pwa wrote:mjr wrote:Is it, though? If there's one group loudly calling for "no helmet no ride" - probably using emotional blackmail - and a less vociferous less well-backed-by-media group calling for "wear what you like" based on evidence, then the faux-balanced view becomes "helmets recommended" which - if you sincerely believe that helmets have no effect because their impact protection is negated by increasing crash rates - doesn't help our fellow cyclists, especially those the helmet users crash into. So, to move the pendulum back to neutral, shouldn't we call for racing helmets to be banned from non-races?
And that in itself acts as a ban on people like myself who wear a lid but don't care whether others do or not. Where does that get us? Apartheid based on headwear. And the lidless become a fringe group, even more so than now.
Ah, that's only if such helmet bans actually happen and I don't know of any ride yet to ban them. Do you? Even "vintage" rides I've done have allowed modern helmets as well as vintage hairnet and pith ones.
There's a difference in most negotiations between what you start out asking for and what you'd accept.