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Comment by walshemj | Hacker News Reader

Falling off a bike or scooter and hitting your head is a non trivial injury and if your unlucky can be fatal.

You can make an argument for wearing a helmet just about anywhere including hiking, walking up stairs, and driving a car. Helmets would presumably decrease head injury rate with all those activities. But we make tradeoffs.

People get very doctrinaire about wearing helmets for specific activities. Not that long ago, people never used to wear helmets downhill skiing unless they were racing. Now they're common and, for some people, are something that it's reckless not to wear.

At least traditional helmets just don't fit with bike share and scooter share services. Maybe some of the flexible materials like D3O make sense for this sort of application as a compromise.

Bike share companies do not fit with helmets, and they choose to do business. I interpret this to mean bike share companies do not care about the safety of their customers.

Especially with undocked bikes, no one has come up with a workable way to rent helmets. It seems reasonable to let adults decide on their own whether to rent or not rent and either carry their own helmet or do without.

People make poor decisions all the time. We can create policies that nudge people into making better decisions. We should do this because it makes society better. Yes, I think the decision to ride a bicycle with a helmet in an American urban environment is a fundamentally better decision than to ride a bicycle without a helmet. I think we should not allow business to operate if they encourage biking without a helmet much the same way it is illegal to rent cars that do not have seat belts installed.

>bicycle with a helmet in an American urban environment is a fundamentally better decision

I agree. I don't bike on streets but I do wear a helmet when I do bike.

>we should not allow business to operate if they encourage biking without a helmet

The problem is that this is effectively equivalent to saying bike-sharing should be banned, especially dockless bike sharing (because they're probably not interesting to many given, say, strict enforcement of helmet laws). I'm not sure that's a nudge that "makes society better."

> equivalent to saying bike-sharing should be banned

Yeah, I said this in my root comment. I hope the city I live in bans bike shares like SF did. I addressed more issues than the helmet there too.

Edit: Reasons why I don't like bike shares as mentioned in the root comment.

* I think local DOT is expecting more ridership than will happen. This will cause us to miss our carbon reduction goals.

* They consume sidewalk space

* Heavy bikes are a bad option for a hilly rainy city. Rain gear and lighter multi speed bikes are required to effectively bike here.

I know people who have an illness that causes them to have fits and he does wear a light helmet - I bit like the ones hookers war in rugby (not that sort of hooker)

Thanks for saying this. I wear a helmet every ride because I have a friend who bumped their head in a low speed over the handlebars crash. They seem fine but they won't taste or smell for the rest of their life.

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