Bontrager’s WaveCel material more effective at preventing concussions than MIPS
pelotonmagazine.com
pelotonmagazine.com
The real story is that marketing probably has a bigger influence than science in this case. Several years ago helmet manufacturers hit the practical weight limit for helmets with styrofoam and carbon fiber shells. I bought a Giro Atmos over a decade ago and never needed to upgrade because the top of the line helmets were only a couple grams lighter, after a decade of “improvement.” The manufacturers noticed that helmet sales were declining, and all of a sudden “new science” appeared with a theory about concussions being caused by brain rotation and MIPS technology helps prevent that. How convenient that this appeared.
The dirty secret is that literally nobody has ever seen a brain rotate inside a skull and result in concussion. It’s really hard to image a brain in motion (impossible with off the shelf equipment), so the brain rotation theory is just a hypothetical mechanism. There isn’t an ethical test for blunt force trauma in real life conditions, and bike crashes are very rarely reported if they don’t send the rider to the hospital. So the leading authority on product safety, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, doesn’t even have good numbers on concussion rates for cyclists.
The bottom line is that MIPS and this new gel layer came at way too good of a time for the helmet industry for us not to be wary of the science. They can get away with it because it’s such an easy marketing sell- most people think their life is worth more than $250, so any helmet tech is a bet on the order of Pascal’s wager. If it’s snake oil I’m just out $250, but if it really is better then I just saved my life in a crash.
They found people with a history of repeated concussions, and then as what they thought might be a group to compare to some American football linemen with no history of concussions to compare with.
They found linemen with the same issues despite no concussion history.
This raised the possibility that worrying about severe hits that result in a concussion was possibly missing a larger issue.
It seems our understanding of brain injury and even how it comes about may be inaccurate.
Cycling seems like a different order entirely, it’s extremely unusual for a cyclist’s head to hit anything and only happens during an accident or mishap.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180424112923.h...
With no reported concussion history.
Also seen enough concussions and evaluations to be able to identify those exhibiting obvious symptoms tho I'm not trained in it.
I would let the people running the study decide how to classify them.
Its also not like there is a standard "reporting" form for concussions. Especially further back and esp if you had a team doctor.
I think this is basically accurate. Even if you have zero expectation that either this or MIPS or whatever works, I don't see how anyone who has seen Crash Reel or any of the football-related concussion documentaries could possibly not spring the extra few bucks.
Someone should put together a list of the cheapest or highest expected-value Pascal's wagers. Even things like flossing your teeth are a good example, where it's clearly good for your gum health even though the Cochrane research is equivocal. (Although using a WaterPik is probably better, especially if you do so in addition to flossing.)
Anyway if you haven't seen it, this movie will change the way you think about sports: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1hxtjlbTHI
This would be different than a cap in that the elastic nubbins should dissipate some of the energy. All this is a bit speculative, but that's what I'd go with.
For a long period of time football players were told that if they wore helmets they were protecting their head. So they were lured into dangerous behaviors. If cycling is a dangerous as playing football (it's not) then bicycle helmets would fulfill the same misleading role as football helmets. As it is cycling is relatively safe and helmets are observed to make no measurable difference in outcomes[1]
1. https://www.badscience.net/2013/12/bicycle-helmets-and-the-l...
FYI, I just bought the Bontrager wavecell last weekend for $150 at REI. It was a no-brainer, so to speak.
[I just had the worst crash of my life 2 weeks ago. I incurred nothing worse than scrapes and bruises, mostly because the helmet did its job, but needed to replace it after the crash.]
Better to not risk it: serious crash, replace helmet.
So yes, some amount of kinetic energy was dissipated in deformation of the plastic rather than my skull. I was more than a little grateful.
Foam can and does distribute and absorb shock without being significantly damaged or destroyed in less severe collisions, crashes that can still put you in the hospital without a helmet.
I would maybe describe how helmets work as having a shock-absorbing cushion that slows deceleration of it’s contents. Talking about “energy” is bound to be misleading or confusing, since from a given speed, you always transfer the same amount of energy no matter how you stop, whether it’s a sudden strike against concrete or a slow gentle braking, or even waiting several minutes for air and tire friction to wear out all your kinetic energy.
I don’t want the helmet to be damaged or destroyed only because that means the crash is bad or severe.
The helmet, by conforming to the shape of your head, distributes the energy from the point of impact to a much larger area. So instead of having your head cracked open at the point it hits the tarmac, or pierced by a pointy rock, the force will be evenly distributed across your head.
The helmet also has a low-friction shell that will slide across a surface, which helps avoid head rotation, snapping your neck or getting whiplash, and will protect you from cuts and abrasions.
I've been saved by my helmet many times.
The kinetic energy represented by the difference in height was still added to the egg, but the honey slowed the transfer down, and spread it out to the whole object, in the same way that walking the egg down the stairs, instead of dropping it off the balcony, would have slowed it down.
You don't always want the helmet to be damaged. I wouldn't want my helmet to be constantly denting, cracking, spalling, and ablating every time it touched something. You really want it to be damaged only when the kinetic energy is coming in too quickly to safely (slowly, widely) transfer it all to the protected head, and permanent deformation is the fastest way to bleed off that excess. In theory, the helmet could also heat up when it gets hit, but that's more expensive than just wrapping EPS around whatever you want to protect.
Can you describe what happened? Always interested in learning from other cyclists what to watch out for.
Are you sure?. We have a thing called tomography with things like xrays, magnetic resonance that let's us look inside bodies.
Experiments were done in the past with animals that have a similar brain to us, specially aviation military, that were extremely interested on concussions.
At least they have x-rays photography of impacts. By the way all this research led to car's seatbelts.
Thousands of brain surgical procedures are done each year, there are experts in the anatomical features of the brain, and we have detailed maps of sliced brains and complete heads.
Tens of thousands of people die in car accidents and hundred of thousands are injured. Insurance companies have extensive documentation on those.
We know the physical properties of those things and we have things called computers that let us do very complex models about the brain with finite elements or just analog 3d printed models with gelatin and plastics.
