Linky

Oh god, do we have to……..

“Elisabeth Rosenthal writes that in the United States the notion that bike helmets promote health and safety by preventing head injuries is taken as pretty near God’s truth but many European health experts have taken a very different view.”

By ‘European’, do they mean ‘Scottish’ ?

#headbutts desk reapeatly# #wishes was wearing helmet#

if you force people to wear helmets, you discourage them from riding bicycles

Yep, that happened in Australia.
Until a year or so later when the number of cyclists went up.

that said, i don’t think it should be legalised, its a waste of money.
Ultimatly its a combination of common sense and Darwinian Evolution.

most of the high rated comments look fine to me, and in line with CTC position (and mine btw). but!

Another experiment someone did in Britain was to fit an ultrasonic measuring system to a bicycle to measure how close cars were passing. They tried riding in various different manners, for example further from the kerb (tr.US: curb), with helmet, without helmet, dressed as a woman etc. He found that as a hemetless woman, cars gave him the greatest amount of room, and as a helmeted man, the least amount of room. http://www.drianwalker.com/overtaking/overtakingprobrief.pdf [drianwalker.com]

some great stuff there. emphasis mine.

So rather than a helmet law there should be a law that cyclists should dress as women. I could go with that!

#face #palm 🙄

That experiment is way too small scale to take any meaning from…

True Fuzzy, it’s more fun than most studies though.

I thought you meant that slashdot were selling bike helmets. Without wanting to stereotype too much (but I will anyway) most folks I know that read slashdot spend most of their time in a darkened room dressed in a wizard outfit and are too busy telling the rest of the internet how wrong they are to even consider riding a bike. I was looking forward to seeing a bunch of these types modelling a slashdot p!sspot, most likely in a recumbant!

Ah, I love the modding system on Slashdot. Means I don’t have to read all the crap comments and only the reasonable debate. If only I could do that here… 😛

There probably wouldn’t be much left to read!

That experiment is way too small scale to take any meaning from…

2,300 measurements is a reasonable sample size, is it not? In any event I’ve got a lot of respect for Ian, he undertook the study himself and was hit by vehicles twice. He’d be the first to admit that there needs to be more research into car/cyclist interaction, and he’s a top bloke in real life too.

problem is, it could just be transvestites that drivers avoid, or ginger wigs, or women with massive hairy legs, or some other things. 2300 measurements, but only one “woman”.
😯

I booked him to speak about road safety at a cycling event a couple of months ago. I’m not going to comment on whether he’s a convincing enough tranny, but he’s a great speaker with some interesting ideas.

http://info89693.podomatic.com/entry/2012-07-21T21_02_04-07_00

ok he sounds like a top bloke. just not knowing anything about him, on face of it this study sounds a wee bit odd. regardless i think his findings are basically right, drivers probably do give women, those without helmets, those weaving all over the road etc more room. not sure what we’re meant to do with this information mind..

the flip side is this

“I’ve also had a couple of biking accidents where my helmet didn’t play a role, but if you get thrown from your bike it’s not hard to see that your head is extremely vulnerable. My GF works with traumatic brain injury patients at a local hospital, and words can hardly describe how devastating these injuries can be, or how instantly your life can change forever. So other people can do what they want, but I’m not going out biking without the helmet. It takes all of 5 seconds.”

basically, choose to wear a helmet, but don’t force people to wear helmets.
i was very glad to be wearing mine and still got a headache last week when i landed… on my head (an off road accident).

yes this site could use a moderation system

I don’t think he claims to have all the answers, but his argument is that if you “normalise” cycling and make it clear that cyclists aren’t some weird, risk-taking group of outsiders, driver behaviour improves and safety improves.

Falling off your MTB on a traffic-free trail has nothing to do with this.

A moderation system is no good without threading, otherwise you have to re-read sections of the thread to make sure you haven’t missed a salient point. Usenet has it just about right – apart from the people 🙂