Thehairs1970 wrote: ↑8 Dec 2021, 8:16am
Crashing more when wearing a helmet? Who knows? Possibly, not being rude, your age. It could be riding style has changed, who knows. Again difficult to find evidence/reasons.
It could be my riding style, but if it was, that would mean that my style changed several times coinciding closely with the start and end of each period of helmet use, which would suggest that the helmet may be causing the change somehow.
Your injury may well have been caused by a helmet. MIPS helmets have been shown to be better at preventing secondary injuries. However, what no one knows is what the injury would have been without the helmet.
I can tell you with absolute certainty that that injury would have been zero without the helmet.
Head too insulated? This seems very unlikely. Motorcycle riders seems to manage to make very quick decisions whilst wearing full face helmets. Divers have to make live saving calculations etc while wearing tight wetsuits around there heads. Many cyclists wear woolly hats without trouble.
Motorcycle riders are not exerting themselves, divers are water-cooled and I actually wear a woolly hat while cycling in winter. A beanie regulates my temperature far better than helmets ever did: no sweat/freeze pattern in winter... and I don't wear it in summer, switching to a cooler patrol cap, casquette or bandana.
Drivers behave differently around unhelmeted riders. Possibly. However, surely this is about driver education not cyclists. I suspect you will find drivers behaving differently to the elderly or pregnant pedestrian than those who aren’t as well.
We should push for better driver education for many reasons, but how do we best deal with it for now?
Willing to not crash without a helmet?! Well, I think you’ll find better numbers for your study. You are correct though. We do need to have crash reduction full stop. This does not mean you ignore have to ignore protection though.
I'm not ignoring it, but we should consider that helmets might not only be protection and could be causing an increased crash rate somehow. That would explain why real-world injury rates do not seem to vary in step with helmet usage rates.
You are right to a point that crashing puts you in the lap of the gods (wondering if you follow Hinduism or Ancient Greek religion) but it is also science. And yes, the rest of your body can suffer horrible injuries and the helmet won’t do any good, But wouldn’t you wear steel toe cap boots when swinging a sledgehammer even though it might be your fingers you hit?
Here we go again: no, I'd wear composite toecaps when doing stuff like swinging a sledgehammer. Steel toecaps have more risk of breaking toes if used for that task.
So it's not only about protecting the right parts of your body, but using the appropriate protection for the task. A cycle helmet is appropriate protection for the head in a standing fall but that's a pretty rare way to die or get seriously injured and, like steel toecaps where heavy stuff is falling, it's inappropriate for the general task of cycling because the drawbacks at least negate the protection.
Do I think cycling is worth fighting for? Absolutely. But not this. While we focus on a small piece of legislation, cycle paths are still being built that are useless at best and dangerous at worst. Cyclists are killed everyday because of their or drivers poor road behaviour. Facilities for cyclists in towns, cities and workplaces are non existent. Prosecution of drivers who kill cyclists seems to be treated different to those involved in other RTAs. These are the issues worth fighting for I’d say.
So why are you fighting so strongly for helmets instead of those other things?