To say that nobody can imagine a brain in motion, so everything is a hypothetical mechanism is quite unfortunate.
We know a lot about what happens more or less. Things have improved dramatically for people like motorbike racers because we actually know a lot and lots of lives had been saved because of that.
Note that I’m not saying that a MIPS or WaveCel helmet is worse than the previous generation, I’m just pointing out that the timing in which these features appeared on the market is suspect, which causes me to suspect the “science” behind it. It is most likely that these antirotation features don’t make the helmets worse but also not any better.
The MIPS and Wavecell seem to assume that helmets grab the road with great traction and then snap your skull producing a large rotational acceleration so great that your brain falls behind. In my experience helmets (which are at first approximation spherical) hit in the center, easily skid, and induce approximately zero rotation in your skull.
I do recall in the 1990s or so that as brands switched from a heavier plastic shell (like the ancient bell helmets) to the then common nylon sleeve over the styrofoam that one manufacturer picked a particularly high friction material which did cause additional injuries. Once that was fixed everyone was happy again.
So absorbing energy from the fall is great. Playing games with additional layers with low internal friction or fancy ways to collapse is useless. I'm not completely against the idea, but seems laughable to pay 3-6X for something unlikely to help. Bike helmets that meet the toughest impact standards are available for $50 or so.
I personally have fallen many times, had my helmet skip many times (the longest was more than 10 feet) and never noticed my helmet gripping the ground and trying to torque my head.
Shouldn't that be sqrt(10) times as bad?
The distance fallen under constant acceleration g for t seconds is 1/2 g t^2, so it takes sqrt(10) times as long to fall 10 times as far. The velocity after falling t seconds is g t, so falling sqrt(10) times as long gives a velocity of sqrt(10) times as much.
The square root in the velocity calculation goes away since
E_k = 1/2 MV^2
so the energy dispersed hitting the ground from a 10 inch fall is exactly 10x as bad as a 1 inch fall.
Of course the actual damage done by that energy transferred through your head will be some complex function due to bone breakage and cell tearing thresholds, etc. But as a first approximation of suck, I'd go with this simple linear model.
Still dropping your head an inch (painful) is a nice reminder of how much energy is involved from normal riding height.
Or a balloon. It recovers from lots of pressing, even repeatedly. But there's a pressure from which it's never going to recover and crossing that threshold has binary outcome.
First consider that our kinetic energy is
K = mv^2/2
Additionally is the material has a spring constant k, then the force that results when the material deforms by x amount is
F(x) = kx
If we let d be the max distance the material, then we can integrate over the force to get the energy absorbed, which is equal to the kinetic energy.
int_0^d F(x) dx = K
kd^2/2 = mv^2/2
Now there are two ways the impact could work. Imagine we have a really thick crash pad, then we consider it to deform without limit and have a constant k, giving
d = sqrt(mv^2/k)
F_max = F(d) = v sqrt(mk)
But what about a helmet? It can only over it's thickness, at which point your head is basically in contact with the concrete. Thus, we have a constant deformation distance d, and get
k = mv^2/d^2
F(d) = mv^2/d
As we can see, depending on how we consider it we get either a force of sqrt(10) or 10 times the original amount. I probably failed to take into account something that someone who knew more about materials could point out.
tl;dr it's complicated because impact force does not necessarily scale linearly with velocity.
update: so after some conversation with others. It seems that head on concrete is better modeled by a constant d. So a drop of 10 times the height results in 10 times the force.
See also http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/impulse.html
I just bought a new helmet and the one with MIPS was among the cheapest options at the bike store I went to. There were many many other helmets without it that were vastly more expensive. I paid £50 for a Scott helmet that had MIPS, most other helmets were in the £80-150 range and most of them didn't have it. So I don't exactly feel like I paid extra for this technology, it just happened to be included with the helmet that was 1) within my budget 2) fit comfortably.
Edit if you prefer it directly from the marketing horse’s mouth: https://mipsprotection.com/
When you have suffered a concussion or an even more serious damage to the brain, rotational motion to the brain is the most likely cause.
I’m sure you’ve heard this but they say to replace a helmet every two-three years even if it hasn’t been in a crash.
It’s up to you whether you think that makes sense, but I’d sooner believe it than not.
https://www.secumar.com/en/servicing/
For bike helmets, independent safety labs have actually done the science and found no measurable deterioration in impact testing nor material properties with helmets as much as 26 years old. (Link to journal paper at end of summary linked below.)
Bicycle helmets just add a few mm of valuable deceleration distance in the best case, that's all they do apart from protecting from purely cosmetical abrasions. The maximum amount of extra deceleration distance is provided at one very specific kind of impact. When the material properties change, the maximum will be achieved at a different impact. But you cannot predict which one you will have that one time when you actually use the helmet. The old one might be better or worse, nobody knows.
If manufacturers knew exactly what would eventually hit you, lots of engineering could be applied to precisely tune the helmet to that impact, but they don't know so they cannot do that. So all the engineering goes into achieving comfort while hitting regulation targets and into marketing features that only need to appeal to "common sense". There is no engineering at all going into the main purpose. Even aerodynamics, a clearly defined performance metric orthogonal to protection, is just barely starting to move on from hand-wavey "fast looks" to actual engineering.
That is just a way to sell more product by shaming people into "being safe".
Uncrashed styrofoam doesn't stop being effective and turn into a pumpkin after two years. But you can double revenue if you can halve the replacement cycle.
I'd never heard that one before.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mattresses-double-weight-e...
The cynic part of me agrees, but is it though?
Some plastics seem to get "stressed" over time, especially if under sunlight (not sure if it's the temperature or UV that's the issue) - I wonder if that's part of the concern here?
You want the EPS to crush smoothly -- if it cracks and displaces, it will not be in place to absorb energy and cushion the impact further.
We replace our bike helmets every ~6 yr.
Source: Have listened to the crackle of decade-old plastic kayaking helmets under tensile/compressive stress and watched them shatter like glass after impact with a concrete floor. New helmets from the same manufacturer did neither.
