show.
He looks at the preferable remedies which might have prevented the apparent need for protection.
These are more difficult to bring about than the individual action of putting on a helmet, just as Chris Boardman's nine better remedies for cycling casualties are more difficult to bring about, but these do work. Look at those countries with low rates of casualties.
He talks about drivers who want to get us into helmets. I think that many drivers do genuinely worry about our vulnerability, and the danger they present to us. They salve their consciences with the belief that things would be much better if only we would put on a helmet. It wouldn't. Look at the countries with mandation. But the helmet pushing does substitute for taking measures which would really help, but might limit drivers' freedoms.
It would be great if helmets made a measureable difference; if they did make us safer, but myself, I will not normalise this alibi for real action, I refuse to endorse this sham.
I suspect that some drivers feel better able to carry on with their dangerous driving habits because they think that cyclists are safe in their helmets, just as they are with their air bags etc.
It's the same the whole world over
It's the poor what gets the blame
It's the rich what gets the pleasure
Isn't it a blooming shame?
slowster
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Re: Is it time for a helmet?

Post by slowster »

Read your own account of what happened from your previous thread:
Tangled Metal wrote:Accident caused by me not spotting a huge pothole in time, by this i mean a reasonable judgement call that an oncoming car was a greater risk than the partif the road i was in turned out with hindsight to be wrong. My defense, such as it counts as a defence, is that my attention was with a dithering car that I couldn't work out if it was about to move out from behind parked cars into my path. The road has garages one side with cars parked and the other side sunken roadwork repairs that run along the road where pipes were laid. This means you have to ride in the middle of the road and get out of the way of cars coming the other way by riding over this repair bodge job. That was what I was expecting I do because of this car. In the end it pulled out then turned into the garage off the road before i could get there, at the point in time when I looked down and spotted the pothole as I was about to drop into it.

The issue of wearing or not wearing a helmet is a distraction from assessing the causes and contributory factors of your accident. By that I mean especially those things which are under your control and which you can modify. You can never control or always accurately predict other road users' behaviour, only your own ability to react to it. We all make mistakes out riding and driving and the vast majority of the time little or no harm is done, but what matters most is whether we learn from those mistakes.

From your description there seem to be two factors:

1. The road through the estate is badly potholed, and a small wheeled bike makes those potholes much more dangerous.

2. You failed to spot the pothole in question because you were concentrating on what a car driver was about to do.

You already know that a helmet is not a proper solution. Wear one or not as you wish, but don't let it blind you to taking action that will actually reduce the risk of another accident with similar root causes/underlying factors. I am not going to suggest what the proper solutions are, because you can determine them yourself and you probably already have.

Tangled Metal wrote:I think helmet use is purely to get people off my back. I don't have enough arguments as to why it's unnecessary besides they're the sort to not listen or believe it. They'll simply think you're being stupid and even use the "think of your family" point.
...
Gets people off my back.
...
I don't see why I should conform to others views. On a purely schoolboy level nobody else at work wears a helmet to work so why are they pressuring me?

Please take the following in the spirit of goodwill in which I intend it:

Go look at your family and children. It's they whom you need to consider. You are responsible to them for doing whatever you decide is necessary to safely commute to work.

Why are you devoting so much thought to what other people say and think? From what you say they are not well informed about cycling, road safety and helmet wearing, or for that matter even all that intelligent. It's not your job to educate them or explain your decisions to them. If they make a comment about you not wearing a helmet there is no need for you to get drawn into discussion. Just ignore them.

Put another way, would you be happy if your children were to be persuaded by people to do things that they really did not believe in or want to because of peer pressure? Part of your job as a parent is to teach them to exercise good judgement and have confidence in themselves to be able to ignore and resist such peer pressure.
Jdsk
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Re: Is it time for a helmet?

Post by Jdsk »

No comment on whether you should wear a helmet or not, but a few suggestions on making decisions following the questions in the OP.

What other people say:
Really helpful in drawing out what you think. Will sometimes add a point that you hadn't realised already. But after that you have to make your own decision. Contrarian positions are great in debate, but useless after that. (And see slowster's comments above.)

