Hacker News Reader

Comment by ericmo | Hacker News Reader

> Let me just start by saying that there is no good reason not to wear a helmet when riding a bike in NYC.

One common argument is that drivers have more respect for cyclists without helmets, i.e. they're more afraid of hitting a cyclist without a helmet.

The discussion goes back a long time, this article for instance is 9.5 years old: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-...

I guess, most cyclists think it's more likely that they'll be hit by a car, not a pedestrian.

It could also be that some cyclists don't have the money to buy a helmet - or other types of safety gear.

View on HN

Also with citi bike people can find themselves biking home from a spot they didn't bike to and not have a helmet on them.

The University of Bath study was barely scientific. The researcher was his own test subject, and there has been no attempt at replication that I'm aware of.

Yet this study is cited in every discussion of bike helmet use.

I've been interested in this topic for some time, as a year round bike commuter with my entire family on bikes. It's become a prickly topic because of the intensity of advocacy from both sides of the debate.

The debate around whether to wear a piece of styrofoam on your head eclipses many other far more salient aspects of cycling safely.

Good maintenance, situational awareness, and defensive/evasive riding skills are all under emphasized.

A critical one is knowing how to wipe out correctly, a martial art unto itself.

As much as a boxer will instinctively react to a fist flying at his face, a cyclist should know how to respond to a sudden altercation with the pavement. Many of them don't.

I mean, if you step into the ring against a professional Boxer having no training but think a shiny new bike helmet will keep you safe, well, good luck with that.

We're slaves to measurable outcomes, and it's easy measure and gather statistics on helmets. It's harder to measure how effective a rough and tumble childhood is for avoiding concussions and other accident related injuries later in life.

There is also no good reason not to wear a helmet when driving a car. Head trauma kills regardless.

> wear a helmet when driving a car.

Seat headrests and side impact air bags provide this function much more effectively than loose helmets. Which are not safe for use in passenger cars due to neck trauma. Further, your skull hitting the pavement is more rapid acceleration than a survivable car crash.

That said, NASCAR drivers do use helmets and a five point harness instead of air bags. But, very importantly they strap the helmet to the head rest, but that only works because of the five point harness and several other safety systems missing from consumer cars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HANS_device

TLDR: The issue is neck trauma. Which NASCAR avoids, by strapping both the driver and their helmet down.

Well, for what it's worth I do wear a helmet when I cycle. I have a suspicion that one saved my life when I was 16 and flipped my bike, landing directly on the crown of my head. The helmet smashed around it (an odd sensation), but I managed to stay alert enough to roll out of the way of cars approaching at ~50mph.

Even so, it does seem like we could save a decent number of lives by using helmets and HANS devices while motoring.

Yep, there is no good reason not to wear a helmet and a HANS device while driving a car.

Well, other than it being tremendously inconvenient and messing up people's hair. We have active prioritized those two things over safety.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com