Just like the sofa store tells me that ideally you need to flip all cushions on my sofa every day? It's a load of marketing nonsense.
That said, you could just put zinc oxide sunblock on your helmet and then protect the UV-blocking layer with a spray urethane top-coat, and thereby extend the useful lifespan of your helmet by years.
Can't really do much about O2 damage or migration of plasticizers, though, unless you want to freeze your helmet any time you're not wearing it. Keeping it in an air-conditioned interior room rather than a hot garage or bike locker might help.
EPS can last quite a while when buried, where it is protected from UV, excessive O2, or heat extremes, but I wouldn't entirely trust an EPS helmet beyond 10 years. It's not so much that EPS can't last that long, but that you can't guarantee that it hasn't encountered environmental conditions that would result in degradation over longer time spans. Better a 10-year-old helmet than no helmet, though. There's no excuse for doing that when municipalities sometimes just give away free (to the recipient) bicycle helmets, maybe with sponsorship by an insurer or National Safety Council or similar organization.
Please don't fuck about with safety critical equipment.
While following up, I discovered that what I suggested is patented. US 6884501.
Anyway, please don't ask people not to hack on a site with "Hacker" in the title. You are free to replace your own expanded-polystyrene bike helmets on a schedule set by helmet manufacturers and cyclist-targeting publications, if you choose. I believe that if a helmet shows no outward signs of degradation or damage, and no known incidences of impacts, there is no particular need to replace it. Just use it until it's dirty, damaged, or unfashionable, and replace it then.
There aren't a lot of studies on the real-world effectiveness of factory-new bike helmets, and as far as I know, none that actually support any particular expiration date for them. Even Snell admits that their 5-year guideline is based on "consensus" and "prudence", and not any actual evidence [0]. And one of the arguments is literally that "we will probably have better helmets available five years from now". Having been around longer than that, it just isn't true (at the price point where I buy helmets). The bike helmet I have now is largely the same as the one I had as a kid. More holes. More fashionable. More comfortable. Functionally the same. Wrap skull in 2" shell of expanded polystyrene, and put a cover over it.
Keep your helmet cool, clean, and out of direct sunlight, and it will last longer than five years. Prophylactically treating one of the well-known causes of failure in expanded polystyrene, immediately after purchase, will help.
Anyone who cycles frequently will likely replace more often based on acquired grime or stink, anyway.
> There isn’t an ethical test for blunt force trauma in real life conditions, and bike crashes are very rarely reported if they don’t send the rider to the hospital.
There's one ethical source of data - televised bike races. Surely there are enough crashes recorded in publicly accessible videos to provide a fairly representative sample of how a human head moves when the helmet it's wearing hits the road.
> They can get away with it because it’s such an easy marketing sell- most people think their life is worth more than $250, so any helmet tech is a bet on the order of Pascal’s wager.
It's exactly the same with motorcycle helmets. You can get a DOT approved helmet for $150, but the general perception in the community is "if you have a $150 head, wear a $150 helmet". Then everyone pays $800 for helmets designed to European standards which are meant for racing, and give dubious benefit if any at normal road-going speeds (eg. see https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/automobiles/27SNELL.html).
There's probably other ways in which pros crash differently, making them a less than ideal sample of the overall cycling population.
And, on the other hand, cyclists who are casual enough to crash very differently to the pros probably wouldn't be looking up in-depth analyses of bike crashes when choosing a helmet either. They'll just buy the second cheapest one.
This is absolutely not the modern perception. The modern perception is that DOT is a joke and that a $120 SNELL or ECE helmet is better than a $500 DOT helmet.
Also, your statement about "european standards meant for racing" is nonsense. ECE is a standard for street use, and SNELL is an American standard.
Because there's no one way to crash, there's hardly one way to test. Buy the most expensive helmet you can afford, more likely than not that it's a better product.
That doesn't mean the technology can't be improved, and there's actual science being done. Brains are being imaged. There are peer reviewed articles published every year that details the challenges of how to model brain damages. It's not fair to brush them off as just an invention in marketing.
So far it does seem that measuring impacts at an angle matches real world brain damages better than the older standards of measuring dead-on impacts. That's what "rotational acceleration" means. Acceleration is just another word for impact. It doesn't mean your skull should rotate freely.
There are enough indications that this translates to helmet improvements that most consumer organizations have started to recommend them should you buy a new one. That doesn't mean you should throw away your old helmet but it should be enough to disqualify it as "snake oil".
This new Wavecel system hasn't been reproduced yet, two testing institutes has so far failed, but it is similar enough to existing cell and slip systems that performance is not likely to be worse.
Doesn't your car have seatbelts and airbags?
2 meter drops that achieve about 14 miles per hour (22.5 kph) on the flat anvil. In Europe the drop height is only 1.5 meters. Why so low, when bicyclists frequently exceed 14 mph in forward speed?
The typical road or trail bike crash involves a drop to pavement. The important energy in that crash is supplied by gravity, not by forward speed. Although forward speed can contribute some additional energy, the main force is the attraction of gravity, and the impact severity is determined by the height of your head above the pavement when the fall begins. It is gravity that determines how fast your helmet closes with the pavement. Some of the crash energy is often "scrubbed off" by hitting first with other body parts. The typical bicycle crash impact occurs at a force level equating to about 1 meter (3 feet) of drop, or a falling speed of 10 MPH. The rider's forward speed before the crash may be considerably higher than that, but the speed of the head closing with the ground, plus a component of the forward speed, less any energy "scrubbed off" in other ways, normally average out at about 10 MPH.
So bike helmets are tested with a 2 meter (6.56 feet) drop. Motorcycle helmets are tested at 3 meters, about 17 mph. A really good bicycle helmet can handle
https://helmets.org/limits.htm
The (now foolishly down-voted) comment that you are replying to is exactly right that a bicycle helmet would mitigate the shower scenario injuries.
This isn't true when wearing a helmet alters behaviour of the user or other road users. In the UK it has been found that motorists leave less space for cyclists who are wearing a helmet, and that helmets increase risk-taking behaviour.