"Only had one "accident" so far"/ "Never needed one yet":
For events that are rare but serious I don't like this logic. It always reminds me of the comment from the man who's fallen off a skyscraper and is asked how he he's doing as he passes the second floor.
It frequently comes up for preventive medicine, most recently in this forum about not taking vitamin D supplements because a weakened bone hasn't fractured. Yet.

Writing it down:
It seems to help many people to make better decisions if they write down the options across the top and the advantages and disadvantages underneath each option.
See Kepler's choice of a second wife!

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pjclinch
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Re: Is it time for a helmet?

Post by pjclinch »

I'd say the best reason to wear a helmet is if you want to. That's bound to involve some degree of psychology, but that's not a bad thing even if it's a good idea to acknowledge that some of it is down to gut feeling. Given the ambivalence of the evidence it's very easy to over-think it.

Another point to consider is that helmets are designed and specced to mitigate minor injuries, like a bump after you come off in a race and it's the difference between seeing stars and abandoning with a nasty bump or getting back on and finishing (e.g., George Bennett in a recent road race, I think it was a stage of Paris-Nice). For sports riding where falls are relatively common and abandoning an event means writing it off that adds quite a bit of backing to wearing one, even if it weren't in the rules. For more sedate riding, compare and contrast to other activities where once in a while you whack your head (last one for me was on the tailgate of the car, which wasn't all the way up like I was expecting when I was putting something in the back). Do you subsequently take up helmet wearing for those things? Lack of walking-on-icy-pavement helmets, stair-descent helmets, everyday driving helmets, getting-out-of-the-bath helmets suggest people generally don't. The difference in the UK is a constant background noise of You Should Wear a Cycling Helmet to ride backed up with all sorts of stories about lives saved and how it's stupid not to, while walking on frosty pavements or using stairs isn't.
In NL I imagine the reaction to coming off a bike, whacking your head and having it patched up in A&E is very much like falling down the stairs and whacking you head, because there isn't a constant cultural push to get you in to a helmet there. People will shrug it off the way a slip on a frosty pavement would be treated here.

None of that's to say you shouldn't wear one. It's entirely normal to take cultural cues on board (that's what makes them cultural cues!), and if you're happier doing it, do it.

On Brommies in particular, I'd suggest practicing hopping the front wheel over potholes is better than crashing, but wearing a helmet!

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mjr
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Re: Is it time for a helmet?

Post by mjr »

Tangled Metal wrote:I think helmet use is purely to get people off my back. I don't have enough arguments as to why it's unnecessary besides they're the sort to not listen or believe it. They'll simply think you're being stupid and even use the "think of your family" point.

My experience of helmet use was that I crashed far more in the years using, so I am thinking of my family. Bike crashes are a bit like nuclear war in the 1983 film War Games: the only way to win is not to play. So I concentrate on trying to reduce the causes of crashes, rather than mitigate the damage of crashing, so I started using studded tyres on icy days instead of stupidly using a hard hat. And it's not even clear that helmets are mitigation, as far as we can tell from real-world data: they offer testable impact protection, but at the cost of a larger heavier hotter head.

Arguments as to why it's unnecessary? Mine are at https://mjr.towers.org.uk/proj/cyclynn/helmets


On a purely schoolboy level nobody else at work wears a helmet to work so why are they pressuring me?

I suspect it is because you are being a deviant, not driving and not conforming to their government-supported irrational prejudices of how a cyclist should dress.

Will it really get them off your back anyway, or will the next thing be ugly clothing so drivers "can see you"? And then not using a "clown bike"? And then being told to grow up and use a car like normal people do? "Come on, join us vegetating in our mobile armchairs and gassing the planet"?

Just curious what the collective views on this are. Go along with helmet or not and why?

No because it wouldn't have helped in this crash and I think there's low probability of it ever helping in any crash a rider has that they wouldn't have had if not for the helmet.

I'd prioritise finding a field and practising jumping off the bike safely in a crash. My little folder with its low step-through frame is pretty good for jumping clear from, but I've not had need that often!
MJR, mostly pedalling 3-speed roadsters. KL+West Norfolk BUG incl social easy rides http://www.klwnbug.co.uk
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