Mike Sales wrote: ↑6 Aug 2021, 3:10pm
It is odd that when so many people are wearing helmets, many of them by mandation, that we cannot be sure whether or not they work.
It is odd that so much effort and vituperation (from some) is put into getting cyclists to wear helmets when we cannot tell whether they work.
Oh, we know that they work. The old "hit your head against a wall with and without a helmet" test shows that they work
to some degree in some situations. We also know they work in making the psychological difference between some people riding and not riding, or just being happier riding. And so on.
The trickier thing is pinning down the particular value of "work" that you're looking for, and as very few people actually bother to do that we end up with a lot of cross-purposed conversations. Alongside the sweeping assumptions of goodness, little tends to be made of the downsides.
But that I can't tell you whether the propensity to helmet use has cost or saved lives in the UK overall is not at all the same thing as not being able to say they don't work at any level. However, working on some level is not the same thing as being a safe bet for a public health and safety policy.
Mike Sales wrote:
On the other hand we can compare the cyclist casualty rates of countries where helmets are mandated or heavily promoted with the casualty rates of countries where cycle safety efforts go in other directions. That comparison might just have something to tell us about helmet efficacy.
Not really, it just shows you that other ways are better, not that helmets don't actually work (for some values of "work", as above). You'd need a parallel NL where they made everyone wear helmets to see the real effects of helmets in a Dutch context, and that wouldn't tell you how good they were here. It's not an experiment we can do, in any case.
Mike Sales wrote:We can also compare the kilometres cycled in helmet countries, compared with those where helmets are little worn.
Again, that doesn't tell you much about helmet performance, only that a safety approach primarily dependent on lids isn't as encouraging as one based on making riding pleasant, safe and convenient by design.
Helmets can still "work" in a Dutch-type context. Perhaps the bigger question that helmet proponents tend to avoid is "it might help to some degree, but is it worth doing?". The stock response is "if one life is saved!", yet the people saying that somehow don't see fit to applying it to their use of e.g. stairs.
Pete.
Often seen riding a bike around Dundee...