It was one study on car driver behaviour. It was on roads I use.
Most experiments on helmet use shows increase in risk behaviour of the wearer. Observational studies are less important for decision making.
You instantly lose credibility with this line: "I bought a Giro Atmos over a decade ago and never needed to upgrade because the top of the line helmets were only a couple grams lighter, after a decade of “improvement.”
I hope you've since replaced it. General guidelines are to replace a helmet every three years due to material degradation and UV damage.
Yes, you are correct that there is a marketing element. Likewise, you are correct that people value their lives over $250 price tag.
As a bit of antidotal evidence, I had a fall this weekend on Evolution trail on Galbraith MTN in Bellingham, WA. I fell from about 6-7 feet up on a feature called the Stinger, a long, super fun north shore style bridge (watch some youtube videos if you want to see it). My face and head were impacted in the fall and I suffered, what I think is, a very mild concussion. I replaced my helmet afterwards as per the recommendations. I also have a history of TBI caused by a cycling accident where wearing a helmet saved my life. I am absolutely going to buy something that even vaguely suggests an advantage for injury prevention. Mountain Biking is, after all, and inherently dangerous sport.
As you suggest, any progress is good progress when it comes to saving lives. But I absolutely disagree that it "is a bet on the order of Pascals wager," especially when it seems I myself have made that wager and come out ahead. So, with the utmost respect, unless you are a leading researcher in this field, STFU.
https://www.helmet.beam.vt.edu/bicycle-helmet-ratings.html
Here's their methodology:
The unique claim WaveCell/MIPS is making is that they can absorb the energy that's trying to rotate your head. I've seen no indications that this is a problem. Tires have great traction, pretty much anything else (you, skin, bike, backpack, helmet, bike gloves, etc) have very poor traction so accidents rarely impart large rotational forces. Even if they did the WaveCell is only going to absorb a minimal amount since the helmet is strapped to your head.
Mips and WaveCel are claiming "Rotation causes injuries", engineering a solution to it, not proving it exists, and claiming they are safer because it.
Neither MIPS or WaveCel are claiming they absorb normal impacts better than normal helmets. Generally both ANSI and SNELL have picked an acceleration and penetration standard that's a compromise between rider comfort and safety. Helmets are tested against those standards.
MIPS and WaveCel have failed to prove any additional safety and instead of working with the safety standard folks are appealing directly to consumers to justify their 3-6 times price increase over other ANSI and SNELL approved helmets.
The impact that you can't see in the video that damaged the helmet was in the collision with the side of the truck after it hit my left arm, rotating my handlebars to the right. This caused the counter-steer that slammed me into the side of the truck. The truck was moving faster than I was, so that was the source of the rotational acceleration.
So both WaveCel and non-WaveCel helmets help absorb impacts and reduce the peak acceleration of your brain. Imparting dangerous levels of rotational acceleration seems wildly improbable. Maybe if your helmet strap got caught on the trucks lugnuts? Even then the MIPS or WaveCel would absorb maybe 30 degrees of rotation?
I'm actually curious if you still have a working WaveCel. If you try to rotate your helmet for a normal helmet how much extra rotation do you get? Is it damped as you rotate, or rotating freely within the range available?
For the Wavecel to make a difference you'd need a very high traction to allow high torque which is required to reach a high peak rotational acceleration AND a very low total rotation. Even then I'd expect a normal helmet to rotate just as far.
Antanomically I just can't see it working. I've had my chin forced into my chest, landed on the wide of my head (forcing head onto the opposite shoulder), crushed the back my helmet. But generally there's not much friction between my hair and the helmet, or the helmet and the ground. So to transfer much energy requires an impact not a shear force or torque of any kind.
Can you propose an accident that would impact a sudden large torque to a normal helmet, but a low total rotation (compatible with keeping ones head attached)? Or really anything that allows a slippery layer inside the helmet to make a meaningful difference?
If WaveCel was actually better at absorbing impacts (which they show in their animation) than styrofoam I wouldn't expect them to make their helmet out of mostly styrofoam. If the WaveCel material is worse than the helmet is actually less good at absorbing impacts than a helmet of similar thickness and weight.
Seems safest to just buy the best styrofoam helmet you can buy and don't add cost, weight, and complexity to try to offset this theorized danger of peak rotational acceleration causing concussions that is somehow mitigated by Mips or WaveCel and not by a normal helmet worn normally.
Whether or not it's a marketing gimmick, it's the only good indicator we have as the research is inconclusive and I certainly don't have any better idea than the people making the helmets.
That said, what I typically look to for advice on what is a safe helmet is downhill mountain biking competition standards. If they think it will make the sport safer, and their insurance lower, then it's a good indicator that it is probably a good standard to have for my own head.
Also, some people argue that MIPS is probably not as effective in real life as in tests because people simply don't fasten helmets tight enough for it to matter (and the same may apply to these helmets with respect to shear forces), but I don't know if this has been scientifically tested.
Look for "Lazer Cyclone MIPS".
Edit: Unfortunately it appears that this particular helmet has been discontinued: https://www.bikeforums.net/general-cycling-discussion/117473...
But there are others that perform about as well that are similarly priced.
[0] Fasting is neuroprotective following traumatic brain injury, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jnr.21628
[1] Cerebral Metabolic Adaptation and Ketone Metabolism after Brain Injury, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1038/sj.jcbfm.96005...
They aren't perfect, and they don't need to be. They help sometimes and almost never make things worse, that's about all we can hope for. If someone made a helmet that's better sometimes, then that's a good thing. It'll help someone at some point.
That said, I've crashed innumerable time over the years, often at speed. As a teen, crashed several times on a dirt road at over 45 miles an hour without wearing a helmet. Been over the handle bars at least 6 times. Been T-boned by a car on a training ride.
Through all that, Ive managed to never hit my head. How? No clue. Just luck I guess. Didnt wear a helmet as a kid, but as an adult I wont get on a bike without on. Only injury above my knock I've had was when I dumped my road bike at 25 mph when I lost the rear end in a corner. Landed on my side, rolled onto my stomach and dragged my chin on the pavement for a bit. Broke my left hand and burnt my finger tips from that one, too. Got up and rode 5 miles home...
If I were still riding, I would definitely get one of these helmets. A lot of my gear is already Bontrager (helmet and 2 pairs of cycling shoes), and all 3 of my bikes are Trek (Bontrager is a Trek subsidiary).
But if you are serious about biking, not just casually using a bike to get to work or school, a helmet isn’t really a big deal and probably much more useful.
But, people, especially kids, are unpredictable. I once literally ran over a boy around 12 years old on a bike path in the US. He was riding with a younger sibling and his father riding head on at me. They were riding inline on the right side (their right), with the kid I ran over in front. Just seconds before we were going to ride past each other (I was also on my right side of the path), the kid swerved directly across me, and dumped his bike. I literally had no time to respond, and rode right over him. I was on my mountain bike at the time, and the bike just thought it was a bump.
Kid was fine, maybe a bit of road rash, dad was pissed at me. Something along the likes of "WTF are you doing riding recklessly and hitting my kid?". The real WTF was like "did you not see what I saw? You kid swerved in front of me and dumped his bike." Dad was so irate I got to the point quickly of: I'm done talking with about this, whats your insurance amd I'm going to call the police to sort this out (my bike had a little bit of damage like a dinged wheel and a bent pedal from it). To this day, dont know if he was running a scam or just had a moron for a son, but as soon as I threatened to bring the cops in, the dad dropped it and went on their way.
At any rate, I think helmet use is required for kids in the Netherlands.
I had a simple rule when driving. At every moment in time, imagine the most asinine/ignorant thing every driver around you could possibly do. And that is what they will do.
But.
They will do it slowly. So when somebody just merges straight into you while you're in the straight lane, they'll just ease it over slow enough that you can react.
They'll cut directly across from the left lane to the right lane, ignoring the lights, to make the turn they feel like making. And run over a little old lady in the process, and scream at her body.
I was all like "I know the rules, I'll follow the rules", and I'd do batshit insane things like stop for pedestrians because they had the right of way. They'd look at me like I was a serial killer just waiting for my chance, usually until they noticed I wasn't from around there. Then they'd laugh at me and walk.
China has great rules of the road. Nobody follows them.
I'm from the Netherlands, and unfortunately wearing a helmet is not required for anyone.
I don't always wear a helmet, for me it depends on the ride. I wear my helmet when I ride fast or through a busy city.
Funny thing: wearing helmets is much more common in Germany. If you see adult cyclists wearing a helmets on upright bikes they'll speak German most of the time :)
Generally I wear a helmet if I'll be doing more than 15 mph, or riding through a city.
Two hundred deaths a year and more than ten thousand injuries for bicyclists in the Netherlands... Not going to debate whether it’s a “problem”, only assert that the belief that helmets aren’t necessary is causing some unnecessary loss of life. A few of those people in the Netherlands know that even with their well designed infrastructure and slow biking speeds, as many as 80-90 Nederlanders are dying unnecessarily every year and would live if they’d only wear helmets...
https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2019/03/top-hat-bike-helmets-w...
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=nl&tl=en&u=htt...
Firstly, it's certainly not 80-90 of those 200, that's preposterous if you look at more detailed analyses of the results. About 70 of those 200 deaths are from irresponsible use of ebikes by old people!
Furthermore, bikes are the primary mode of transportation for most people I know here - elderly, young, weak, strong, you name it. The USA's main mode of transportation is cars (unnecessarily large ones!), which (aside from killing over 40,000 people a year directly) also kill the environment, the bodies of those inside, and a truly horrifying number of other people by proxy of countless wars waged over oil. If you count the 40,000 direct deaths alone, you get 129 deaths per 1M Americans per year and 11 deaths per 1M Dutch people per year. Take into account the other issues involved in driving and I'm sure that number will increase by (at absolute minimum) a factor of 10.
Helmets may make sense in America, where biking is a sport dominated by 30-55 year old men on $1000+ bikes wearing criminally tight pants, sunglasses, and aerodynamic helmets. But in the Netherlands they are a preposterous idea. Wearing helmets decreases bike use, which kills in far greater numbers.
Right, yes, I’m on the only American here, and only Americans believe that bike helmets make you safe.
I didn’t make the claim, it was made by SWOV of The Hague in the Netherlands, and republished by DutchNews. Since you’re there, maybe take this up with them? They did look at the detailed analysis, and they said helmets would save 85 Netherlanders per year, not me.
> The USA’s main mode of transportation is cars [...] killing over 40,000 people a year directly
Why did you turn this into a death competition? What does this have to do with cars? The discussion was over whether bike helmets make you safer or not.
I’m fully aware of how bad cars are. Your nationalistic slight aside, not all Americans want cars and the deaths that come with them. I can’t control that. But I can wear a helmet.
> Wearing helmets decreases bike use, which kills in far greater numbers.
That’s a strong claim. Please put a magnitude on it and some evidence and sources behind it.
> Please put a magnitude on it and some evidence and sources behind it.
Alberta's helmet law – children's cycling halved, injuries increased per cyclist
https://www.cyclehelmets.org/1250.html
HEAT analysis: United Kingdom
https://www.cyclehelmets.org/1231.html
Frequently asked Questions For Policy Makers
While I appreciate the response and attempt to address my question, all three of those links are from cyclehelmets.org, and the site is helmet skeptic. That’s not my opinion, it says right on the site that most of their material is anti-helmets. I find it incredibly biased, it tends to use emotional arguments and tries to magnify every scrap of anti-helmet evidence. I dislike how cyclehelmets.org attempts to draw causal lines from correlations at practically every opportunity. Just read your link and see how often they use words like “seem” and “suggest”, then try to imagine some of the many other possible explanations.
BTW, did you notice what the 10-year Canada study concluded? “In general the rate of head injuries is declining, but this is not consistent across the country, nor is it attributable to legislation as some provinces with legislation experienced a decline while others did not.” So there is evidence that helmet laws did not cause the supposed changes in ridership.
Do you believe that having to use seat belts prevents people from driving cars? If not, why not? Do you think seat belts make drivers more aggressive? Do you believe that helmets prevent people from participating in other sports? I live near a lot of ski resorts, and nearly 100% of skiers here are voluntarily wearing helmets, and the number of skiers is rising every year. Same goes for bikes, there are no helmet laws where I live and yet most people wear them, and more people are riding than ever. I don’t buy for a second that helmets are so offputting it drives away half of all people, there are a million possible explanations for whatever data points they found in Alberta. For example, the injury rates presented are absolute numbers, not per-capita like they should be. More injuries is expected when there are more people, and between 2000 and 2006, Alberta got more people.
Do your children use helmets?
1) SWOV has published multiple analyses of this issue. They explicitly noted that the analysis you're referring to was unusual in that it said up to 85 people would be saved per year by wearing helmets. Their other analyses, which use different modes of calculation, arrived at far lower numbers.
2) It's not "a death competition" (but don't worry, America is #1 regardless.) However, every mode of transportation has a cost in lives in many forms. Aside from direct deaths, there are also many indirect deaths from various modes of transportation. If you're going to criticize a possible safety problem in a mode of transportation, keep in mind the broader context. In the Netherlands, where trains are a critical part of the transportation infrastructure, there are more suicides by train than bike deaths (although both are around 200/yr.) You could argue for, perhaps, airport-train-style doors in front of platforms. But that too has an associated cost, and a benefit.
3) You need to consider the consequences of every action, no matter how obscure or strange they may possibly be. Anti-child labor laws sound like a good thing, right? Well, read up on the Child Labor Deterrence Act. Harkin simply introducing the act in Congress was enough to scare manufacturers around the world into action, firing their enormous sweatshops of children. Good, huh? Well, the children were at the sweatshops for a reason. Turns out that without the sweatshops, enormous numbers of children went into prostitution, theft, and rock crushing (which might not sound bad, but it guarantees the destruction of your lungs if you're not killed in a number of other ways.) Every action can have first order, second order, third order consequences...
Finally: 200 deaths a year is an extremely, extremely small number for a system with nearly 20 million users, operating carbon-free, smog-free, at extremely low cost (~20 eur/year.) And it manages to provide fresh air and exercise to all participants! There's basically nothing like it; it's a wonder of the modern world. Risking damaging this system by adding helmets... The payoff is tiny, the risk is enormous.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16836336
Fortunately it wasn't me who hit their head hard in my original story, because she's now dead as a result.
I credit the helmet for protecting me and not ending up with a crushed nose.
Like I said, as an adult, I believe in helmets and religiously wear them while riding since I was about 20 (now 38).
Likewise, I said I was incredibly lucky. When I got hit by the car, by all rights, I should have slammed my head on the ground, but didn't. Not a dent or scratch on my helmet. After getting hit, I saw ground, sky then ground again before impact and my bike landed on the opposite side of the Street's sidewalk. Trashed about a $3500 carbon race bike and faced close to $40k in medical bills between ambulance and ER treatment (this was in the US in 2008). I never saw a bill, though because I wasn't at fault as the guy that hit me ran a stop sign and his insurance immediately accepted fault.
The most frequent pieces of gear I've trashed during accidents: gloves and shorts. Neither hold up well to sliding across dirt roads or asphalt.
I remember when I was younger doing an x-up (turning the handlebars backwards in the air so your arms make an x) over a pretty big jump. This was something I'd done many times before, but this time, while trying to straighten out before landing, my handlebars got tangled in my shirt and stuck at a 90 degree angle. Somehow, instead of landing in that very unfortunate position, I managed to stuff my bike down between my legs and behind me before, reasonably gracefully, sliding down the landing on my knees. I was completely unscathed, but a little baffled as to how.
I ride a lot more conservatively now and a lot less regularly so I don't fall very often, but it seems like when I do, that lack of practice shows. I don't seem to get as lucky any more.
My helmet cracked where I hit my head. Who knows where I would have been without it.
OTOH, there are or will soon be options to replace our foam brain buckets with high-tech collars/airbags that may (?) be less sweaty and may (?) provide more coverage in a crash (chin, back, sides, etc.)
One example: https://hovding.com/how-hovding-works/
They claim you still have a 90% risk of head injury with a traditional helmet at 25km/h, but only a 2% risk with Hövding:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yOAkMZpbww
That's a pretty significant improvement if true.
The only reason I don't currently own one is that they say it's not as ergonomic for those using road/drop bar bikes. Presumably this is due to the weight of the air canister and battery in the pod that sits behind your neck, since the riding position is less upright.
If any road bike users wear Hövding, I'd be interested to hear about your experience.
In my many years of riding I've fallen on the back of my head zero times and on my chin twice, as a kid.
https://bike.kaliprotectives.com/helmets/
But it's a tradeoff. Full-faced helmets give the helmet another point of leverage on which to break your neck. On the other hand they won't erase your face, which is nice.
Not to mention that they will breathe very very very poorly, though I'm a little unsure how these wavecell helmets will breathe. Like the Scott helmets, lots of tiny holes seems like not as good as big holes for airflow.
Motorcycles on the other hand consistently travel at 30+mph and regularly see sustained 55-80mph on the highway. It's not the same problem at all.
If your helmet is likely to encounter a 60mph impact you will design for that. Most likely that means your helmet will be stronger, which means it won't break away as easily at lower speeds. This means when your head will take more of the kinetic energy in a 15mph crash than it otherwise would. Not to mention that the helmet will be heavier, which means there's more momentum on impact which may affect the way forces get dissipated.
If you compare with downhill mountain biking that's a very tiny segment of the population. It's true that some downhill mountain bikers may use motocross helmets. That's not what the average bike helmet is for, and it's not what the average bike rider should be using.
Don't use a motorcycle helmet as a bike helmet.
https://crazybmxer.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/bmx-racing.jp... https://i1.wp.com/www.njmotocross.com/wp-content/uploads/201...
That'd be a miserable experience, motorcycle helmets aren't significantly vented and in my experience have substantial sweat-absorbing padding. They prioritize minimizing wind noise and expect much higher speeds than most bicycles encounter...
In which case they’re literal lifesavers. I’d be braindead ten times over if it weren’t for those helmets.
And I agree, the lack of face/chin protection is absurd in bicycle helmets. I know personally of two folks who injured their jaw or teeth in bicycle crashes wearing minimal helmets. I'm not even a particularly social person with lots of friends let alone ones who ride.
One needed an implant to replace a cracked tooth that had barely touched the pavement in a crash that also tore his chin up enough to need stitches. The other broke his jaw and was eating cheeseburgers through a straw for months while it was wired shut.
Both bad outcomes would have been trivially prevented by a full-face helmet.
I haven't found a down side to riding w/full-face, the modern ones are light enough and it's sufficiently ventilated to not be a heat issue.
[0] https://www.bellhelmets.com/bike/p/super-3r-mips-mountain-bi...
The chin is not a particularly common injury for bicyclist.
https://nationsfootballclassic.com/best-football-chin-straps...
These are not significantly heavy or hot.
What's to be done?
Buy the helmet that reduces concussions by 98%?
Or don't buy a helmet at all, and trust that you won't get in an accident?
That's quite the conundrum.
[0] http://www.bath.ac.uk/news/articles/archive/overtaking110906...
Wear a helmet, and don't ride on streets with cars.
In some cities in the US, which is just plain wrong. For example, in Portland OR you cannot lawfully ride a bicycle on the sidewalk unless you're avoiding some road hazard (cars do not count, unless it's on fire or something).
Personally, I would ignore both this study and the WaveCel marketing material, and look at results of actual outcomes in collisions. Boston and New York both, just for example (many cities & states do this, and so does the NTSB), publish data on how often helmets prevent brain injury, statistically speaking. [1][2][3] (Note that NYC is so sure helmets save lives, they’re spending millions to distribute them for free. There’s a decent chance it’s saving money overall.)
> Or don’t buy a helmet at all, and trust that you won’t get in an accident?
Well, do what makes you feel safer and obeys the laws. But trusting that you won’t get in an accident because of that study you cited would be a dramatic, and possibly dangerous mis-interpretation and mis-understanding of that study’s results.
While there’s some controversy over that study admitted by the author, even if you take it a face value, it’s saying that without a helmet cars pass 4.4 feet from him, and with a helmet, they pass 4.1 feet from him on average. That might be a bit more dangerous, but what’s the actual accident rate? You can’t conclude anything about that from his 2 accidents, and the U.S. standard for vehicles passing bikes is 3 feet, so he’s demonstrating that with or without helmets, drivers are on average passing safely.
If you want to take the studies at face value, then try to calculate the expected value, which is risk multiplied by cost. It’s wrong to suggest that it’s a toss up just because there exists evidence in both directions, when the magnitude of the evidence may be overwhelmingly unidirectional. Clearly many people here don’t believe the 98% improvement WaveCel claims, but suppose you take it at face value. To decide what do to about it, you need to know what the increase in concussion risk is due to vehicles passing you more closely. Don’t call it a conundrum, find out. How often does an average of 4.1 feet of room result in concussion over 4.4 feet of room?
(BTW, do note the 98% number that WaveCel is advertising is relative to other kinds of helmets, not relative to the unprotected skull. Statistics on outcomes seem to consistently show 80%-90% effectiveness for wearing any kind of helmet, but don’t take my word for it...)
[1] https://www1.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/bicyclists/biketips.shtml
[2] https://www.cityofboston.gov/news/uploads/16776_49_15_27.pdf
The study is also weird in that in the course of being passed by 2500 vehicles, he was struck twice. That is an astronomical accident rate that leads me to think his test was abnormal in some way.
Additionally (without having checked any statistics) i believe most vehicle strikes where i live are due to the driver not seeing the cyclist at all, because they do not orientate properly on right turns or the cyclist is riding too aggressively.
When I looked at the literature on Wavecell, it seemed to be of the "up to 40x better" variety. To a lay person like myself, that seemed suspicious because I have no idea what the common accident types are, and the literature didn't seem to indicate that it was more protective in the common scenarios. The article linked here does seem to make that case, but as others have noted it reads a bit like an advertisement.
I am actually planning on getting on getting one of these helmets simply because its shape fits my head very well, and in talking with cyclists I've been told that having a shape that fits your head (mine is apparently more "circular" than "oblong") is the most important thing.
Unless you have one of those textile covered urban fashion helmets which do not slide on asphalt and also risk breaking intervertebral disks or neck bones.
Bike helmets are sold on the basis of look, feel, and most importantly weight. Nobody is touting real safety. Compare motorcycle helmets, which come in two radically different safety standards: DOT, for harley riders who want something that is barely legal. And SNELL, for sportbike riders who actually want to keep their face on their heads after a crash. I have never seen a bicyclist with a full face helmet on the road. Bicyclists, like the harley riders, care far more about comfort and style than actual safety. At 50kph the asphalt doesn't care whether you just fell off a bicycle or a motorcycle. Please prove me wrong. Please find me a pic of someone riding a bicycle on a road in a snell motorcycle helmet. I have seen plenty of them in the downhill community, never among commuters.
My point is that this new material will not be used to make safer helmets. It will be used to make lighter and more stylish helmets that, like all the others, remain only slightly above the absolute minimum legal standards. That's the market.
Also BTW, their helmets have way more cushion/crumble zone than regular street helmets.
I think there's a market for safer helmets and I own a bike helmet made to SNELL standards (for bike helmets not road). I just checked, I have a Specialized helmet with a Snell sticker inside that says "B90A". I'd buy a safer helmet, but I'm not willing to buy a full face helmet to offset the rare case of falling on my chin. Nor am I willing to pay 3-6x the price for some marketing campaign which claims that peak rotational acceleration is a major menace for bicyclists.
Sure Snell motorcycle helmets are more durable than bike helmets, but they have similar styrofoam of a similar thickness for lowering the peak acceleration. Sure my bike helmet would likely shatter into a million pieces in a major accident at 100 mph, but I don't bike at 100 mph.
I've went to my goto source on the subject: the Bike Helmet institute: https://helmets.org/helmet19.htm#bontrager
Their veredict:
when we sent a Specter model to a lab for conventional impact test results the results were very good but not amazing.
https://www.cnet.com/news/brain-surgeon-theres-no-point-wear...
There were reports of increased rates of basal skull injury, i.e. the same injury many race car drivers suffered (Dale Earnhard) and for which HANS device was invented. So on one hand you would be protected in simple accidents but on the other hand exposed to more serious ones.
https://road.cc/content/news/121280-cycle-helmets-save-lives...
Which actually makes the point I was trying to make initially; there is no consensus.
Knocked myself out 2 years ago on a mountain bike wearing a MIPS helmet. No stitches in head. No concussion.
Last year wife went over the bars at whistler and took it on the face with the best carbon fiber full face downhill helmet money can buy. Pressure on her face was so much she had lines of blood under her eyes just from the pressure. Big scratches on the face-guard. But she was totally fine, not knocked out, walked it off and laughed about it later.
Completely unscientific data above, but when it comes to my budget distribution these days, it goes into helmet, then pads (D3O for downhill and cross country), then bike, camelbak and rest of gear.
Helmets are awesome.
For reference: https://www.d3o.com/ Various manufacturers use this stuff - Fox, Raceface, but my personal favorite are these TLDs. They're great for long sweaty rides and gnarly stuff. https://shop.troyleedesigns.com/raid-knee-guard?color=7
This is the helmet she was using: https://shop.troyleedesigns.com/19f-tld-d3-midnight-chrome-c...
I'll also add that I'm not a fan of Bell's Super 3R helmet with the removable face. It's MIPS these days, but I don't feel the chin guard provides enough space in case you actually take a face hit. The more DH specific helmets have more clearance. I guess now that I've seen one work and save someone, I'm a little more picky. Thisis the Super 3R I'm referring to: https://www.bellhelmets.com/bike/p/super-3r-mips-mountain-bi...
For cross country rides that have some more challenging DH, I use this helmet which breathes way more than the TLD I linked to above and has more clearance than the Super 3R: https://www.foxracing.com/proframe-helmet-matte-%5Bblk%5D-m/...
I'm sure there are tons of cyclists, XC and downhill folks on HN and we all have our opinions and experience. Would love to hear from others. YMMV considerably from mine. Stay safe!!
I'd recommend a white helmet, with stick-on reflective tape, to maximize visibility. And CINCH IT DOWN TIGHT.
Fun times we live in -- I expect in 5 years we (in the US) will be able to buy a 45mph, 50kg e-bike (e-motorcycle?) for $3,000-$6,000. We'll need better helmets, gloves, shoes, and pads for that, but hopefully stil shy of full motorcycle regalia (known as "ATGATT", all the gear, all the time).
And I like my current Troy Lee Designs helmet simply because it fits so well.
Ditto: helmets are awesome.
iirc this is one of the theories about injury being higher in American Football vs. Rugby, the increased safety equipment leads to a cycle of increased hitting force which leads to increased equipment, etc.
The gear helps when I have much greater exposure (i.e. longer periods of time) to the risks, and part of the idea is when I’m taking a vacation and spending a lot of money to go up to Whistler for a week, fewer small problems will end my vacation early. The gear also helps when I run the risk of exhaustion, which is a major cause of mountain bike crashes.
BTW, I actually do think there’s some truth to the idea that gear increases risk taking. That doesn’t mean that overall safety goes down though, so you have to be careful how you think and talk about it. If injury outcomes are on average lower when wearing gear, then that’s that, it doesn’t matter if people are taking larger chances, the protection is still outweighing the risk.
I mean this sounds great, and the contrarian version of me says, no way its all marketing.
Discuss
My general outlook, which is why I like this, is that it's relatively rare in life to find things where you can improve your health or increase your life expectancy just by swiping your credit card without needing to do any additional work or anything else unpleasant afterwards, so one should take advantage of these opportunities when possible. (Another good example is HEPA filters, where you just swipe your credit card and plug it in and that's it, and although there are limited studies on HEPA filters themselves there is a very clear link between air pollution and mortality risk.)
I had a concussion recently and my doctor said nothing of that nature. I would love to have had a helmet which was better able to handle the impact though! Definitely the least fun altered state of consciousness that I have experienced.
And severity of impact does not correlate strongly with severity of symptoms.
Anecdotal, but I got 2 concussions while playing lacrosse in highschool (not minor), and none of the nurses or doctors I spoke to said anything about looking at electronics
I also read the article first and reached out to my bike shop about it. I think the tech is great, I do find percentages that big to be a bit questioning, so I will do more research on them. Meaning, how much is hype vs actual, it looks awesome though, and we need something like this.
I didn't make my comment until I noticed that it only took 9 minutes to get that article in the top of the top on here and was just curious how that happens. ie, actual people reading, how many people need to vote on it to get it to the top, vs pay to play top ranking. Was asking a serious question too, I have no idea I am pretty new to HN and I know that Reddit is pay to play,
Thanks for the post though, I am interested and if it makes sense will probably invest in one of these
I'll agree with you though -- I too tend to assume that everything on the internet is an advertisement.
That's the kind of organic upvote rate you'd expect from something like "Alien spaceship lands in Times Square (nytimes.com)"
For this post I'd expect not more than 3 points in 10 minutes. Probably bots?
EDIT: can you remember how many upvotes it had when you voted?
WaveCel inventors, Dr. Steve Madey and Dr. Michael Bottlang, are authors of the study, as well as founders and co-directors of the Legacy Research Institute.
12 points in ~10 minutes with only two comments yields a high position.